Someone remarked that writing is three percent inspiration and 97 percent not getting distracted by stuff on the world wide web. I can relate to that. Every time I try to get something done, I go wandering all over what I call the cyberhypersphere. This is not really a thinly-veiled attempt at explaining away why I have not been writing stuff on this blog.
Take, for instance, the EDGE: World Question Center.
EDGE
To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, to seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.
It is like a group blog where a question is addressed by a whole lot of smart people. Visiting that site is a major time-sink and a source of intellectual delight.
Here is the The Edge Annual Question for 2006
WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?
The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 
Atanu, in the good old days of no computers, nor the big bad www, it was said in different words that “a man who loves reading can never clean the attic”; he will be willynilly distracted by all the ancient books that are there!….
The idea or accepted fact that “All human beings are equal” is dangerous, though in a certain way, it is just and should be true.
It puts to nought implementation of the conclusions of an acute sense of correct discrimination that might be in us, or respect the hierarchy that inevitably exists among different types of people, a hierarchy of different skill-, efficiency- levels.
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Another dangerous idea is “Plastics” being the most useful thing/s ever created by man. Haven’t seen anything else so very completely deadly and dangerous to the whole of Earth.
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The world economy is pegged to the growth in the USA. Most currencies in Asia are pegged to USA. Oil and gold are traded and denominated in USA. The dollar seems to be the official reserve currency of the world.
Fully 35% of all Chinese exports go to the United States and we could say that for most Asian economies. (we shouldnt forget that America is suffering from its largest current-account deficit in history — presently running at 6.4% of US GDP)
The whole world is massively dependent on a country which is quite good in intellectual terms but the worrisome thing is its run by an absolute mupped. (I would suggest people to watch Fahrenheit 9/11).
He could do some nonsense that could affect our lives and that sounds “dangerous”. For eg:- he could hit Iran and call it “war on terror” and as a result oil price might shoot thru the roof and there comes the doom.
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“a man who loves reading can never clean the atticâ€
Thanks Parvati. My storage is full of old newspaper cuttings, tech articles, even ads. You have given me a good defence.
Atanu, I totally empathise with you. Everytime I set out to write something, I end up reading/commenting on a hundred different blogs and my Bookmarks/ToReadLater section just keeps increasing exponentially 🙂
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Here are three dangerous ideas about religion:
(1) Most religions are institutionalized memes whose original purpose, as well as their sole reason for continuing to survive in a post-enlightenment world, is to confer survival advantage on their adherents.
(2) Whether a particular religious doctrine provides a plausible description of existential reality is completely immaterial to its survival prospects.
(3) Many of the religions which most vehemently oppose the ideas of Darwin are also among the best examples of Darwinian evolution in action.
P.S. It is interesting to contrast the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions in terms of the position of contemporary mainstream American Christianity on each of them.
The Darwinian revolution was reluctantly begun by Charles Darwin with his publication of “The Origin of the Species” in 1859. The most revolutionary idea which Darwin set forth, which completely overturned the Judeo-Christian creation myth that God created the world and all its inhabitants from scratch in seven days, was that life on earth evolved gradually over eons from a common origin. The twentieth century unleashed a preponderance of scientific evidence from the macropaleontologic scale down to the molecular biological / genetic scale which could have potentially contradicted Darwin’s common origin theory, yet none succeeded. However, to grasp this fact requires a good deal of science education, including at least a feel for the ideas of the scientific method, probability theory, paleontology, and post-DNA-discovery molecular biology. Anyone bereft of familiarity with these various disciplines, or at least willing to ignore the logical conclusions which much be reached by a thinking person’s assessment of the evidence, will have no reason to favor Darwin’s science-based theory over Old Testament mythology.
By contrast, the Copernican revolution occurred much earlier and thus had a longer period to gain acceptance. Further, given the advances in telescope technology and the highly publicized advent of the space age, there is such a preponderance of evidence in favor of the notion that the earth revolves around the sun that all but the most backward Christian sects were forced by facts to abandon their earlier position.
Recommended reading for further insight to my points:
“The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World.” By Matthew Stewart.
“Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” by Daniel Dennett.
“What Evolution Is” by Ernst Mayr.
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‘For eg:- he could hit Iran and call it “war on terror†and as a result oil price might shoot thru the roof and there comes the doom.’
No worries there — we are already at war in the mid-East, and the oil price is already through the roof 😦
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My dangerous idea? Throw out the politicians in India and replace democracy with a dictatorship…perhaps, someone like Lee Kuan Yew! Perhaps we might finally see some real growth & development, poverty alleviation and population arrest!
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