Some context on this essay - I've been making my way through Bret Victor's collection of links [0] and started reading diSesssa's Knowledge in Pieces, which opens with this quote:<p>"Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking's a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That's why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you've got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wangle yourself out another to take its place.”<p>I didn't recognise the quote, but the author seemed familiar (Dashiell Hammett), so I looked it up and found this fascinating essay on the relationship between how Hammett's detectives thought, how Hammett himself thought, and what changed over the course of his career as his philosophical views shifted from pragmatism to Marxism.<p>[0] <a href="http://worrydream.com/refs/" rel="nofollow">http://worrydream.com/refs/</a>