Children are Smarter Than Adults

This precocity of childhood may be said to characterise all the known races of man, and to be even more marked the more primitive the race. On this point, ‘It is an interesting fact,’ says Havelock Ellis (183, p. 177), ‘and perhaps of some significance, that among primitive races in all parts of the world, the children, at an early age, are very precocious in intelligence.’ And again, ‘ It seems that, the lower the race, the more marked is this precocity, and its arrest at puberty. ...

 Why We Can't Have "Intuitive" Programming Languages

If a procedure named INSIGHT has been defined and then called seventeen times in the program, and the eighteenth time it is misspelled as INSIHGT, woe to the programmer. The compiler will balk and print a rigidly unsympathetic error message, saying that it has never heard of INSIHGT. Often, when such an error is detected by a compiler, the compiler tries to continue, but because of its lack of insihgt, it has not understood what the programmer meant. In fact, it may very well suppose that som...

 Beginning to Reason

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.... If we do not understand what an escalator is, we might get on it intending to go a few meters, only to find that once we are on, it is difficult to avoid going all the way to the end. Similarly, once reasoning has got started it is hard to tell where it will stop. The...

 The Silos in "Wool"

The silo was something she had always taken for granted. The priests say it had always been here, that it was lovingly created by a caring God, that everything they would ever need had been provided for. Juliette had a hard time with this story. A few years ago, she had been on the first team to drill past 10,000 feet and hit new oil reserves. She had a sense of the size and scope of the world below them. And then she had seen with her own eyes the view of the outside with its phantom-like sh...

 The Human Race Will Only Improve

Such is the object of the work I have undertaken; the result of which will be to show, from reasoning and from facts, that no bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties; that the pefectibility of man is absolutely indefinite; that the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth above the controul of every power that would impede it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us. The course of this progress may doubtless be more or less...

 Michael Faraday's Advice to School Children

Study science with earnestness -- search into nature -- elicit the truth -- reason on it, and reject all which will not stand the closest investigation. Keep your imagination within bounds, taking heed lest it run away with your judgment. Above all, let me warn you young ones of the danger of being led away by the superstitions which at this day of boasted progress are a disgrace to the age, and which afford astonishing proofs of the vast floods of ignorance overwhelming and desolating the hi...

 The Mother-Infant Dyad

In a more evolutionardy appropriate infant-caretaker scheme, the infant is a social partner, part of a dyad. Both mother and infant are interested in being in equilibrium, that is, in a stable and contented state. This goal is adiieved by mutual regulation, by reciprocity, and by keep¬ ing tabs on each other. This system nicely describes the infant-caretaker pair, and as I have presented in Chapter Two, there is a great deal of evidence that infants and those who love them are attuned to eac...

 Atheism is on Par With Religious Belief

If you were to ask me, if I believed in god. Since I am a professional scientist, I would want to give you two answers. In my capacity as a professional scientist I would have to--I would be required to--be agnostic on the subject since I couldn't cite with scientific certainty say that there is a god and I couldn't with scientific certainty say that there isn't. But if I were allowed to respond as just a regular non-scientist and if you allowed me to take the very same indulgences that all...