Download Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives AudioBook Free
In this provocative and headline-making reserve, Michael Specter confronts the common fear of research and its horrible toll on individuals and the earth.
In Denialism, New Yorker personnel copy writer Michael Specter uncovers that Americans have come to mistrust companies and especially the establishment of research more today than ever before. For centuries, the general view have been that research is neither good nor bad—that this merely supplies information which new information is usually beneficial. Now, research is viewed as a political constituency that isn’t always in our best interest. We are in a world where the market leaders of African countries would prefer to let their people starve to loss of life rather than import genetically improved grains. Youth vaccines are actually the most effective public health solution in history, yet people march on Washington to protest their use. In america a growing group of studies also show that dietary supplements and “natural” treatments have almost no value, and often cause injury. We still spend billions of dollars about them. In a huge selection of the best colleges in the world, laboratories are private, unmarked, and ornamented by platoons of security guards—such is the opposition to any research that includes experiments with family pets. And pharmaceutical companies that just forty years ago were perhaps the most visible symbol of our exceptional move forward against disease have more and more been viewed as callous organizations propelled solely by avarice and greed.
As Michael Specter recognizes it, this sums to a warfare against improvement. The issues may be sophisticated but the alternatives aren't: Are we going to continue to embrace new technology, along with acknowledging their limitations and risks, or are we prepared to slink back into a time of mysterious thinking? In Denialism, Specter makes an argument for a fresh Enlightenment, the revival of a procedure for the physical world that was stunningly effective for hundreds of years: What can be grasped and reliably repeated by experiment is what dynamics regarded as true. Now, during mankind’s greatest scientific improvements—and our greatest need for them—that deal must be restored.
