The Beginning of Infinity: David Deutsch - Chapter on Epistemology

[JosephKnecht]

In Chapter 10 of the book, there is a dialogue between Socrates (the wisest man) and Hermes(messenger of God). 

The dialogue is one of the best takes on Epistemology that I have seen yet. I highly recommend reading this chapter: https://publicism.info/science/infinity/11.html 

The rest of the book is also insightful.

[Recress]

I have this ebook on my phooone for quite a while. I dont know why I waited for this long to actually read it.

[JosephKnecht]

The text below is an excerpt from the same chapter... 

...we Athenians are concerned above all with improvement; the Spartans seek only – stasis. Two opposite objectives. If you think about it, I believe you’ll soon agree that this is the single source of all the myriad differences between the two cities.

PLATO: I never thought of it that way before, but I think I do agree. Let me try out the theory. Here’s one difference between the cities: Sparta has no philosophers. That’s because the job of a philosopher is to understand things better, which is a form of change, so they don’t want it. Another difference: they don’t honour living poets, only dead ones. Why? Because dead poets don’t write anything new, but live ones do. A third difference: their education system is insanely harsh; ours is famously lax. Why? Because they don’t want their kids to dare to question anything, so that they won’t ever think of changing anything...