Rick’s Rants and Raves

I saw this bumper sticker on the side (yes, the side) of a pick-up truck the other day on my way to work:

Tolerance is the virtue of a man without conviction

Unfortunately, conviction has no bearing on whether you are right or wrong. Tolerance is the only way science has advanced our society–tolerance for ideas that challenge conventional wisdom, e.g. ideas held with conviction. It was tolerance for Copernicus (eventually) that allows us to understand that the earth is not the center of the universe. It was tolerance for Einstein’s radical ideas that allowed us to progress beyond Newtonian physics. Heck, it was tolerance for Newton’s ideas that allowed us to greatly understand and predict much of what make an automobile even possible.

Conviction is only valuable if it is measured with a bit of tolerance for alternate views. Without tolerance, conviction is stupidity. Who would look at members of the flat earth society and think “Now there are some folks with a lot of conviction”? No, most everyone outside of the society says “Wow, those folks are stupid.”

My retort, if I were to place a response on my car would be:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson