“To say that something is ‘natural’ means not that it is inevitable, but that the potential for it exists in the genotype. This in turn implies that it is merely prudent to bear in mind the potential of that ‘natural’ behavior and act accordingly. [Robert] Wright approvingly cites Francis Bacon, who announced, ‘Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.’”
Lionel Tiger reviewing Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny in National Review March 6, 2000
“statistics, a term which for most people is synonymous with ‘migraine.’”
William Watson in National Post Nov. 27, 2001
“An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and who manages to avoid them.”
Werner Heisenberg (of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) quoted in Globe & Mail Feb. 1, 2002
In my latest National Post column I say democracies for all their failings still beat tyranny hollow because we can ask people who want power what they’d do with it and why.
Here’s a video from the past. It’s a talk I gave at the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June 2019 so I’m tardy making it available. And it’s about the Middle Ages which were, far too many people think, necessarily awful because they were long ago and old is bad and new is good. In fact there are a great many modern horrors that would have appalled people in the Middle Ages and one of them is widespread ignorance about the period.
Sorry to take so long to get around to editing and posting it. Life got in the way.
In my latest National Post column I ponder the gleeful way many people welcome the development of AI that’s better than us at everything, and ask whether at Christmastime in particular we can’t find something to cherish in our fallible, all-too-human fellows and selves.