Education

Sparta has no philosophers. That’s because the job of a philosopher is to understand things better, which is a form of change, so they don’t want it. Another difference: they don’t honour living poets, only dead ones. Why? Because dead poets don’t write anything new, but live ones do. A third difference: their education system is insanely harsh; ours is famously lax. Why? Because they don’t want their kids to dare to question anything, so that they won’t ever think of changing anything. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The prophetic approach can see only what one might do to postpone disaster, namely improve sustainability: drastically reduce and disperse the population, make travel difficult, suppress contact between different geographical areas. A society which did this would not be able to afford the kind of scientific research that would lead to new antibiotics. Its members would hope that their lifestyle would protect them instead. But note that this lifestyle did not, when it was tried, prevent the Black Death. Nor would it cure cancer. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

The fabric of reality does not consist only of reductionist ingredients like space, time and subatomic particles, but also of life, thought, computation and the other things to which those explanations refer. — David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: Towards a Theory of Everything

Genetic studies suggest that our own species came close to extinction about 70,000 years ago, as a result of an unknown catastrophe which reduced its total numbers to only a few thousand. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

So I suppose that the real difference between the Spartans and us is that their moral education enjoins them to hold their most important ideas immune from criticism. Not to be open to suggestions. Not to criticize certain ideas such as their traditions or their conceptions of the gods; not to seek the truth, because they claim that they already have it. — David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World