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RE: Reflections on Aphorisms #34

in #steempress5 years ago

Stay curious, but don't let it get in the way of my life.

This is a good leading principle. To put Wilde and Occam together, "the true mystery of the world is the visible when too many unnecessary assumption about things are made.

That's how gossiping spread, now in the form of fake news which of course are intentional and have a different purpose but it is amazing how in this day and age with so many technological devices that were supposed to sharpen our perception of the world, fix it for us to assess it objectively, etc, we can't still trust what is presented to us as unquestionable reality/truth.

We should remain skeptical, but we can't afford to waste time, energy and emotions on speculations that would lead us nowhere, unless we are artist and cannot part with imagination and creativity, the heart and soul of human innovation.

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My general rule of thumb is to follow Montaigne's rule of thumb: If you don't have a reason to believe something, ignore it. You don't reject things, but you also don't cling to them either.

Too much of what people do revolves around partial perception being treated as fact. The majority of the information we surround ourselves with is only dubiously reliable, and even the good stuff requires more context than we typically can handle.

There's an expression that "perfect is the enemy of good", which is very much the case when trying to understand reality. If your goal is to achieve 100% accuracy and depth in thought, the only result is that you will sacrifice everything to get to a single epiphany (and even then there is no guarantee that the goal of one's inquiries will be achieved), and I think it's tragic that more people fall into this trap.