Michael Edgeworth McIntyre (2022). Science, music, and mathematics — The deepest connections. World Scientific, Singapore. ISBN 978-981-124-183-3
What makes life as a scientist worth living? For me, part of the answer is the joy of being honest.
Two more lucidity principles are worth noting here. There's an explicitness principle — the need to be more explicit than you feel necessary — because, obviously, you're communicating with someone whose head isn't full of what your own head is full of. As the great mathematician J. E. Littlewood once put it,30 “Two trivialities omitted can add up to an impasse.”
In his 1959 Reith Lectures, Peter Medawar remarks on the “appalling confusion and waste of time” caused by the “innocent belief” that a single word should have a single, context-independent meaning.32
Lucid writing and speaking are highly explicit, and where possible use the same word or phrase for the same thing, similar word-patterns for similar or comparable things, and different words, phrases, and word-patterns for different things ... Context is built before new points are introduced ...34
... an important part of the creativity that goes into good science ... [is] to maintain a healthy scepticism, while respecting the evidence. And because it respects the evidence, such creativity is to be sharply distinguished from the postmodernist anything goes.〔科學家也是 anything goes，前提是符合資料〕
And the equations themselves take different forms embodying different viewpoints, with technical names such as ‘variational,’ ‘Eulerian,’ ‘Lagrangian,’ and so on. They're mathematically equivalent but, as the great physicist Richard Feynman used to say, “psychologically very different.”
Common to all forms of fundamentalism, or puritanism, or extremism is that besides ignoring or cherry-picking evidence they forbid the loosening of thinking that allows freedom to view things from more than one angle.
But first, what about those multi-timescale aspects? How on Earth can genome, language and culture co-evolve, and interact dynamically, when their timescales are so very, very different?
... the existence of genetically-enabled automata for language — self-assembling building blocks55,57 for language — has been verified, conclusively, by recent events in Nicaragua. Starting in the late 1970s, Nicaragua saw the emergence of a new Deaf community and a fully-fledged, syntactically powerful new sign language, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL).
There's also the evidence documented in the book by David Sloan Wilson (Does altruism exist? Culture, genes, and the welfare of others. Yale Universit Press, 2015) This carefully argued book includes detailed case studies of fundamentalist or puritanical belief systems — religious in chapter 6, and atheist in chapter 7. For instance Ayn Rand, an atheist prophet revered for her preaching of market fundamentalism, held that selfishness is absolutely good and altruism absolutely bad, for absolutely everyone. ... Any logic-checking that considers an alternative viewpoint is irrational, something to be dismissed out of hand.
我先記到這裡，該還書了。