Monday, January 05, 2004

What You Can't Say

What You Can't Say is an interesting essay about heresy: how to think forbidden thoughts, and what to do with them. So take the Conformists test, "Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told." Think about this, "We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners." But Paul Graham goes much deeper than that. He explains that searching for popular misconceptions not only satisfies the curiosity and confirms whether you are right or wrong about a particular idea but it exercises the brain, "If you can think things so outside the box that they'd make people's hair stand on end, you'll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative."
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