(3089/898) Socio/science stuff

265) University of California at Berkeley [...] anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay [...] showed that the color terms used by diverse societies all follow a systematic pattern. That is, if a society has only two color terms, these terms will divide the spectrum between black and white; if a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red; if it contains four terms, the it contains a term for green or yellow (but not both) and so on to the most complete languages which contain eleven basic color terms (white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, pink, purple, orange, and gray). [...] But some anthropologists feel that the conclusions drawn by Berlin and Kay are too broad. John Bousfield, for example, suggests that it is one thing to know that the color spectrum is divided into two segments, but quite another to translate the terms into "black" and "white." In his view, such a pair of terms would acquire far more meaning (since they are the only ways to talk about colors) then they do in a multicolor-term culture [...]

Howard Gardner
The Mind's New Science (1985)
citing Berlin, B. and Kay, P. Basic Color Terms:
Their Universality and Evolution (1969) and
Bousfield, J. The World Seen As A Color Chart (1979)

266) Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for.

Amos Tversky
possibly from Tversky, A. and Kahnmen, D.
"Extensional vs. Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction
Fallacy in Probability Judgment" (1983)
quoted by Howard Gardner in
The Mind's New Science (1985)

267) People seem to have little difficulty in accepting the modifiability of "environmental" effects on human development. If a child has had bad teaching in mathematics, it is accepted that the resulting deficiency can be remedied by extra good teaching the following year. But any suggestion that the child's mathematical deficiency might have a genetic origin is likely to be greeted with something approaching despair: if it is in the genes "it is written", it is "determined" and nothing can be done about it; you might as well give up attempting to teach the child mathematics. This is pernicious rubbish on an almost astrological scale. Genetic causes and environmental causes are in principal no different from each other. Some influences of both type may be hard to reverse; others may be easy to reverse. Some may be usually hard to reverse but easy if the right agent is applied. The important point here is that there is no general reason for expecting genetic influences to be any more irrevocable than environmental ones.

Richard Dawkins
The Extended Phenotype (1982)

268) [W]ith the rise of many scientists to prominence in our nation's life, something was triggered in the American response which is perhaps idiosyncratic for this country but in fact is fundamentally healthy - namely, skepticism against this, as against any, form of strong, organized authority. As the astute political scientist Don K. Price has pointed out, Americans tend to have a special response to science, one that has roots in our ingrained political philosophy. From the beginning, the predominant attitude toward any large-scale organized authority in the United States has been essentially negative, and our political institutions are set up with the purpose of impeding the assertion of centralized authority as much as possible. In the first century and a half of the Republic, scientists and engineers were seen as outsiders, even as a force against established authority, as challengers of all dogma and successors of the religious dissenters who founded this country [...] But, Price says, "during the past generation there has been a sharp break with this tradition." As scientists have become far more numerous and their work, directly or indirectly, has begun to change our daily lives, they have come to be identified not with dissent but with authority. Thus, although science itself is still seen as a positive force by a majority of Americans, scientists - who have been slow to understand this reaction - have become increasingly targets of suspicion.

Gerald Holton
Science and Anti-Science (1993)
citing Don K. Price
America's Unwritten Constitution (1983)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 791 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.