Book

Finished "What's Your Dangerous Idea?" which was disappointing. The premise is good. You ask a whole bunch of really smart people a question, and anthologize their answers. The problem was that nearly everyone misinterpreted the question (which was posed by Steven Pinker). He was pressing for ideas that science and society are presently afraid to tackle because they might be true. Here are some blood-boiling examples, from his introduction:

Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men? Were the events in the Bible fictitious — not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires? Has the state of the environment improved in the last fifty years? Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage? Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape? Do men have an innate tendency to rape? Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence? Are suicide terrorists well educated, mentally healthy, and morally driven? Are Ashkenazi Jews, on average, smarter than gentiles because their ancestors were selected for the shrewdness needed in money lending? Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized? Do African American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men? Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality? Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized? Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease? Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability? Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children? Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism? Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances? Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe's nuclear waste? Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people? Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder? Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation? Should people have the right to clone themselves, or enhance the genetic traits of their children?

Instead, it seemed, nearly everyone's idea was:

their pet theory that they thought would change the world, or

a current trend that they thought had dangerous consequences.

Which were interesting enough, but weren't what the question was aiming for.

Also, I have to say, some smart people are really quite dumb.

Anyway, the whole thing was basically a book version of this online site. The previous year's question was more interesting, I think.