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Share Your Most Dangerous Idea
GabrielF writes "Every year The Edge asks over 100 top scientists and thinkers a question, and the responses are fascinating and widely quoted. This year, psychologist Steven Pinker suggested they ask "What is your most dangerous idea?" The 117 respondents include Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Daniel Dennett, Jared Diamond -- and that's just the D's! As you might expect, the submissions are brilliant and very controversial."
This has to be the biggest "article" submitted to Slashdot ever.
Here's my idea: If you have a Bose-Einstein condensate of heavy atoms, why happens when they radioactively decay? Does every atom decay simultaniously? Wouldn't that be kinda like a bomb?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Buss, and his not-excellently-supported-by-empirical-evidence rhetoric are discussed on Mixing Memory, along with the answers of the major cognitive sciencists. Worth a read if you are interested in the study of the mind, and how many of these answers relate to that.
You know very well that's not what parent is saying. He's merely pointing out a fact of history: that more people were killed in the 20th Century by atheist regimes than by any religion. Possibly more than all deaths for religious reasons in all of history, but that would be difficult to calculate for lack of data. At least 60M died under the Maoist and Stalinist regimes alone. (40M and 20M respectively, although that last in particular is a low estimate. See this. Stalin's victims may number as high as 50M.)
And the brethren went away edified.