Michael Shermer - Toward a Type 1 civilization. Ignore the nutty libertarianism - read only this sentence:
Globalism that includes worldwide wireless Internet access, with all knowledge digitized and available to everyone.
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That's getting harder and harder to do with him.
Hey now, there is a very good I wouldn't be reading this blog right now if it weren't for 'Why People Believe Weird Things'. It really made me re-think a lot of the things I held to be 'true'. And what's wrong with a little libertarianism? At least it's not Ron Paul.
Cell phones and wireless internet may change things a lot. People really are getting connected. It's great.
As far a Shermer, I bought his last book on markets. I got to the the chapter where he lets George Will describe the wonders of Wal-Mart, as a shining example of the free market at work. When he described Will as a "savvy" commenter on social issues, I knew it was time to move on. George Will the economist. Great.
Griff
His early books were excellent, I have read 2-3 of them, and I have met him in person and he is smart and cool. But lately, he's been really off his rocker with crude libertarianism, which makes me not want to read any of his stuff any more.
Shermer completely misses the value of the Kardashev-Dyson scale, which was that it cast the progress of a civilization in terms grounded in physics and therefore independent of human peculiarities. (What else could we expect from somebody who claims that liberalism is the Intelligent Design of politics?)
Tobacco and CFC manufacturers would just luvvvv this.
If you reify the extreme tail end of a bell curve, perhaps.
Which is why I picked only ONE sentence I agree with. The other sentences....nope.
I've not kept up with Shermer's recent work, though I consider How We Believe and Why People Believe Weird Things to be essential reading. However, I do find it odd that Borderlands of Science was unaccountably and sometimes unreadably dry. I have to say, I didn't realize how devoted he was to his Rand-without-Rand economic beliefs. You'd think a leading light of rationalism would be a little more questioning of free market fundamentalism, but then Penn and Teller are notorious for the same fault.