OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson wrote:
Your analysis may be accurate, even if aspects are disquieting to me.
What concerns me is that if most of society in general shows no
interest in educating themselves to the conflicts and internal
bickering that birthed bastardized new technologies like CF...
...we effectively doom ourselves to having history repeat itself
again, and again.
As I see it, the biggest danger is not that people will forget the
conflicts. People will not forget that the experts were wrong. Robert
Park and Frank Close will be a laughingstock for centuries to come, the
way the Rev. Wilburforce is, for debating T. H. Huxley about evolution
and making an ass of himself.
No, the biggest danger is that people will think to themselves "we, in
our enlightened will never be so foolish." They will say, as Captain
Smith of the Titanic said, "we are beyond that sort of thing now." It
can never happen again. As I wrote in my essay about stupid mistakes,
hubris, and the Titanic:
Perhaps the greatest danger in studying the Titanic is that you may be
lulled into a false sense of superiority. We must not imagine that we
are immune to suicidal mistakes. We will not run a ship into an iceberg
at high speed, thanks to regulations and radar. But we will discover
many new ways to commit mayhem. Look at the damage we do to the
environment, the Chernobyl accident, our stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
Look at a crowd of physicists
cheering and applauding derisive attacks on cold fusion at the APS. Let
us hope our descendants do not look back at the cold fusion debate, read
the statements by Taubes -- which are more wrongheaded and reckless than
anything Lightoller said -- and conclude that they will never be so stupid.
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusion.pdf
To take a recent example, before Fukushima, Mizuno and I agree that we
were both lulled into a false sense of security. We thought that U.S.
and Japanese nuclear reactors would never again fail as badly as they
did at Three Mile Island. We knew there have been serious accidents and
catastrophic failures such as Connecticut Yankee. We considered
ourselves realists, even pessimists, with regard to technology. We knew
there were bound to be more accidents. Yet we never expected anything as
bad as that to happen.
- Jed
