{"id":10822,"date":"2011-03-23T06:09:22","date_gmt":"2011-03-23T06:09:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/03\/23\/scientistic-nonsense-in-the-nyt-sunday-book-review\/"},"modified":"2011-03-23T06:09:22","modified_gmt":"2011-03-23T06:09:22","slug":"scientistic-nonsense-in-the-nyt-sunday-book-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/03\/23\/scientistic-nonsense-in-the-nyt-sunday-book-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientistic Nonsense in the NYT Sunday Book Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The review<\/a> begins:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The universe, the 18th-century mathematician and philosopher Jean Le Rond d\u2019Alembert said, \u201cwould only be one fact and one great truth for whoever knew how to embrace it from a single point of view.\u201d James Gleick has such a perspective, and signals it in the first word of the title of his new book, \u201cThe Information,\u201d using the definite article we usually reserve for totalities like the universe, the ether \u2014 and the Internet. Information, he argues, is more than just the contents of our overflowing libraries and Web servers. It is \u201cthe blood and the fuel, the vital principle\u201d of the world. Human consciousness, society, life on earth, the cosmos \u2014 it\u2019s bits all the way down.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At his point I stopped reading.  A bit is a binary digit.  So my love for my wife is binary digits all the way down?  That's nonsense, and beneath refutation.  An appropriate response would be, "Get out of here, and take your scientistic Unsinn<\/em> with you."  A more charitable response: "Please come into my office and lie down on the couch.  We need to talk."  Some need therapy, not refutation.<\/span><\/p>\n

See the Scientism category <\/a>for rather more patient unmaskings of this sort of rubbish.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The review begins: The universe, the 18th-century mathematician and philosopher Jean Le Rond d\u2019Alembert said, \u201cwould only be one fact and one great truth for whoever knew how to embrace it from a single point of view.\u201d James Gleick has such a perspective, and signals it in the first word of the title of his … Continue reading “Scientistic Nonsense in the NYT Sunday Book Review”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scientism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10822\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}