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The Characteristic Human Trait Is Not Awareness But Conformity, And The Characteristic Result Is Religious Warfare. Other Animals Fight For Territory Or Food; But, Uniquely In The Animal Kingdom, Human Beings Fight For Their 'beliefs.' The Reason Is That Beliefs Guide Behavior, Which Has Evolutionary Importance Among Human Beings. But At A Time When Our Behavior May Well Lead Us To Extinction, I See No Reason To Assume We Have Any Awareness At All. We Are Stubborn, Self-destructive Conformists. Any Other View Of Our Species Is Just A Self-congratulatory Delusion.

-Michael Crichton

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The Characteristic Human Trait

Michael Crichton

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The Characteristic Human Trait Is Not Awareness But Conformity, And The Characteristic Result Is Religious Warfare. Other Animals Fight For Territory Or Food; But, Uniquely In The Animal Kingdom, Human Beings Fight For Their 'beliefs.' The Reason Is That Beliefs Guide Behavior, Which Has Evolutionary Importance Among Human Beings. But At A Time When Our Behavior May Well Lead Us To Extinction, I See No Reason To Assume We Have Any Awareness At All. We Are Stubborn, Self-destructive Conformists. Any Other View Of Our Species Is Just A Self-congratulatory Delusion.

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Let's Be Clear: All Professions Look Bad In The Movies. And There's A Good Reason For This. Movies Don't Portray Career Paths, They Conscript Interesting Lifestyles To Serve A Plot. So Lawyers Are All Unscrupulous And Doctors Are All Uncaring. Psychiatrists Are All Crazy, And Politicians Are All Corrupt. All Cops Are Psychopaths, And All Businessmen Are Crooks. Even Moviemakers Come Off Badly: Directors Are Megalomaniacs, Actors Are Spoiled Brats. Since All Occupations Are Portrayed Negatively, Why Expect Scientists To Be Treated Differently?

This Novel Is Fiction, Except For The Parts That Aren't.

In The Information Society, Nobody Thinks. We Expect To Banish Paper, But We Actually Banish Thought.

The Minute We Look, We Cease Being Afraid.

Discovery, They Believe, Is Inevitable. So They Just Try To Do It First. That's The Game In Science.

The Fact That The Patients Were Complex Human Beings With A Rich Life Beyond The Hospital Never Really Sank Into The Consciousness Of The Residents. Because They Had No Rich Lives Beyond The Hospital, They Assumed No One Else Did, Either. In The End, What They Lacked Was Not Medical Knowledge But Ordinary Life Experience.

Medical Knowledge

Although Personally, I Think Cyberspace Means The End Of Our Species.

That Is The Danger We Now Face. And This Is Why The Intermixing Of Science And Politics Is A Bad Combination, With A Bad History. We Must Remember The History, And Be Certain That What We Present To The World As Knowledge Is Disinterested And Honest.

You Can Answer Your Own Question. You Already Know The Answer, If You Can Just Gain Access To It.

One May Even Suspect That There Is More To Reality Than Measurements Will Ever Reveal.

God Created Dinosaurs. God Destroyed Dinosaurs. God Created Man. Man Destroyed God. Man Created Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs Eat Man...woman Inherits The Earth.

Kids Didn't Have Huge Backpacks When I Was Their Age. We Didn't Have Backpacks At All. Now It Seemed All The Kids Had Them. You Saw Little Second-graders Bent Over Like Sherpas, Dragging Themselves Through The School Doors Under The Weight Of Their Packs. Some Of The Kids Had Their Packs On Rollers, Hauling Them Like Luggage At The Airport. I Didn't Understand Any Of This. The World Was Becoming Digital; Everything Was Smaller And Lighter. But Kids At School Lugged More Weight Than Ever.

The Experience Of Climbing Kilimanjaro Affected Me So Powerfully That, For A Long Time Afterward, If I Caught Myself Saying, "i'm Not A Person Who Likes To Do That Activity, Eat That Food, Listen To That Music," I Would Automatically Go Out And Do What I Imagined I Didn't Like. Generally I Found I Was Wrong About Myself - I Liked What I Thought I Wouldn't Like. And Even If I Didn't Like The Particular Experience, I Learned I Liked Having New Experiences.

New Experiences

Whenever You Hear The Consensus Of Scientists Agrees On Something Or Other, Reach For Your Wallet, Because You're Being Had.

You Know What's Wrong With Scientific Power? It's A Form Of Inherited Wealth. And You Know What Assholes Congenitally Rich People Are.

In My View, Our Approach To Global Warming Exemplifies Everything That Is Wrong With Our Approach To The Environment. We Are Basing Our Decisions On Speculation, Not Evidence. Proponents Are Pressing Their Views With More Pr Than Scientific Data. Indeed, We Have Allowed The Whole Issue To Be Politicized-red Vs Blue, Republican Vs Democrat. This Is In My View Absurd. Data Aren't Political. Data Are Data. Politics Leads You In The Direction Of A Belief. Data, If You Follow Them, Lead You To Truth.

Increasingly, People Perceive No Difference Between The Narcissistic Self-serving Reporters Asking Questions, And The Narcissistic Self-serving Politicians Who Evade Them.

Asking Questions

I Operate Under The Assumption That The Mass Media Will Never Be Accurate. ... It Operates With The Objective To Simplify And Exaggerate, Which Is Exactly What Walt Disney Told His Cartoonists.

But Complex Animals Had Obtained Their Adaptive Flexibility At Some Cost--they Had Traded One Dependency For Another. It Was No Longer Necessary To Change Their Bodies To Adapt, Because Now Their Adaptation Was Behavior, Socially Determined. That Behavior Required Learning. In A Sense, Among Higher Animals Adaptive Fitness Was No Longer Transmitted To The Next Generation By Dna At All. It Was Now Carried By Teaching.

To Apply General Tools To Specific Problems Is To Fail.

Men Under Stress Are Fools, And Fool Themselves.

We Think We Know What We Are Doing. We Have Always Thought So. We Never Seem To Acknowledge That We Have Been Wrong In The Past, And So Might Be Wrong In The Future. Instead, Each Generation Writes Off Earlier Errors As The Result Of Bad Thinking By Less Able Minds - And Then Confidently Embarks On Fresh Errors Of Its Own.

The Work Of Science Has Nothing Whatever To Do With Consensus. Consensus Is The Business Of Politics. Science, On The Contrary, Requires Only One Investigator Who Happens To Be Right, Which Means That He Or She Has Results That Are Verifiable By Reference To The Real World. In Science Consensus Is Irrelevant. What Is Relevant Is Reproducible Results. The Greatest Scientists In History Are Great Precisely Because They Broke With The Consensus.

The Rules Of Grammar Exist In Large Part To Permit Readers And Writers To Operate From A Shared Set Of Expectations.

The Greatest Challenge Facing Mankind Is The Challenge Of Distinguishing Reality From Fantasy, Truth From Propaganda.

It Takes Enormous Effort To Avoid All Theories And Just See.

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