(3089/898) Metamagical Themas

226) [T]he truth has to fight constantly for its life! [...] [An idea] will have to be rephrased and reprinted many times, often by many different people, before it has any chance of taking hold. This is upsetting to an idealist like me, someone more disposed to believe in the notion of a monolithic and absolute truth that in the notion of a pluralistic and relative truth (a notion championed by a certain school of anthropologists and sociologists, who un-self-consciously insist "all systems of belief are equally valid", seemingly without realizing that this dogma of relativism not only is just a narrow-minded as any other dogma, but moreover is unbelievably wishy-washy!).

Douglas R. Hofstadter
"World Views in Collision"
Scientific American magazine (2/82),
reprinted in Metamagical Themas (1985)

227) Seeing clear to the essence of something unfamiliar is often best achieved by finding one or more known things that you can see it as, then being able to balance those views. Physicists have long since learned to juggle two views of light: light as waves, light as particles. They know that each contains a grain of the essence of light, that neither contains it all, and they know when to think of light which way. Don't be fooled by people who knowingly assure you that physicists don't depend on crude images or analogies as crutches, that everything they need is contained in their formulas.

Douglas R. Hofstadter
"Post Scriptum to 'Variations on a Theme
as the Crux of Creativity'" in
Metamagical Themas (1985)

228) Chance favors only the mind that is prepared.

Louis Pasteur
quoted by Rene Vallery-Radot
The Life of Pasteur (1927) [B15]

229) We celebrate individual styles, rather than seeing them negatively, as proofs of inner limits. What in fact is curious is that those people who are able to put on or take off styles in the manner of a chameleon seem to have no style of their own and are simply saloon performers, amusing imitators. We accord greatness to those people whose "limitations", if that is how you want to look at it, are the most apparent, the most blatant.

Douglas R. Hofstadter
"On the Seeming Paradox of Mechanizing Creativity"
Scientific American magazine (9/82)
reprinted in Metamagical Themas (1985)

230) How can cooperators get started in a world of unconditional defection - a "primordial sea" swarming with unresponsive ALL-D[efection] creatures? The answer [...] is that invasion by small clusters of conditionally cooperating organism, even if they form a tiny minority, is enough to give cooperation a toehold.

Robert Axelrod
findings from The Evolution of Cooperation (1984)
summarized by Douglas R. Hofstadter in
"The Prisoner's Dilemma and
the Evolution of Cooperation" in
Scientific American magazine (5/83)
reprinted in Metamagical Themas (1985)

231) Should I abide by the rules until they're changed, or help speed the change by breaking them? Better start rushing before the rush begins!

Ashleigh Brilliant
quoted by Douglas R. Hofstadter in
"Post Scriptum to 'The Prisoner's Dilemma
and the Evolution of Cooperation'" in
Metamagical Themas (1985)

Sources

[B15] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 15th edition (1980)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 822 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.