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What the next President must know

By catdynamics on October 1, 2008.

The Apple Pro-Sessions Science Blogging panel is done, and jolly good fun it was too.

Good crowd, very good questions and decent banter - interesting to meet the various sciblings, including the ringers in the crowd.

The last question, and I paraphrase, was interesting:
"What one thing should the next President understand about science?"

There were several good answers, mine was:

"The next President must understand that you CAN NOT make your own reality"

here is the original:

"The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'""

Very existential, but you can't actually do that.
Doesn't work.

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