Marty Kaplan: Watch Mr. Wizard - Media on The Huffington Post: "...It's a pity that scientists today, including those who owe their career starts to him, are so often snobbish about show biz. That mandarin condescension toward the masses is why Carl Sagan, one of Don Herbert's television successors, was dismissed as a vulgar popularizer by many of his peers. Entertainment, as Herbert knew, is the art of capturing attention. Scientists depend on public funding, and therefore on the theater of persuasion. Scientists, like it or not, have become hostages to culture warriors, and their ranking in the public's hierarchy of epistemologies, like it or not, depends on the sympathies of citizen audiences. Evidence and proof, conjecture and refutation, theory and argument: these may be defined by scientists with reference to a community of their peers, but if they have any hope of staving off a new Dark Age, it's their non-peers to whom they must also communicate -- the Idol- and Oprah-watchers, the climate-change know-nothings, the 'I didn't descend from a primate' pols and their constituents..."
To get a taste of this mind-set and its consequent calcification, visit Skeptic.com or better yet, join up. See how long you can tolerate the sneering, condescending tone emanating from the sanctimonious intellectual highlands. Then wonder why we don't have a colony on Mars, flying cars, warp drive and then know why we won't have them. If these same scientific nay-sayers had infected Silicon Valley years ago, there would be no Internets tubes and everyone would be blogging on bulletin boards at the bus station with Underwood typewriters.
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