Dwight (!)

… hmm… it’s probably time I read that again…

…a possible corrective.

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http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/return_of_the_public_a_response
Dan Hind’s The Return of the Public …

Hind sets out proposals for beginning to retrieve control of the mechanisms by which we, as a society generate the information necessary as a basis for truly democratic, informed deliberation and decision making.

…review of the book here, and you can read Dan Hind’s recent NLP article on media reform here.
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Ernst Mayr: ” he [Mayr] basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation.”"

in: Noam Chomsky: Human intelligence and the environment
http://www.isreview.org/issues/76/feat-chomsky.shtml

excerpt: ” I’ll begin with an interesting debate that took place some years ago between Carl Sagan, the well-known astrophysicist, and Ernst Mayr, the grand old man of American biology. They were debating the possibility of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. ”

excerpt: “And what he [Mayr] basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation.”

excerpt: “his [Mayr's] argument was, you’re just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won’t find it here for very long either because it’s just a lethal mutation. “”

excerpt: “With the environmental crisis, we’re now in a situation where we can decide whether Mayr was right or not. If nothing significant is done about it, and pretty quickly, then he will have been correct: human intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. Maybe some humans will survive, but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent existence, and we’ll take a lot of the rest of the living world along with us.

So is anything going to be done about it? The prospects are not very auspicious.”