Would you die for your current beliefs? (page 2)

SweetBabyCheezits

Nice clarification, Qcmbr. I agree.

EDIT: Also, good job of being contrary for the sake of being contrary, James.

00DAD

BR: "There can't be a practical reason for believing what isn't true!"

james_woods

EDIT: Also, good job of being contrary for the sake of being contrary, James.

I would die for my right to be contrary - you know that well, SBC.

But if anybody is wondering what I was talking about - a good book on the subject is "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter.

SweetBabyCheezits

James: I would die for my right to be contrary - you know that well, SBC.

Well you should also poo-poo Copernicus and Galileo for not getting heliocentrism exactly right. Those guys and ol' Bertrand were real f'ckups.

... Good Thing (sic) that Bertrand Russell did not have to die for his ideas in Principia Mathematica.

Per http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/principia-mathematica/#SOPM:

Despite these criticisms, Principia Mathematica proved to be remarkably influential in at least three other ways. First, it popularized modern mathematical logic to an extent undreamt of by its authors. By using a notation superior in many ways to that of Frege, Whitehead and Russell managed to convey the remarkable expressive power of modern predicate logic in a way that previous writers had been unable to achieve. Second, by exhibiting so clearly the deductive power of the new logic, Whitehead and Russell were able to show how powerful the modern idea of a formal system could be, thus opening up new work in what was soon to be called metalogic. Third, Principia Mathematica reaffirmed clear and interesting connections between logicism and two of the main branches of traditional philosophy, namely metaphysics and epistemology, thus initiating new and interesting work in both of these areas.

Thus, not only did Principia introduce a wide range of philosophically rich notions (such as propositional function, logical construction, and type theory), it also set the stage for the discovery of classical metatheoretic results (such as those of Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, Alan Turing and others) and initiated a tradition of common technical work in fields as diverse as philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, economics and computer science.

james_woods

Well you should also poo-poo Copernicus and Galileo for not getting heliocentrism exactly right. Those guys and ol' Bertrand were real f'ckups.

Isaac Newton as well - Einstein proved that his gravitational theory was incomplete.

OK - back to topic:

This is an interesting point that SBC makes: Really, no scientific, religious, or political IDEA is worth dying for. The idea will live on anyway, (without your dying in vain to prove you believe it) - and it may not even be definitavely correct.