The only thing that guarantees an open-ended collaboration among human beings, the only thing that guarantees that this project is truly open-ended, is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation.
Interpretation
Open-ended collaboration requires a willingness to adjust our beliefs through meaningful conversation.
In this quote, Sam Harris emphasizes the importance of conversation in fostering open-ended collaborations among people. It suggests that true collaboration is not just about working together on a project, but also about being open to changing one's beliefs and behaviors based on the insights gained through dialogue, highlighting the transformative power of communication in our relationships and endeavors.
In practice
In a team meeting to encourage creativity and open discussion.
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts.
What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.
The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.
It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.
It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
If we go on explaining we shall cease to understand one another.
The worst thing about e-mail is that you can’t interrupt the other person. You have to read the whole thing and then e-mail them back, pointing out all their mistakes and faulty assumptions. It’s frustrating and it’s time-consuming. God bless phone calls.
Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.
We cannot be speakers who do not listen. But neither can we be listeners who do not speak.
I'm not an interviewer. I have conversations.
I never took any elocution lessons, no diction lessons. I might have been a pretty decent broadcaster if I had, but what you see, I'm afraid, is what you get.
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