Cognitive scientist at Harvard.

Boston, MA
Joined January 2010
FWIW I personally doubt SARS-Cov-2 escaped from a lab, & have money (for charity) riding on it: a Long Bet with Martin Rees @lordmartinrees. But the world desperately needs to know the truth. (We won't settle till it's settled.) longbets.org/9/
SARS viruses are known to have escaped previously from laboratories in Singapore, Taiwan and twice in Beijing. wsj.com/articles/the-world-n…
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My favorite MLK essay: Pilgrimage to Nonviolence. King was an intellectual: "After reading Rauschenbusch, I turned to a serious study of the social and ethical theories of the great philosophers....kinginstitute.stanford.edu/k…
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...from Plato and Aristotle down to Rousseau, Hobbes, Bentham, Mill, and Locke. All of these masters stimulated my thinking—such as it was—and, while finding things to question in each of them, I nevertheless learned a great deal from their study."
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King read & rejected Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx. He was inspired by liberal humanistic Christianity, but most of all, of course, by the writings of Gandhi.
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Memorial to big thinker, intellectual royalty, and Edge stalwart Mary Catherine Bateson: Systems Thinker | Edge.org edge.org/conversation/mary-c…
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McWhorter @johnhmcwhorter nails it again.
When the right engages in the same kind of recreational, anti-empirical exaggerations as the woke left ... it's all about a general personality type and the warmth of crowds rather than politics. theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv…
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Indeed. A few guiding principles and a feedback mechanism oriented to truth-seeking spell the difference in digital media (and everything else) between a font of knowledge and a cesspool of malarkey.
Wikipedia is arguably the greatest website ever made. Happy 20th.
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