Well Said...

"Conscience never deceives us and is the true guide of humanity. She is to the soul what instinct is to the body; whoever follows her pursues the direct path of nature and need not fear being misled."

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

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Timothy Ferris: The World of the Intellectual vs The World of the Engineer

Timothy Ferris of Wired (2011) observes that intellectuals and engineers have historically taken very different paths enroute to knowledge creation.

Being an intellectual had more to do with fashioning fresh ideas than with finding fresh facts. Facts used to be scarce on the ground anyway, so it was easy to skirt or ignore them while constructing an argument. The wildly popular 18th-century thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose disciples range from Robespierre and Hitler to the anti-vaccination crusaders currently bringing San Francisco to the brink of a public health crisis, built an entire philosophy (nature good, civilization bad) on almost no facts at all. Karl Marx studiously ignored the improving living standards of working-class Londoners — he visited no factories and interviewed not a single worker — while writing Das Kapital, which declared it an “iron law” that the lot of the proletariat must be getting worse. The 20th-century philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend boasted of having lectured on cosmology “without mentioning a single fact.”

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Source: Ferris, T (2011, October 13), Timothy Ferris: The World of the Intellectual vs The World of the Engineer, Wired.

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