There should be a 50% tax on dumb ideas

[QuantumIguana]

Originally Posted by Phogg

An honor in all ways equivelent to being one of the most respected brothels in the world. When the pool of respect is so microscopic it is silly to laud it.

I'll give that all the consideration it deserves.

The pool of respect is in fact not small. Just because you don't have any respect for newspapers doesn't mean the rest of the world does. Solipsism is no way to go through life.

[bill_mchale]

I tend to find that news sources tend to be respected in direct proportion to how much one agrees with them. Thus if you have liberal leanings, you will probably like the New York Tmes and despise Fox News, if you are a conservative the converse will probably be the case.

--
Bill

[pdurrant]

This is veering dangerously towards politics. Please remember that political discussion must take place in the opt-in Politics and Religion forum.

[GlenBarrington]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

I'll give that all the consideration it deserves.

The pool of respect is in fact not small. Just because you don't have any respect for newspapers doesn't mean the rest of the world does. Solipsism is no way to go through life.

I'm not sure you are using the term 'Solipsism' correctly. I was taught that "Sollipsism" is the uncertainty, or possibly the belief, that one can only know one's own mind. To me, you are using it as some sort of substitute for close minded belief of the inherent correctness of your beliefs over those of others.

That isn't solipsism it is arrogance; of which there is no shortage in ANY sort of political, religious, or economic value systems.

By the way, mark me down as someone who has lost all respect for the NYT. They are eating their own seed corn, living off the intellectual achievement of times gone by. I don't care that they are liberal, I don't care that they basically are the distributor of liberal talking points on any issue; political jingoism has always been the nature of newspapers. I do care about the hypocrisy of their own arrogance in believing that second rate journalism is somehow better if it comes from the NYT.

It is no accident in an environment of fading newspapers, they are fading faster than the rest.

Is it arrogant of me to say this? I don't think so, but feel free to think otherwise.

[GlenBarrington]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

This is veering dangerously towards politics. Please remember that political discussion must take place in the opt-in Politics and Religion forum.

Actually I started this thread as a response to the ludicrous idea of a 20% tax on paper books in another thread. There is always some busybody trying to tell us how to live.

And unfortunately, life is nothing BUT granular politics. And books are all about life. ALL forms of art are about life but fiction is lifeart in its purest form, I think. In moderated forums you just have to be careful about words, try to take the emotion out of the words. Hide the passion.

[emellaich]

... okay, I know this is all in jest, but my overly analytical side says, huh?

The thing is that if it really is a dumb idea, then 50% if nothing is still nothing. On the other hand, if I/you think its dumb, but the market thinks it's not (ie, it makes a lot of money) then it really isn't dumb.

So, only ideas that are worthless are taxed at 50%?

[Beryll Snyder]

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

just sayin'

Are you talking about your post?

Originally Posted by xg4bx

i'll do you one better

Those statements were more or less true at the time because the ideas were faulty. They were insufficiently developed and they lacked proper evidence.

Example: many people claim that early Greek philosophers discovered that the world is round and that the Earth orbits the sun. At the time their claims were backed by evidence that could easily be contradicted by alternative hypotheses based upon different assumptions. We have only been able develop those ideas sufficiently and acquire enough supporting evidence for them in very recent times.

Getting back to the tax on dumb ideas thing: I'm a firm believer that extraordinary claims require extraordinary ideas. Sure, that means that we will cling on to old ideas far longer than we should. But what's the alternative? The alternative is that every idea is put on equal footing. Can't prove that the Earth orbits the Sun or that the the Sun orbits the Earth? Well, maybe the planets orbit the sun while the Sun and Moon orbit the Earth. Why would anyone want a model that messy? Don't ask me, ask the guy that Kepler was working for. (Kepler was the guy who proved the heliocentric model proposed by Copernicus.) Or maybe someone would propose that the planets are doing a cha-cha. I mean, why not since we couldn't actually prove the other models until Newton gave us a mechanism and Kepler gave us a verifiable model.

Discarding dumb ideas is simply a coping mechanism that allows science and society function. It allows us to focus upon developing the contemporary ideas and continue making progress. If we ever acquire sufficient evidence to say we should be looking somewhere else, we maybe prove a couple of the dumb ideas that we discarded along the way. But I'll guarantee you that the dumb ideas that proved to be true is going to be a tiny fraction of the number of dumb ideas that would have confounded us if they were placed on equal footing with the old ideas.