Paul Graham recently wrote an interesting article on the similarity of politics and religion here. In that article, he shared some thought on why these topics will generate much more heated but useless debates than other topics, like mathematics or C programming.
Just imagine how many hours of our precious time are wasted by people who preach a particular religion or political view? Even if you think you are immune from all these nonsenses, have you ever taken a flight in US before? How many hours you were in line to board due to security search ahead?
"To prevent terrorism", you may say. Correct, but what are the main forces behind all the 911 and the Iraq drama? You got it. Religions and politics. I don't mean people should isolate themselves from the world, but we should exercise common-sense and proper reasoning on what being told as the 'truth'.
I don't plan to paraphrase Graham's article. Instead, I want to add that in order for us to stay independent and remain objective, it is useful to be paranoid and skeptical: believe in as few things as possible, and always re-examine things you believe with an open-mind, because things do and will change.
4 comments:
Why politics and religion generate more debate? Cause everyone can have an opinion on them and it affects everyone else because zealots want to push their religious views on others?
I bet you if everyone knows a variant of C then we'd have more C "religious wars" on the "right" way to write a C program or how the standardization should be. For the case of maths, everyone "knows" maths but they don't really know it. :)
we have enough flame war on programming languages, but none on the level as those that involve religions.
I'm speculating that we could if we have more people who know programming languages.
Exactly, the need to have certain level of knowledge in programming bars a lot of people from giving opinions, but not for politics and religions ;)
Post a Comment