Talk:Higher Superstition

message: The tone of this work is fairly well written although it lacks in a few areas. First is the authors overuse of arcane English words. This is perhaps because of the enormous intellectual verbiage in the literature they are attacking and perhaps a desire to impress us that they are not unintelligent. It makes the work less readable and no more forceful. Second, is the odd use of end-notes by page number rather than chapter which detracts from it. Third is the general failure to account for the status quo pro-science positions with much evidence. Largely we are to take their sweeping statements along the lines of "Most scientists agree that..." or "No biologists we know of..." and so on. Lastly, and this is a small point, they make small attacks on things like rap music and graffiti art. Postmodern's ability to embrace everyone and everything, especially pop culture, is one of the things that makes it a potent force. To champion modernism, classical art, literature and music are not necessary to show that postmodernism is making a huge gaffe in discounting scientific "knowing".
What's that? This isn't a book review...
yes, this passage dosn't seem relevant, nor impartial.
This article is extremely biased in its praise for the book, and its lack of space for responses from those criticised, and it's lack of space for critics of the book itself. See my edit of the science wars example for a brief example, and the chapter by Stolzenberg in the book after the science science wars for a full exposition.
:I removed all of the anon's additions for the mostpart. They were not useful, highly POV, and contained long sections on things which were not even in the book. Hopefully somebody can cobble together a more neutral article on the book, one which presents the arguments made by the authors, the criticisms of the book by others, the effect the book had when published (if any), etc. --Fastfission 17:12, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: (Old article)

message: Just out of sheer curiosity... What does the book talk about? --euyyn 00:20, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  eehhhh 

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message: I've recently started reading this book for research and I've noticed that the summary of the book does not include many of the more controversial statements in the book, including the denial of the human impact of climate change (starting in "Section Six: The Gates of Eden" from my epub copy):
:"The current concern with the possibility of an enhanced and deleterious "greenhouse effect" is not just superstitious alarmism. It is only the public language and political style emerging with the concern that are dangerous."
:"It is distinctly possible that human activities, intensified as population grows and fuel-hungry technology becomes ubiquitous, could change the set point. Natural geological and astronomical phenomena, operative now as in the past, have, certainly, done that--during successive ice ages, for example, and perhaps as a consequence of the cyclic repositioning of Earth relative to our star and the sun's to the center of the galaxy. Of course they will continue to do so in the future. There will be global warming and cooling, whether we are here or not. Volcanoes alone will see to it.18 The question--and we emphasize that it remains a question--of the effect upon this set point of increasing emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other "greenhouse" gases, byproducts of technology and agriculture, is of the highest importance. It deserves the most comprehensive and scrupulous investigation.
:So does, however, the question of the climatic consequences, a quite different and even more difficult question, about which there remain deep disagreements among atmospheric scientists. The depth and seriousness of these disagreements is visible to every reader of such general professional journals as Nature and Science. The proposals of some (but certainly not all) atmospheric physicists that action to reduce greenhouse emissions should not be deferred pending the outcome of this investigation have to be weighed seriously. There is only one Earth, and nobody in his right mind wants to use it as a crash-test dummy. But recommendations have to be weighed. Such proposals do not justify panic; nor do they call for anything like an immediate restructuring of society, along lines sketched by somebody's derivative, post-Marxist, poststructuralist utopianism."
I included this in the summary for its importance. More research is needed right now but I hope to expand also on the reception section as well, since the book received many criticisms between its first and second releases that I think should be mentioned somewhere but I haven't tracked any of the sources that Gross and Levitt are responding to yet. For those interested, their responses are found in the section "Supplementary Notes to the 1998 Edition" of the second edition.
--67.149.10.152 (talk) 11:28, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I wrote the summary mainly to include the topics discussed in the book, not what was said in detail about each topic...AnonMoos (talk) 16:38, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Anyway, for good or bad, climate schange skepticism in 1994 was a different beast from climate change skepticism in 2021 (notice that 1994 was 27 years ago?). AnonMoos (talk) 16:58, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Summary is Incomplete