Sunday, February 04, 2007

Sokal and Mooney Op-Ed in LA Times

See Chris Mooney's blog, The Intersection, for more introduction to this editorial that he and Alan Sokal co-authored in today's LA Times. It's titled Can Washington get smart about science?, and is a nice little piece of writing.

What I like is that Sokal has been known to criticize liberals and Mooney has a book about conservatives in government and their subversion of science. I like to see people team up like this and cut through the partisan crap. It's all too easy for people to stay on "their side", whatever that means. The partisan brain is a funny thing. People with strong partisan tendencies tend to automatically believe, agree, disbelieve, disagree with statements that have yet to be checked for its truthiness.

Sometimes when I stroll about the blogosphere I get severely turned off by ultra-partisan "liberals" spouting complete nonsense. Conservatives do the same, of course....I guess I don't find myself strolling about their internet neighborhoods though.

Anyhow....read Chris and Alan's article, it's good.

1 comment:

VasyaDC said...

While the statement: "Sokal has been known to criticize liberals," is technically true, it is a little misleading. Sokal plants himself firmly on the left, and criticizes other academics (who tend to congregate mostly in English and Comp. Lit. departments) for shoddy (at best) reasoning that may succeed in expressing a politically left point-of-view in some novel ways (to three or four people total), but in undermining the foundational Enlightenment-inspired assumptions serves mostly to commit both intellectual fraud and political self-immolation.