Be hard on your opinions To create real community debate and valuable community discussion we all need to be willing to look at our current views and opinions and inspect them honestly. The following quote is by Tim Minchen, a great Australian whos ability to articulate his observations of life is amazing. I hope you enjoy it. A famous bon mot asserts that opinions are like assholes, in that everyone has one. There is great wisdom in this, but I would add that opinions differ significantly from assholes, in that yours should be constantly and thoroughly examined. I used to take exams in here! It’s revenge. We must think critically, and not just about the ideas of others. Be hard on your beliefs — take them out on the veranda and hit them with a cricket bat. Be intellectually rigorous. Identify your biases, your prejudices, your privileges. Most of society’s arguments are kept alive by a failure to acknowledge nuance. We tend to generate false dichotomies, then argue one point using two entirely different sets of assumptions, like two tennis players trying to win a match by hitting beautifully-executed shots from either end of separate tennis courts. By the way, while I have science and arts graduates in front of me, please don’t make the mistake of thinking the arts and sciences are at odds with one another. That is a recent, stupid, and damaging idea. You don’t have to be unscientific to make beautiful art, to make beautiful things. If you need proof: Twain, Douglas Adams, Vonnegut, McEwan, Sagan, Shakespeare, Dickens, for a start. You don’t need to be superstitious to be a poet, you don’t need to hate GM technology to care about the beauty of the planet, you don’t have to claim a soul to have compassion. Science is not a body of knowledge, nor a belief system — it is just a term that describes humankind’s incremental understanding through observation. Science is awesome. The arts and sciences need to work together to improve how knowledge is communicated. The idea that many Australians, including our new P.M. and my distant cousin Nick Minchin believe, that the science of anthropogenic global warming is controversial, is a powerful indication of the extent of our failure to communicate. The fact that thirty percent of the people in this room just bristled is further evidence still. The fact that that bristling is more to do with politics than science is even more despairing. For the full Video click below https://youtube/watch?v=yoEezZD71sc
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 04:11:10 +0000
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