"The scientist is concerned above all with the truth, with simply seeing things as they are, regardless of any other interests or concerns. The job of the public intellectual is not so simple. As an intellectual, he is certainly concerned with the truth as it is discovered by his intellect. Yet he is also concerned with the public things, that is, with the common good, and therefore with the well-being and needs of his fellow citizens. And while the truth is assuredly not in principle hostile to human well-being, neither is every truth unproblematically consistent with human well-being in every instance. ...

What is Dawkins’s response to those for whom his popularization of evolution causes so much pain?
(It causes these people pain because they don't agree with it. Now either it is right and they are wrong, or it is wrong and they are right. In the first case, is it preferable to believe a consoling lie or a harsh truth? In the second case, they already believe the truth, and is not a certain amount of "Christian pity" in order for the poor misguided?) Essentially it is this: 'Keep a stiff upper lip.' If 'something is true', he responds, 'no amount of wishful thinking can undo it.' No doubt this is correct. But we might with as much propriety ask Dawkins: 'If something is painful, does its truth justify inflicting it on people who find it disturbing?' (I.e., Do people have the right do be ignorant? Do they have the right to be wrong?) Let us grant — only, to be sure, for the sake of argument — that Dawkins’s Darwinian explanation of Life, the Universe, and Everything is true. Does this in itself justify his strident shoving of it into our public discourse, knowing full well the emotional distress it will cause the spiritually sensitive? ...

Dawkins contends that the meaningfulness of life need not depend on any notions of the ultimate purpose of the cosmos. He would probably assert that those who seek such cosmic justifications for the things they love are suffering a form of false consciousness imposed by the cultural influence of Biblical religion. Whatever the origins of such transcendent aspirations, however, it is an undeniable fact that countless human beings really do experience the meaningfulness of their lives as somehow bound up with their conviction that the universe possesses ultimate meaning. Dawkins’s ruthless indifference to them makes a tangled web of many of his fellow human beings’ most cherished sentiments and beliefs. (Well then, too bad for their cherished sentiments and beliefs. This sounds awfully callous, but what is the alternative? "Believe lies, if you find them comforting"? As Dawkins himself said on this, "Some of us would scorn to be consoled by a falsehood." )

Horkheimer's book, Eclipse of Reason deals with the concept of "reason" within the history of Western philosophy. Horkheimer defines true reason as rationality. He details the difference between objective and subjective reason and states that we have moved from objective to subjective.

Objective reason deals with universal truths that dictate that an action is either right or wrong. Subjective reason takes into account the situation and social norms. Actions that produce the best situation for the individual are "reasonable" according to subjective reason.

The movement from one type of reason to the other occurred when thought could no longer accommodate these objective truths or when it judged them to be delusions. Under subjective reason, concepts lose their meaning. All concepts must be strictly functional ("useful"?) to be reasonable. Because subjective reason rules, the ideals of a society, for example democratic ideals, become dependent on the "interests" of the people instead of being dependent on objective truths.

Writing in 1946, Horkheimer was strongly influenced by the Nazi legacy in Germany. He outlined how the Nazis had been able to make their agenda appear "reasonable", but also issued a warning about the possibility of this happening again. Horkheimer believed that the ills of modern society are caused by the misuse and misunderstanding of reason: if people use true reason to critique their societies, they will be able to identify and solve their problems."

" The term was coined by sociologist George Ritzer, who wrote the book The McDonaldization of Society. McDonaldization is a reconceptualization of rationalization, or moving from traditional to rational modes of thought, and scientific management. Where Weber used the model of the bureaucracy to represent the direction of this changing society, Ritzer sees the fast-food restaurant as having become a more representative paradigm contemporarily (Ritzer, 2004:553).

Ritzer highlighted four primary components of McDonaldization:

Efficiency - the optimal method for accomplishing a task
Calculability - objective should be quantifiable (i.e. sales) rather than subjective (i.e. taste)
Predictability - standardized and uniform services
Control - standardized and uniform employees

With these four processes, a strategy which is rational within a narrow scope can lead to outcomes that are harmful or irrational."

"Some 51% of teenagers think science lessons are boring, confusing or difficult, a survey suggests.

Figures from the OCR exam board, which interviewed 950 children aged 13 to 16 in England, showed 7% thought people working in the area were "cool". "

Comments from readers:

"Science IS easy. The problem is pupils are not arriving with the appropriate skills (eg. decent level of maths [particularly mental arithmetic and equation skills] and logical analysis skills) and the subject is dull and watered down with lots of irrelevant side issues (nothing to get them excited to want to learn WHY something works). To be a scientist you have to be able to comprehend and want to comprehend." -- David, UK

Science is having an interesting idea about something, then going out of your way to prove yourself wrong.

Pseudoscience is having an interesting idea about something, then going out of your way to prove yourself right.

"People aren't very good at judging risk. In fact, I reckon our shoddiness at judging risk is one of the principle driving factors behind religion, superstition, pseudoscience and general human stupidity.

[We are especially afraid of]

Things that are new
Things that are unknown
Things that are invisible
Things where we don't understand (how to estimate) the hazard at all

I have listed these not because they are surprising, nor because I find them silly, but because most people's metacognitive ability is appalling: you might be worried about mobile phone masts destroying your brain, but the least you could do is recognise that this is in no small part due to the fact that mobile phones are new, microwaves are invisible, and you probably don't have the foggiest idea what a microwave actually is anyway. Metacognition (examining your own brain processes to understand why you think what you do) generally seems lacking from the hysterical reactions you see to the siting of mobile phone masts, traces of pesticides in food, etc. The fact that the same hysterics are happy to drive cars, cross roads, and eat junk food is testament to the blind spot people have for hazards they are used to.

So not only are we dreadful at judging risk, we are also terrible at judging most of the hazards we are now exposed to, because there is nothing in our history to prepare us for them. This means we either under- or over-estimate the hazards of driving cars, using mobile phones, and drinking tap water. ...

So what can we do to make up for our uselessness at judging probabilities, risk and danger? The only method we have so far come up with is mathematical modelling, and in particular, that dreaded word, statistics.

Statistics is how scientists judge risks. We know that our intuition is a grotesquely unreliable tool, so we invented a slightly less unreliable tool to better our intuition. Statistics is not a panacea, and it is all too easy to be taken in by shoddy statistics, but it is all we have. This is most certainly not to say that you should blindly belive statistics thrown at you by scientists, the media or the government."

"I spent the past 3 days taking a beginner SCUBA diving class. ...

Every time I tried to take my regulator out and put it back in, I would (as I figured out later) not recreate the seal around the mouthpiece appropriately, so water would get in and I would choke and panic. ...

Then I stopped and took a step out of it all for a minute. I had been to Skeptics in the Pub the night before so skepticism and critical thinking was on the mind. ...

So there were several components to this fear:

1. The basic physical issues - water up my nose, not being able to breathe, fear of drowning. You know, girly stuff.
2. I was doing this in front of a group of other trainees and I was going to make a fool of myself, and traumatize a bunch of kids if I drowned. ...
3. In doing this wrong or quitting, I would end up disappointing my husband and the instructors who had been so nice, and were waiting for their payment, which they would almost certainly not get if I were dead.

So I looked at this critically. Item 1 was really the biggest issue ... I got past it by focussing on that this class was only for 1 day and that I was only going to be in the pool. It would be highly unlikely that I would be injured in 12 feet (at the most) of water, particularly with three instructors and eight other students around me at all time. ...

So I went to class. ... Right on cue, there was my old friend, Mr. Panic.

Again with the focusing - just today, just the pool. What’s the worst that could happen?

I got to the pool today and did it all. It took me a while but I kept using the same methodology. I examined the problem, broke it into pieces and solved it at an intellectual level, instead of letting the panic get to me. Mask clearing was really bothering me. I realized it was because I hated having water around my nose and that when I got water up my nose, it would panic me.

So, I spent about 15 minutes just standing in the shallow end, breathing from the regulator, with my face submerged without a mask. The first couple of times, I could only do it for a couple of seconds. Within half an hour, I was able to sit on the bottom of the pool, take my mask off, put it back on and clear it. By the end of the day, I was able to swim maskless for 25 ft, put the mask on and clear it.

I also managed to do all the other tasks, including the rescue skills, with minimal problems. I even dealt with unexpected problems.

... critical thinking is a pretty strong tool in overcoming fear. We have fears for a reason, there are evolutionary reasons that fear is a good thing. There’s a reason we instinctively recoil from opportunities to drown, and those reasons aren’t hard to understand. But one thing about that three pounds of grey matter (noticeably more for Skepchicks) on top of your spine is that it can help you overcome irrational, unnecessary fear."