Academic Freedom

Readers will recall Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech, a defense of the fundamental difference between language as we know it and the squawks, moos, and gibbers we hear outside. Wolfe defended linguist Daniel Everett against the Colossus of MIT, Noam Chomsky. Now Everett himself offers some thoughts at Aeon: In 2005, I published a paper in the journal Current Anthropology, arguing that Pirahã – an Amazonian language unrelated to any living language – lacked several kinds of words and grammatical constructions that many researchers would have expected to find in all languages. I made it clear that this absence was not due to any inherent cognitive limitation on the part of its speakers, but due to cultural values, one Read More ›

From the editors of Nature: The article by Mark Lilla, a researcher at Columbia University in New York City who specializes in the history of Western intellectual, political and religious thought, called for an end to what he described as an overemphasis by liberals on racial, gender and sexual identity politics. He believes that this focus distracts from core fundamental concepts of democracy and so weakens social cohesion and civic responsibility. In short, he asserted that many progressives live in bubbles; that they are educationally programmed to be attuned to diversity issues, yet have “shockingly little to say” about political and democratic fundamentals such as class, economics, war and policy issues affecting the common good. Of direct relevance to the Read More ›

From Kevin Mooney at Daily Signal: Just before joining climate change activist and former Vice President Al Gore for a press conference in New York City, seven state-level attorneys general huddled with a representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The political activist, Peter Frumhoff, called for them and other elected officials to move decisively against major corporations and institutions for “denying” climate change. The seeds of that call to action in March were planted four years earlier at a gathering of environmental activists, trial lawyers, and academics across the country in San Diego. The Daily Signal found this and other revealing bits of information among material produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against Virginia’s Read More ›

Three days ago: Why does climate change “denial” matter in a “post-truth” society? From Clare Foran at Atlantic: The entrenchment of climate-science denial is one of the ways the United States appears to be exceptional relative to the rest of the world. A comparative 2015 study of nine conservative political parties in countries such as Canada, Germany, and Spain concluded that “the U.S. Republican Party is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change.” Meanwhile, Americans were least likely to agree that climate change is largely the result of human activity in a 2014 survey of 20 countries, including China, India, Australia, and Great Britain. … Clare Foran, meet Julie Shaw: A scientist on the benefits of a post-truth society: I’m Read More ›

Overnight, his brother and successor Raul announced the death of the former longest serving non-royal head of a state. While we must condole with those who mourn, we must also recognise his very mixed legacy, as a Communist dictator leading a state that — per fair comment — has been very un-free and hampered in its development. Be that as it may, we must recognise this is the death of a former national leader and widely respected statesman. One, who will be mourned not just by family and friends or countrymen, but far and wide across the world. The development also comes at a pivotal time, when the USA is undergoing its own leadership transition after a very polarised election, Read More ›

. . . as in, it’s a delusion: >>When the machines take over our important decisions we will do the same thing we do now – we will imagine that we are making the decisions on our own. Today our important decisions are made with emotions, and rationalized after the fact. We incorrectly call this process “thinking.” In the near future, our machines will make our daily decisions using Big Data and whatever they know about us as individuals to maximize our outcomes. You’ll like that future because the machines will make better decisions than you, and you’ll have better quality of life. In the new world ahead, you will be the robot – albeit a moist one. The machines Read More ›

Sometimes, popular debates and commenters can put their fingers on a key issue, almost in passing. In this case, in addressing the cognitive dissonance issue triggering  many reactions to the rise of Donald Trump to US President-Elect (I confess, my own surprise* . . . ) Dilbert’s Scott Adams has dropped a real clanger of a wake-up call: Here is a money-shot clip from his current blog article, “The Cognitive Dissonance Cluster Bomb”: >>As I often tell you, we all live in our own movies inside our heads. Humans did not evolve with the capability to understand their reality because it was not important to survival. Any illusion that keeps us alive long enough to procreate is good enough. That’s Read More ›

A quick FTR-FYI, here. END PS: Cover page:    

This issue is directly relevant to the ID controversy, but also to much more of what has gone wrong with our civilisation and the utter, stark peril we now face because we ignored warning signs for decades: This has to be decoded a bit, as it is of course in the usual context of our being concerned over sawdust in the other fellow’s eyes while there is a plank in our own.  In an overnight comment, I gave a few clues: >> –> Ask yourself, are ALL the moneybags on one side? (E.g. Koch vs Soros. [And no, I am not endorsing or opposing any parties or individuals, I am pointing out balancing facts given the known tendencies of pundits Read More ›

In the recently settled soft dino tissue find case, part of the fired prof’s evidence was the following incident: The lawsuit contends that [creationism was] why Armitage’s employment at Cal State Northridge was terminated, with one professor allegedly storming into his office and shouting: “We are not going to tolerate your religion in this department!” More. It strikes me that Prof Stormer thinks that there is a hard and fast distinction to be made between “science” and “religion.” But the distinction falls apart when examined. Here is a hypothetical example: My religion, we’ll say, teaches that killing animals is wrong and therefore eating meat is wrong. It would be easy to come up with a wealth of science information on Read More ›

Armitage settlement: Nuclear chemist Jay Wiles’s thoughts Last evening, we learned frm College Fix: A creationist scholar recently received a six-figure settlement from California State University Northridge, a payout that resolved a 2-year-old lawsuit that alleged the scholar had been fired after discovering soft tissue on a triceratops horn and publishing his findings. … The lawsuit contends that’s why Armitage’s employment at Cal State Northridge was terminated, with one professor allegedly storming into his office and shouting: “We are not going to tolerate your religion in this department!” More. Here’s some of Jay Wile’s further information from his blog: According to Mr. Armitage, his discovery was well-known in the department long before he and Dr. Anderson published their scientific paper. Read More ›

A friend writes that letters sent to the incoming class of 2020 make it clear the University of Chicago isn’t a fan of trigger warnings or safe spaces. From John Miltimore at Intellectual Takeout: Letters sent to the incoming class of 2020 make it clear the University of Chicago isn’t a fan of trigger warnings or safe spaces. … The University of Chicago recently made it clear to its crop of incoming students that academic freedom and inquiry remain pillars at the institution, and that the university does not support “so-called” trigger warnings or offer safe spaces that allow students “to retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own. Here is how the university welcomed its incoming class Read More ›

From Climate Audit: n 2012, the then much ballyhoo-ed Australian temperature reconstruction of Gergis et al 2012 mysteriously disappeared from Journal of Climate after being criticized at Climate Audit. Now, more than four years later, a successor article has finally been published. Gergis says that the only problem with the original article was a “typo” in a single word. Rather than “taking the easy way out” and simply correcting the “typo”, Gergis instead embarked on a program that ultimately involved nine rounds of revision, 21 individual reviews, two editors and took longer than the American involvement in World War II. However, rather than Gergis et al 2016 being an improvement on or confirmation of Gergis et al 2012, it is Read More ›

From guest blogger Amanda Freise at Scientific American: It’s Time for Scientists to Stop Explaining So Much Research shows that more facts don’t necessarily lead to changed minds, but my colleagues have a hard time accepting it Not to leave you in suspense or anything: This theory of science communication, the so-called “deficit model,” suggests that public skepticism of science is due to a lack of information and understanding, and can be overcome if more information is provided. But the model has been widely discredited. Simply giving someone information, no matter how much or how many experts stand behind it, just isn’t enough to convince them. So why, in the face of evidence, do some scientists continue to insist that Read More ›

From Eric Worrall at Watt’s Up with That?: The alleged weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation appears to be triggering a growing amount of speculation about abrupt cooling, like the plot of the movie “The Day After Tomorrow”. More. We’ll see. Good thing I didn’t put away my parka. Please. No more persecution of dissenters. See also: Scientific dissent can never be securities fraud Follow UD News at Twitter!