{"id":1067,"date":"2007-12-21T01:42:20","date_gmt":"2007-12-21T05:42:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/21\/sf-authors-say-smart-things-peter-watts\/"},"modified":"2007-12-27T10:28:08","modified_gmt":"2007-12-27T14:28:08","slug":"sf-authors-say-smart-things-peter-watts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/21\/sf-authors-say-smart-things-peter-watts\/","title":{"rendered":"SF Authors Say Smart Things: Peter Watts"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Most people acquire their beliefs through osmosis and observation, not investigation. We&#8217;d rather observe than derive. Raised in a society awash in certain ubiquitous beliefs, you tend to accept those beliefs without thinking. I think most people come to their faith in the same way they come to believe that not wearing a tie is &#8220;unprofessional office behaviour&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Another in the series of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/category\/people-say-smart-things\/\">&#8230; Say Smart Things<\/a> posts, extracted from <a href=\"http:\/\/rifters.com\/real\/2007\/12\/my-father-his-son-and-holy-ghost.html\">an extremely well-tagged rant-in-progress<\/a> by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/?s=peter+watts\">mentioned-here-many-times<\/a> author <a href=\"http:\/\/rifters.com\">Peter Watts<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This has a lot in common with what I tend to refer to as Lawrence&#8217;s Law: &#8220;Most people&#8217;s opinions on any given subject are just the last thing they&#8217;ve heard about it&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">Most people acquire their beliefs through osmosis and observation, not investigation. We&#8217;d rather observe than derive. Raised in a society awash in certain ubiquitous beliefs, you tend to accept those beliefs without thinking. I think most people come to their faith in the same way they come to believe that not wearing a tie is &#8220;unprofessional office behaviour&#8221; Another in&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/21\/sf-authors-say-smart-things-peter-watts\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20],"tags":[125,157,158,159],"class_list":["post-1067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-people-say-smart-things","tag-quote","tag-smart-things","tag-the-masses","tag-thinking","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-hd","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1067\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}