Carl Sagan with some wise man learnings over at Brain Pickings (who have a pretty good habit of squishing David Foster Wallace tidbits into everything they aggregate, which is swell).
Before my philosophy degree, I was really good at being skeptical - at calling out arguments. The hardest part of actually doing philosophy well, though, isn’t the skeptical part. It’s finding something that you agree with, which begins with being open to every idea you’ve ever come across, and which ends with having gradually refined that idea down to something that applies to the particular problem you’re facing at one specific time.
We all need to be able to do this - not just physicists or philosophers. If you care about living a decent life, you need to know how to be fair to an idea, a person, or a thing without also getting attached to it.
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