The Best Article I Have Ever Read on Climate Change
I bet some of you think I am linking to my own piece. Nope this is Jim Manzi at Cato. This is really a tour de force, except for the wussy concessions at the very end. (HT2MR)
"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Bob, here are a few thoughts on Manzi's piece:
ReplyDeletehttp://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/08/22/jim-manzi-cato-on-climate-i-with-flabby-quot-libertariarian-sinews-quot-advocates-domestic-climate-science-and-technology-investments.aspx
BTW, is there a way to post links using html?