I just read an interview with my friend Tim O’Reilly in which he approvingly cited Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. There are some books so bad, but so plausible and influential, that periodically trashing them in public is almost an obligation. The really classic stinkeroos of this kind, like Karl Marx’s Das Kapital,… Continue reading Brother, Can you Paradigm?
Month: July 2003
The Myth of Man the Killer
(An updated version of this essay lives here.) One of the most dangerous errors of our time is the belief that human beings are uniquely violent animals, barely restrained from committing atrocities on each other by the constraints of ethics, religion, and the state. It may seem odd to some to dispute this, given the… Continue reading The Myth of Man the Killer