Faith + Reason = Truth

Edge.org cuts through the crap. It also adds to it.  Influential thinkers, both of the past and the future, contribute essays on whatever is moving them at the time, and although you won't agree with the viewpoints of everyone you read there, I would say that should be even greater motivation for some of the essays to be read.

Freeman Dyson has contributed an excerpt from a book of his, and it is alarming in its directness and common sense, anti-dogmatic perspective of the scientific establishment.  I say "alarming" because he is an 82-year old product of that very establishment; the reason he remains relevant is that he refuses to be a slave to it.  If you are a regular reader of Worth Reading, you will quickly see why I delighted in reading Dyson's thoughts at Edge.  Here's his intro to the excerpt:

"My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models."

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