The least convenient path is the only valid one.
This should be a law in political discourse.
This should be a law in political discourse.
For example, suppose I want to argue against the statement that we have been visited by poorly-hidden aliens. I could go find all the compelling arguments that we have been so visited, and refute them. Alternatively, I could examine all possible poor hiding places, and demonstrate that there are no aliens in these places. I can refute the arguments, or I can disprove the conclusion.
Both of these approaches are valid. One is necessarily more convenient than the other, and thus is not the most convenient.
The larger point (that refuting a poor argument is meaningless) still stands on its own, and that should be a law in political discourse.
What the article is arguing against, is the method of dismissing the poorly-hidden alien theory, because some crackpot who advances it believes that aliens live in his bathroom drain.
One cannot simply inspect this one drain, find no evidence of extraterrestrial life and then dismiss the entire poorly-hidden alien theory.
The entire rest of the post is pretty good; it's just that one particular part can be misleading if taken in isolation.
But doesn't life contradict physics? Why should there be something that wants to take energy from its surroundings? What about entropy? Life contradicts entropy. Why do things want to make order out of a universe that tends toward disorder?
And thinking like that, that life is a contradiction of physical laws, it makes sense that people want to take the least convenient path. People are irrational. They do want to work hard.
So many times, people ask for something and propose a difficult solution and I say, "What about this?" and they come back with all the reasons that that simple solution I proposed isn't going to work. The only valid solution in their mind requires effort on part of an entire organization of people, when the could just setup an auto-reminder for themselves.
Failure to update in light of evidence is most definitely an indicator against brilliance.
I only posted the video to illustrate that he can say 'A' only seconds after someone has explained, indeed, 'not A'. Whether or not you accept the explanation of 'not A', reasoned discourse requires addressing, rather than ignoring, such a statement.
A meandering river can go on for hundreds of miles, but only cover about ten miles from start to finish of a section. We as humans will innately wind our way following the path of least resistance presented, however as humans we're benefited more by taking a few bumps and going down the hill.
We'll readily take weeks to do something that may only take hours, why? Because right now it's easier to meander.
Imagine the streams that run into the desert, they'll meander for miles and die off before they get to the ocean where as if they covered the same distance in a straight line it would have reached the ocean.
Humans are innately beings of entropy. Everything we do increases entropy. Our ancestors a thousand years ago levelled mountainsides to build towns, they moved thousands of tons of stone from hundreds of feet in the air, to within 20 feet of the ground in a feat that would have taken nature a million years.