Simple, neat, and wrong.
Check out this post today from Terrance Tao (UCLA) on Mastodon. It’s all good– T. Tao is excellent. I’m particularly interested in the posts because I’ve been working on some dynamical systems ideas, and these comments resonated with me on several levels. That aside, I’m just going to post a bunch of H. L. Mencken quotes. I don’t agree with everything Mencken said, but I can see some value in these quotes:
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.
H. L. Mencken
A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
H. L. Mencken
It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.
That should do it.
The phrase “skeptical and tolerant” — I like that. I’ve been using the terms “rigor and compassion” recently in discussions of what is lacking in some prominent political discourse, and I think it’s the same idea as expressed by Mencken above. Rigor or skepticism, and compassion or tolerance — if one or both of those items are missing, then there is a problem.