Journalist Michael Specter makes a erudite and impassioned plea for reason and critical thinking in this video from TED. It's a fantastic speech, and huge tracts could have sprung from my own lips (and probably have done on one occassion or another). He even paraphrases a favourite bon mot of mine: "science is a process not a pronoun". Check it out:
Hat tip: Brian
- Log in to post comments
More like this
As I alluded to a while back, I've been accepted to speak at TED@NYC, which serves as a "talent search" for TED-- the top talks from the event a week from Monday in The City will get a spot talking at the 2014 TED conference in Vancouver. I've got six minutes to wow them with a story about quantum…
... or any other human language for that matter. Even though both monkeys and humans have the anatomical tools for speech, only humans communicate in this manner. Researchers had assumed, incorrectly, that the anatomy of the vocal tract (lips, tongue, larynx) of monkeys was not capable of producing…
Is Bon Jovi an idea worth spreading? Not sure, but it seemed to do wonders with a certain amount of context at a conference I recently attended. This being the TEDactive conference: a satellite event where attendees viewed and immersed themselves in the TED universe at an "off site" locale, all…
I suppose I had better get ready for another e-mail with a wounded, puppy-dog, plaintive complaint of "I'm not really anti-vaccine" in it. You see, that's what has happened in the past a couple of times after I wrote about that pediatrician to the children of the stars (in particular Jenny McCarthy…
"Science is a process, not a pronoun"? What does that mean?
If you're referring to the use of the word "science" as an abstract noun (which is the correct term, not pronoun), this is just part of the way English is spoken, and indeed you used the word "reason" in just this way right here.
If you're referring to something in that weird mind-game they call epistomology, then that's a futile way to try to promote science. It's full of twists, all leading potentially to religious innuendos.