"What have you changed your mind about? Why?"
Edge stilte dette spørsmålet til en rekke fremtredende anglo-amerikanske tenkere og mottok 165 bidrag. Tankevekkende påskelektyre.
I vår hjemlige andedam har nylig Magnhild Meltveit Kleppa endret syn på homofiles rett til å gifte seg. Det viser karakterstyrke å kunne endre standpunkt i viktige prinsipielle spørsmål - ikke vanlig kost blant politikere. I politikken vil endring av standpunkt ofte tolkes negativt, enten som en svakhet - upålitelig vingling - eller som et uttrykk for kalkulert opportunisme. I vitenskapen er man i utgangspunktet forpliktet til å vurdere og revurdere sin tenkning i lys av fakta. Likevel sitter erkjennelsmessige omveltninger langt inne.
Edge sitt panel har en stor overvekt av vitenskapsfolk. Her er noen smakebiter:
Freeman Dyson (teoretisk fysiker, selverklært klimakjetter) forteller hvorfor han nylig har endret syn på betydningen av bombingen av Hiroshima og Nagasaki:
"I changed my mind about an important historical question: did the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bring World War Two to an end? Until this year I used to say, perhaps. Now, because of new facts, I say no." Les resten.
Helena Cronin (London School of Economics) har endret syn på årsaken til kjønnsforskjeller. Interessant nok er kjernen i argumentet basert på et statistisk resonnement:
"Talents, tastes and temperaments play fundamental roles. But they alone don't fully explain the differences. It is a fourth T that most decisively shapes the distinctive structure of male — female differences. That T is Tails — the tails of these statistical distributions. Females are much of a muchness, clustering round the mean. But, among males, the variance — the difference between the most and the least, the best and the worst — can be vast. So males are almost bound to be over-represented both at the bottom and at the top. I think of this as 'more dumbbells but more Nobels'." Les resten.
"Talents, tastes and temperaments play fundamental roles. But they alone don't fully explain the differences. It is a fourth T that most decisively shapes the distinctive structure of male — female differences. That T is Tails — the tails of these statistical distributions. Females are much of a muchness, clustering round the mean. But, among males, the variance — the difference between the most and the least, the best and the worst — can be vast. So males are almost bound to be over-represented both at the bottom and at the top. I think of this as 'more dumbbells but more Nobels'." Les resten.
Howard Gardner (psykolog fra Harvard) tar et oppjør med sitt forbilde Jean Piaget:
"The giant at the time — the middle 1960s — was Jean Piaget. Though I met and interviewed him a few times, Piaget really functioned for me as a paragon. [...]I wrote my first books about Piaget; saw myself as carrying on the Piagetian tradition in my own studies; and even defended Piaget vigorously in print against those who would critique his approach and claims.[...] Yet, now forty years later, I have come to realize that the bulk of my scholarly career has been a critique of the principal claims that Piaget put forth." Les videre.
Oliver Morton (redaktør i Nature) tror ikke lenger på verdien av bemannede romferder:
"I have, falteringly and with various intermediary about-faces and caveats, changed my mind about human spaceflight. [...] And the crucial idea (crucial to me) that human exploration of Mars might answer great questions about life in the universe no longer seems as plausible or as likely to pay off in my lifetime as once it did. I increasingly think that life in a Martian deep biosphere if there is any, will be related to earth life and teach us relatively little that's new.[...] A world with a spartan $100 billion moonbase but no ability to measure spectra and lightcurves from earthlike planets around distant stars is not the world for me." Les videre.
Stewart Brand (grunnlegger av The Whole Earth Catalog) har insett at gode gamle ting er mye dårligere enn gode nye ting:
"[...] I bought a sequence of wooden sailboats. Their gaff rigs couldn't sail to windward. Their leaky wood hulls and decks were a maintenance nightmare. I learned that the fiberglass hulls we'd all sneered at were superior in every way to wood.[...] The message finally got through. Good old stuff sucks. Sticking with the fine old whatevers is like wearing 100% cotton in the mountains; it's just stupid.[...] Give me 100% not-cotton clothing, genetically modified food (from a farmers' market, preferably), this-year's laptop, cutting-edge dentistry and drugs." Les videre.
