Science is a method for establishing truth based on observation, experiment, measurement, and syllogistic logic. As the physicist Richard Feynman said, science is a method of organizing your information so as to avoid being fooled. Science offers a reliable way of knowing about the physical world. It can establish facts, but not human values. Is that why much of today’s society—or at least today’s politics—seems to be anti-science?
After she* was conked on the head by a falling acorn, Chicken Little ran around in panic, crying that the sky was falling. From that story, our children presumably learn not to exaggerate, not to make conclusions without data. Despite the moral of the story, was Chicken Little right? Is the sky falling? Continue reading
So what? I see the world changing, largely due to technologies that few people understand and even fewer feel empowered to control. The world has always been changing, but now the rate of change is proportional to the sum of all changes that have occurred before. That’s what we mean by the term, “exponential,” a term used so often in the media that it is accepted as meaning “large,” without the understanding that it means larger than large. The purpose of these pages is to offer an analytical review of where we’ve come, and where we’re going, and why. The WHY is embedded in the unnoticed rules by which humans affect each other. Understanding the rules by which the individual parts affect each other—that’s the key to understanding and to controlling complex systems, about which these pages will say more. Continue reading