Fool Me Twice
- Kind
- Book
- Date
- 2011-10-11
- Publisher
- Rodale Press
- Retrieved
- Jan 8, 2013
- ISBN
- 6pMqCjVynG
24 memes from this reference
America is Naturally Anti-Science
In the end, politics is about story. Robert McKee, Hollywood's master of storytelling, views the world from the top of America's other great cultural export—its movies. "1 think that the American ethos is not science-friendly and never has been," he says. "The American model is Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Guys who…
Anti-Science in Communism
Suppression of knowledge weakened Russia in the Lysenko affair. which a political ideologue and former peasant named Trofim Lysenko ingratiated himself to communist leaders and was placed in charge of national agriculture because of his ideological conformity. He denounced and suppressed scientists who questioned his…
Climate Change Science is Based on an 1896 Paper
Our understanding that increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could change the climate is not new. The relationship between carbon dioxide, water vapor, and climate was first laid out in detail in 1896 by the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius, who estimated that a doubling of carbon dioxide levels would…
Externalities
In every economic transaction there is a willing buyer and a willing seller. and they agree on a price that benefits both. But there are spillover effects in many economic transactions—costs and/or benefits that are transferred to third parties. Friedman called these spillovers "neighborhood effects." Today, most…
History of the Fairness Doctrine and Rise of Media Relativism
The intellectual erosion of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, as science sat silently on the sidelines and anti-science rose to rule on both the left and the right, was greatly worsened in August of 1987 when, during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) abolished what…
Kuhn's Explanation of Scientific Revolutions as Post-Modernism
The politics the book ascribed to science resonated closely with prevailing attitudes. Scientists ("the Man") resist new (baby boomer) ideas, clinging to old (Western white male), outdated theories even as the evidence they are being willfully blind to accumulates (discrimination) like energy in an electron until it…
Post Modernism Leads to Totalitarianism
There is objective truth to be learned by observation, and the knowledge gained gives power that other "ways of knowing" have not. But the more dangerous problem with postmodernist thinking is its a priori nature. Not truth, but a political goal has to be served—in this particular case the goal of openness, or…
Science is Culture
...science, like art, is a cultural expression that makes a nation worth defending. Like great art and great music, its true value lies in exploring the unknown. Today, the opposite argument, the commoditization of science, is virtually the only one heard. It has metastasized from the smaller-minded appeals of the…
Summary of Postmodernism
The teaching that there is no objective reality, but rather many subjec¬ tive realities, or in this case, that the subjective realities are on an equal par with the objective reality (you're dead!) in turn influences students' views of the primacy of knowledge. To critics, history is no longer the search for what…
The Difference in the Way Scientists and Laypeople Approach Knowledge
Scientists are trained to avoid rhetorical arguments, the "vulgar Induction" Bacon warned against, and let the chips of reality fall where they may. They highly prize this intellectual honesty because the stakes for them are very high. They know how value judgments, prejudices, and habits of thought can blind you to…
The ENMOD Treaty
There are also major foreign policy concerns, beginning with the international ENMOD treaty—the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use ot Environmental Modification Techniques, ratified by the United Nations in 1978 in response to the United States' use of silver iodide cloud seeding to…
Vaccines as a Positive Externality
A science-based example of a positive externality is vaccinations. Vaccinations work based on the number of people in the population who are vaccinated. Once a certain threshold is reached, the disease can't spread effectively and is essentially eliminated. As long as enough people are vaccinated, others who choose…
Why Cell Phone Radiation Does Not Cause Cancer
Physics explains why no links were found. The microwaves used in cell phone transmissions do not have enough energy to break the chemical bonds of DNA, which is how cell mutations occur and cause cancer. How do we know this? Light and other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, including microwaves, radio waves…
Bush Administration Science Abuses
After President Bush's 2004 reelection, scientists noticed that the problem was becoming even worse. One example was Bush's appointment of George Deutsch, a twenty-four-year-old Texas A&M University dropout and Bush campaign intern, to a key position in NASA's public relations department. Deutsch set to work muzzling…
Einstein's Cosmological Constant
Georges Lemaitre was a pudgy, pinkish Belgian Jesuit abbe—a Catholic priest—who also happened to be a skilled astronomer. Lemaitre had noticed that Einstein's general theory of relativity would have implied that the universe was expanding but for a troublesome little mathematical term called the cosmological constant…
Newton Was "Last of the Magicians"
Newton provides an example of how the idea of "science" had not yet fully emerged as something separate from religion in early Enlightenment thinking. In fact, during the seventeenth century, the word "scientist" was not commonly used to describe experimenters at all; they were called natural philosophers"^^ in an…
Science is Inherently Political
When speaking about science to scientists, there is one thing that can be said that will almost always raise their indignation, and that is that science is inherently political and that the practice of science is a political act. Science, they will respond, has nothing to do with politics. But is that true? Let's…
Science is Libertarian
In the wake of the Bush presidency, the already-clear rift between the two dominant perspectives on the right—the small-government libertarians/anarchists and the theocratic fundamentalists—began to grow even wider. Far more than the conservative or liberal philosophy, it is who wins the argument between…
Scientists Need Open Free Societies
. Historically, the brightest minds have migrated to open societies. and once there have made discoveries and created works that enriched and advanced those societies. A classic example is the intellectual flight from fascist Europe in the years leading up to World War 11. Persecution, particularly of Jews and…
Suburbs are the Result of Fear of Nuclear War
The Federal Civil Defense Administration determined that the country that would win a nuclear war was the one best prepared to survive the initial attack. Achieving this required a homeland mobilization on an unprecedented scale, and our children needed to know what to do when nuclear war came. They commissioned a…
The "Sagan Effect"
With Cosmos, Sagan sought to put an end to the fear and to inspire the kind of wonder Hubble's lectures had inspired in the 1930s and 1940s and the Moon landing had inspired in 1969. The series was enormously successful. For the first time since Hubble, a huge audience was engaged in exploring the grand questions of…
The Anti-Relativity Movement
America's embrace of Einstein stood in stark contrast to the treatment he was getting at home. Right-wing relativity deniers, like modern American climate science deniers, mounted ad hominem attacks against Einstein and his theory, which they loudly branded a "hoax." They were led by an engineer named Paul Weyland…
The Story of How the Universe's Size was Determined
It was into this fiery climate of the 1920s that the Protestant-raised Hubble, adorned with the cape, cane, and British accent he had adopted while at Oxford, returned after the war. He arrived at the Carnegie Institution of Washington-funded Mount Wilson Observatory outside Pasadena, California, insisting on being…
When Does Human Life Begin
Careful and reproducible observations and measurements in the bbiosciences have similarly forced us to repeatedly refine our traditional ideas about what life itself is and when it begins. Is a human being first a life when it emerges from the birth canal? Does it have any legal rights is as a person before then? Or…