Posts in Science & Technology
With fools like these...

In my latest National Post column I once again use the front page of the newspaper to show the hazards, across a broad range of issues, of entrusting power to sanctimonious fools instead of competent well-rounded people with common sense.

Words Worth Noting - April 19, 2021

“People asked him [Thomas Edison, almost totally deaf from childhood] why he didn’t invent a hearing aid. Father always replied, ‘How much have you heard in the last twenty-four hours that you couldn’t do without?’ He followed this up with: ‘A man who has to shout can never tell a lie.’”

Edison’s son Charles in William Bennett The Book of Virtues

Words Worth Noting - April 14, 2021

“In one experiment, for example, a group of subjects is told that a man parked his car on an incline, after which it rolled down into a fire hydrant. Another group is told that the car rolled into a pedestrian. The members of the first group generally view the event as an accident; the second group holds the driver responsible.”

John Allen Paulos, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper

Words Worth Noting - April 7, 2021

“If a rule of the form ‘he who takes the benefit must pay the cost’ is at stake, then solving the problem means spotting cheats. People do this well. The mind is not following abstract reason; it is enforcing a social contract.... Given this view of man – a natural trader, ever concerned with social debts and an uncertain future – it is little wonder that human minds are interested in detecting cheats, not pursuing pure logic, and in sampling frequencies rather than making risky one-off guesses.”

The Economist July 4, 1992 [an article on so-called "Wason tests" some of which people solve far better than others though they are logically equivalent]