For years, I’ve tried to get more people—and especially Americans, citizens of the most militaristic nation on Earth—to agree with me that war must be abolished.
Posts published in “Scientific Curmudgeon”
When Stevens hired me a decade ago, it installed me for several months in the department of physics, which had a spare office.
I’ve never understood the appeal of preaching to the converted. What’s the point? Why bother bashing believers in ghosts, homeopathy and Allah or non-believers in global-warming, childhood vaccines and evolution in ways that cannot persuade but only annoy those who don’t pre-agree with you?
Over the summer I attended a meeting of the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank that challenges conventional green thinking. What appeals to me most about Breakthrough is its optimism, which motivates activism better than pessimism and is warranted by human progress.
For an in-class exercise, I like asking students: “What’s your utopia?” I tell them that utopias aren’t fashionable these days; “utopian” is generally employed in a derogatory sense, meaning naively optimistic.
This month, Basic Books is publishing a new edition of my first book, The End of Science, originally released in 1996.
I recently knocked science journalist Chris Mooney for asserting that “You Have No Business Challenging Scientific Experts.” Non-experts have the right and even the duty, I retorted, to question scientific experts, who often get things wrong.
Fisticuffs have broken out in The Guardian, a British newspaper, between two intellectual big shots, philosopher John Gray and psychologist Steven Pinker.
Philosopher Daniel Dennett once asked: Would you rather be remembered for being right about something, or for being “original and provocative?”
Years ago I was blathering to a science-writing class at Columbia Journalism School about the complexities of covering psychiatric drugs when a student raised his hand.