Choruses of ... "Quarantines will ruin the economy, ever think of that?" echo among ... politicians who know more about epidemiology than epidemiologists and who are, apparently, under the impression that dead people go shopping.
Thursday, July 9, 2020
Thursday, May 21, 2020
William Irwin Thompson
[from The American Replacement of Nature, 1991]
Political Virtual Reality: Not a sanguinal polity (tribe) based on blood, nor a territorial polity (nation) based on land and boundaries, but a planetary noetic polity, as hierarchical as the Church and as technological as modern science, not or representation in a republic, but of fantasy participation in the electronic state.
Political Virtual Reality: Not a sanguinal polity (tribe) based on blood, nor a territorial polity (nation) based on land and boundaries, but a planetary noetic polity, as hierarchical as the Church and as technological as modern science, not or representation in a republic, but of fantasy participation in the electronic state.
Friday, April 10, 2020
Timothy Ferris
[from 'The Wrong Stuff' in The New Yorker's Talk of the Town section, April 14, 1997]
[The Heaven's Gate mass suicide is] an object lesson in the hazards of living a life innocent of empirical rigor.... [It] might have been averted had just one of the observers declared, "Gee, the evidence fails to support our belief. Maybe the belief is wrong."...
Tens of millions of people have perished at the hands of leaders who were unwilling to alter their presumptions according to objective evidence....
Science ... remains a minority habit of mind... Blind belief rules the millennial universe.
[The Heaven's Gate mass suicide is] an object lesson in the hazards of living a life innocent of empirical rigor.... [It] might have been averted had just one of the observers declared, "Gee, the evidence fails to support our belief. Maybe the belief is wrong."...
Tens of millions of people have perished at the hands of leaders who were unwilling to alter their presumptions according to objective evidence....
Science ... remains a minority habit of mind... Blind belief rules the millennial universe.
Saturday, March 14, 2020
Neal Stephenson
[Said by a character in Stephenson's novel Fall, or Dodge in Hell]
The ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible ... ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution ... stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along.
The ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible ... ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution ... stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along.
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