[paganel]

I might have read Hume the wrong way, but for me he was one of the few philosophers who basically said “there’s no way for us to know for sure” which can be approximated to “we don’t know”.

My favorite philosopher however remains Heraclitus, had we chosen to go his way we might have had less stupid questions, like “is the cat in the box dead or alive?” and instead we might have straight up came up with the answer “the cat is dead, alive and all the states between dead and alive, and we’re fine with that”. Unfortunately Aristotle was not fine with accepting the many “states” of the world “happening” all at the same time and went for the binary True-False way, bad-mouthing Heraclitus in the process. We certainly did manage to build a more efficient society by following Aristotle’s way but I think we have reached a local maximum, or it certainly looks that way. Maybe reverting to the pre-Socratics will help us go over this local maximum.

[MiroF]

It's terms like "local maxima" that make me realize how useful math knowledge is in conveying easily understandable concepts quickly. I perfectly understood what you meant, but don't think I could convey the concept in less than 10 words without a reference to "local maxima" or being "over-optimized"