The author does not mention climate change, but that's the thing I thought of immediately. We are not allowed to be skeptical of climate change in the least.
The author does mention that he talked with Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of the leading proponents of climate change. Tyson did not think much of the author's premise. No surprise there.
It is also interesting to note that the author says that we must be skeptical of non-scientific great ideas as well. For example, is modern democracy really the best form of government?
Seems like just a rehash of Kuhn’s ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’.
[We are not allowed to be skeptical of climate change in the least. ]
That’s because its not science. Its a political agenda.
I’ve been making this argument on liberal sites when arguing against AGW and evolutionism. I try to explain that we are in the enlightened modern age, but so were the 60’s at the time, and sow was 1880 at the time.
I ask them, “what do we know now that will turn out to be absolutely wrong?”
For example, is modern democracy really the best form of government?
The problems come about when scientists stop doing science.
If they stick to formulating hypotheses, testing them, and facilitating the ongoing validation and re-testing of the hypotheses, they are doing science.
When they make inferences by analogy or take a position based on scant evidence, they are not doing science.
Calvin liked theocracy.
Hobbes liked monarchy.
Urban weather stations, asphalt and altered heat absorption profiles of city environments all probably contribute more to localized URBAN HEATING than CO2 could ever DREAM to...
WOW! What great insight! We don’t know everything and we might learn something new in the future.
What’s pathetic is that this captain obvious is being given any attention.
Galileo, who was trumped by Newton, until Einstein ruled the roost.
...
Those are more like improvements rather than proving the previous person wrong. Or one could look at it as the recent champion standing on the shoulders of giants.
This is toxic irrational skepticism. Arbitrary beliefs and pseudoscience are falsifiable, but objective knowledge acquired by the process of reason is not invalidated or overthrown, but supplemented and expanded by new discoveries. New discoveries make knowledge more precise and accurate and knowledge becomes more certain. If new discoveries constantly refuted previous discoveries as the skeptics claimed, progress of any kind would be impossible.
But I'll bet he is profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of a creator god, because that would be unscientific, and because it opens the possibility that such a god might have purposes that impose obligations on us.
Kinda reminds me of the exchange in the Woody Allen movie, “Sleeper”, when two scientists are discussing the revived Allen:
Dr. Melik: Well, he’s fully recovered, except for a few minor kinks.
Dr. Agon: Has he asked for anything special?
Dr. Melik: Yes, this morning for breakfast. He requested something called wheat germ, organic honey and tiger’s milk.
Dr. Agon: [ laughs ] Oh, yes. Those were the charmed substances...That some years ago Were felt to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies? Or hot fudge?
Dr. Agon: Those were thought to be unhealthy, precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible.
Intellectual fashions, like food fads, change perpetually.
As in Science, so in History ...
As long as you agree with the assurance that we will never know as much as we don’t know, you can enjoy your life with much less stress and anxiety. #;^)
It is why no one should ever put absolute trust in anything mankind says. Plenty of all kinds of experts have also succeeded in killing millions over the years.
St Paul quoted the Greeks: We see through a glass darkly. Down here we will never see the full truth. We do the best with what we do see.
“But I am interested in the possibility that we are going to be wrong in the same way that history has indicated that mankind always is. It seems as though the history of ideas is the history of being wrong. And to me, that is a kind of continuum. It’s a continual path that shows we don’t always know something, but we’re always shifting to a path that makes us feel more comfortable in the moment, even if that shift is wrong, and a new shift is destined to happen again.”
This guy is profoundly stupid. “Always wrong” can be easily achieved for a sufficiently rigorous definition of correctness.
The human mind, indeed knowledge itself is based upon observed patterns and relationships between otherwise abstract entities. We accept gravity and compensate for it when we do many things. Our mind need not extract an unreasonable level of accuracy before we walk across a room. Our mind knows the “right” answer and accomplishes the task before this idiots argument manages to get out of bed.
His thesis would better be described as “everything is impossible” rather than “everything is wrong”.