2173) Unpredictability in every field is the result of the conquest of the whole world by scientific power. This invasion by active knowledge tends to transform man's environment and man himself - to what extent, and with what risks, what deviations from the basic conditions of existence and of the preservation of life we simply do not know. Life has become, in short, the object of an experiment of which we can say only one thing - that it tends to estrange us more and more from what we were, or what we think we are, and that it is leading us [...] we do not know and can by no means imagine where.

Paul Valery
"Unpredictability" (1944) in
History and Politics (1962)
quoted by Edward Tenner in
Why Things Bite Back (1996)

2174) [Edward] Tenner shows convincingly that unintended and undesired consequences are the norm whenever new technologies are introduced: the revolution that now permits information to be stored and transported electronically has produced a proliferation of paper. Flood-control work by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has actually increased the damage caused by floods. Helmets and other protective gear help to make football more dangerous than rugby. Roads designed to relieve congestion are themselves clogged with traffic. Clear, straight roads often have the highest fatality rates.

The more we introduce conspicuous safety measures, Tenner argues, the greater becomes the likelihood of a Titantic-style disaster in which "belief in the safety of the ship [becomes] the greatest single hazard to the survival of the passengers.

John Adams
"Mistakes Were Made"
Scientific American (10/1996)
[review of Why Things Bite Back
by Edward Tenner and The Logic of
Failure by Dietrich Dorner]

2175) The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

Herbert Spencer
"State-Tamperings with Money and Banks"
Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (1891) [WQ]
quoted by John Adams in
"Mistakes Were Made" in
Scientific American (10/1996)
[review of Why Things Bite Back
by Edward Tenner and The Logic of
Failure by Dietrich Dorner]

2176) On Thu, 14 Nov 1996 02:43:00 -0800 Lenoel, James wrote:

The intellectual snobbery I have read over the last few months is far more odious than a syntactically imperfect but emotionally genuine posting.

Embedded in James's view is the presupposition that it is reasonable for anyone who writes with lucidity and rhetorical efficacy either in responding to an ill-conceived or misguided post to be automatically labeled and consigned to the abhorrent "intellectual" category, whilst simultaneously being charged with "snobbery". At the same time the "emotionally genuine" is thought to be preferable, no matter how fatuous, ill-thought-out or poorly constructed. This is in effect both a 'reductio ad absurdum' of the old Intellect v. Emotion (false) dichotomy, and, further, may be seen as part of what happens when egalitarian democratising values (A Good Thing) are over-literally transposed (A Bad Thing) to a sociolinguistic context.

Alan R. Lockett
posted on [AMB] (11/15/1996)

2177) The America to which the textbooks [of the early twentieth century] welcomed the children of Whitney Creek [Montana] was secular, progressive, rational, scientific and can-do practical - a world full of the glory of man and his achievements.

Jonathan Raban
Bad Land (1996)
quoted by Verlyn Klinkenborg in
"Railroaded" in
New York Times Book Review (11/10/1996)

2178) Reunite Gondwanaland!

bumper sticker
the favorite of Michael Novacek, from
Dinosaur of the Flaming Cliffs (1996)
quoted by James Shreeve in
"Bonespotting" in the
New York Times Book Review (11/10/1996)