ENGT

Introduction  The Allegory of the Cave is an essay on perception by Plato.   In the essay, there are people who lived in a cave since their childhood, hands and neck chained to the walls of the cave. A light source nearby enables people in cave to see shadows of passerby. Plato writes that if those people were conversing, they would most likely talk about the shadows they saw.   One man is then let go from the cave. As he first steps into sunlight, his eyes hurt. It takes time to adjust but he can eventually see real objects and realizes shadows are mere projections and not real. His perception of what is real changes as he ascents into a level with more light.   When the man goes back inside the cave and tells people of what he saw, they do not accept him. That comes naturally as he accuses the reality of the cave-people to be unreal.   Problem As the man is let go from the cave, his senses hurt because he has never seen sunlight. He is unable to adjust to chan...

THE BURDEN OF SKEPTICISM      by Carl Sagan Paragraph 21 (1) Really good scientists do both. On their own, talking to themselves, they churn up huge numbers of new ideas and criticize them ruthlessly. Most of the ideas never make it to the outside world. Only the ideas that pass through rigorous self-filtration make it out and are criticized by the rest of the scientific community.  (5 ) It sometimes happens that ideas that are accepted by everybody turn out to be wrong, or at least partially wrong, or at least superseded by ideas of greater generality. And, while there are of course some personal losses -- emotional bonds to the idea that you yourself played a role inventing -- nevertheless the collective ethic is that every time such an idea is overthrown and replaced by something better the enterprise of science has benefited. In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they actually...