Pinker's First Law

From The World Question Center

Human intelligence is a product of analogy and combinatorics. Analogy allows the mind to use a few innate ideas—space, force, essence, goal—to understand more abstract domains. Combinatorics allows an a finite set of simple ideas to give rise to an infinite set of complex ones.

No one asked, but here are my laws:

1. Taxonomies are always foreshortened: they expand as you approach the point-of-view.

Why? People's imperfect expertise and need to distinguish "other" from "self" will always lead to finer distinctions in their classification system the closer one gets to the entity that created the system.

Why's it important? So we realize that Chinese is not one language, but many languages which can share a writing system. So we don't keep discovering new "species" of dog/fox/wolf that can all freely interbreed, while ignoring the plain fact that each new bacterium is a new species by the canonical definition. So that we look for important distinctions among foreigners, and learn to more reliably tell friend from foe in a better-connected world.

2. Faith tends to occur when a person has given an extreme amount of thought to a subject. But it's important to remember that there are two types of extremum: minimum and maximum.

Why? Faith is a sense that something has been thought about enough. And unless they suffer from severe anxiety, an expert will have thought through and/or experienced their favorite subject enough to have faith in some of the less certain parts of it.

Why's it important? This helps to avoid the hasty generalization that religion is irreconcilable with science. Sure, you don't do science if you think that enough thought has been given to your area of study, but history teaches us that religions change quickly enough to admit inquiry into topics where progress is being made. They're only ever a century or two behind, at most. It's also a theoretical framework for the observation that making people think about their beliefs tends to cause them to feel insecure, and hate you for it.

Cross-posted from my Livejournal.