5 Comments

You missed one key fact: The Inquisition led to the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian peninsula. That ultimately led to the rise of communities in Amsterdam, Livorno, Venice and elsewhere, which helped those economies flourish while Spain and Portugal withered.

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Jul 16, 2021Liked by Joachim Klement

We must also remain vigilant against group think WITHIN the sciences. Think of Kuhn’s essay. The establishment—the people we currently trust and believe—will resist findings later demonstrated to be true. At the time, people who defer to academic authorities tend to bow to whatever they are being told. So while climate change may turn out to be human caused after much resistance, what other ideas are we not challenging? Real science should be follow the evidence wherever it leads.

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It seems ironic that an article which started with evidence based studies on the economic impact of supressing individual thought and opinion based on faith, ended with suggesting we suppress individual thought and opinion based on peoples feelings.

Never in our history have data sets been so large and widely available, never have we had better access to experts research (and opinions). People are now more than ever free to make their own choices based on data.

Peoples feelings are valid in a debate but should always be blown away with a counter argument backed by decent data. If this isn't accepted, it dosen't mean it's right.

Encouraging challenge of our own thoughts and exposure to other peoples feelings is key. If we keep seeking out people who feel the same to make ourselves feel better (especially with algortihms reinforcing this sprial), this becomes harder and builds on driving both sides of the argument further apart, not bringing them together.

I've always liked money and finance news because the news tends to gets reported with less political opinion from the writers.

Thanks for giving me a Python smile this morning.

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author

I am not sure what you mean with the article ending with a suggestion to suppress individual thought. Suppressing individual thought is not what I advocate for. But I strongly advocate to only take individual thought seriously if it is grounded in data and evidence, not just opinion or loved experience. Anecdotes are not data, as they say.

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I said "..individual thought based on feelings".

Opinion is how you "feel" about the data. The validity of the opinion is based on how robust that data is e.g. you used an example of your "lived experience" and mentioned an emotive phrase that it was close to your heart "...data, facts and scientific inquiry being increasingly ridiculed."

I've made the assumption there that this is based on your "lived experience" and not data. In the interest of data based opinion, I would be interested if you could correct that assumption.

As social media gives a voice to everyone to be heard, by anyone who will listen, is there evidence that before social media people, and their parents and grandparents, werent always been screaming this at their TVs or in the pub to anyone who will listen?

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