An interesting article in the Guardian discusses the paradoxical way the discoveries of ultra-elitist Newton were found by Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists, Jefferson and Adams and Franklin, Saint-Simon and Fourier, to be full of progressive implications. Gravity affects all people everywhere, which made Newton the supreme philosopher of equality during the French Revolution. Fourier connected the gravitational principle of “passionate attraction” with the free love of his Utopian communities. And oddest of all, “in the debate between John Adams and Benjamin Franklin over a unicameral or bicameral legislature, it was an appeal to Newton that resolved the dispute. Adams argued that only a system with both a House of Representatives and a Senate conformed to Newton’s third law of motion: … Read the rest

There is a story in today’s Guardian about US newspapers competing to attract the ever-popular 18 to 34 year old “market”. Apparently they are crashing into one another and banging heads in a foolish way in Chicago, as each tries to be dumber than the other. The whole subject gives one a feeling of despair. It is so taken for granted that the point of the enterprise is for newspapers to insinuate their way into everyone’s wallets. It is made so drearily obvious that the actual dissemination or clarification of news and knowledge and understanding is just a kind of pretext for or prettification of the real work of delivering customers to advertisers. Is it any wonder that alien abductions … Read the rest

SciTech Daily Review currently has a link to this highly interesting 1996 article from the Skeptical Inquirer. It cites studies by George Gerbner and others that say people who watch a lot of television are more likely (than those who don’t) to be hostile to science and friendly toward pseudoscience, including after controlling for education and other variables. It then goes on to detail the way science and skepticism are the bad guys in several movies and tv shows, while nice, regular, credulous people are the goodies. Of course, this has been true as long as the ghost story has existed (which is probably as long as humans have), because it’s such an excellent device, to have a lot … Read the rest

This is an exhilarating article in the Guardian about the six books on the shortlist for the British Academy prize, “launched last year to celebrate the best of accessible scholarly writing within the humanities and social sciences.” What an excellent idea for a prize. Two words that don’t normally seem to go together–accessible and scholarly–joined up and rewarded. Accessible scholarly writing is perhaps my favorite kind of reading, there is a lot of it about, and more attention should be paid to it. It always strikes me as odd how much more glory there is in writing fiction, even (all too often) quite mediocre fiction, than there is in writing good or even brilliant history or biography or sociology or … Read the rest

This review in the London Review of Books considers a number of inter-connected ideas that are so taken for granted, so entrenched, so the way we all think now, that they are invisible and hence not questioned, even (or least of all?) by people who pride themselves on questioning such things, and even make a living at it, or at attempting it.

For instance the assumption that the self and concern with it are warm and objectivity is cold. And the assumtion that warmth is good and coldness is bad. Then, the assumption that the way to consider these issues is via morality rather than epistemology (which could imply that morality is more important than epistemology and hence should be … Read the rest

Steven Pinker’s new book The Blank Slate is reviewed
in The Nation, the US’s oldest leftist magazine (which I’ve been reading for years), this week. The review is long, favourable, and not opposed to evolutionary psychology. I say ‘not opposed’ rather than sympathetic because the latter seems an absurd word to use about scientific research. It’s not as if evolutionary pyschology is going to have hurt feelings because some people disapprove of it. As Steven Johnson points out, advocates of the ‘blank slate’ view of human nature are being made into Flat Earthers by the science. But there are still a good few of them about, and it is both surprising and heartening to find a sentence like the … Read the rest