[extropy-chat] Re: [wta-talk] Two anniversaries: Galileo and Bruno

[Giu1i0 Pri5c0]

This is very, very true. I often noticed that really smart and
creative people, besides developing new ideas that challenge the
accepted worldview and make others intellectually uneasy, can be a
real pain in the neck as persons: no diplomacy, no manners, arrogant,
abrasive, ready to insult everyone etc. Perhaps because at some point
they become really fed up with our inability to understand that 2+2
=4. Giordano Bruno must have been one of this kind.
What they (and us) need is an interface layer of moderately smart and
creative people able to understand what they mean and translate it to
a format understandable by the rest of us.
G.

On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 13:30:34 +0100, Amara Graps
<Amara.Graps at ifsi.rm.cnr.it> wrote:

> The clergy of his time weren't dummies; they had their own "grand
> unified theory" of how things worked and how people should
> behave. If we have made progress since that era, we owe it less
> to our improved orthodoxies than to the way we've learned to
> _tap_ the creative energies of those who defy the intellectual
> status quo, instead of killing them. Slowly, often grudgingly,
> society discovered that there is something to value in the
> rancorous, difficult, blasphemous few who gleefully challenge
> authority. Those who rip away the set pieces of any conservative
> worldview to reveal disturbing truths that lie beneath and
> beyond. Such people, though irksome, are also responsible for
> much progress in the world.