Fundamentalism vs. Curiosity
“Fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to their faith before they explore it. As opposed to a curious person who explores first and then considers whether or not they want to accept the ramifications.” — Seth Godin
(Via ~C4Chaos)
There is a short video, which you can watch here.
“perhaps curiosity…comes from somewhere beyond my cleverness.”
Fundamentalism creates barriers and limits the self. It applies not only to faith but to political viewpoints, business models, and social constructs.
Very analogous to the distinction between the scientist who searches for data to fit the conclusion and the scientist who searches for a conclusion to fit the data. That subject came up today in a conversation with another Astrophysics major here, when we were talking about Halton Arp, once (and in some ways still) a very well-respected astronomer, who was on one side of an astronomical debate in the 1970s/1980s or so (he believed that astronomical objects called quasars are located in our galaxy, when some though they were many light-years outside). Since then all the data very strongly suggests that quasars are actually extragalactic, but he sticks quite strongly to his beliefs, and generally only presents/accepts the data which seems to support his views. He’s regarded as a kind of nut within the astronomical community, but I think he has a kind of Galileo complex and he turned out to be right, so who knows? My problem is much more with his ways of doing science – the curious vs. the fundamentalist, or the scientist who takes a conclusion from data vs. the scientist who chooses data from a conclusion.