Comment on Belmont's "Progressive Thinking"
In a Belmont Club post entitled "Progressive Thinking" laments the behavior of the "ideological heirs" of the "Inquisitions", the politically correct and their "rejection of the scientific method" , their assault on the "intellectual core" of the West.
Whole categories of discourse are now being outlawed in the West. At least two celebrities are fighting this trend, probably because they lead active lives of the mind. One of them is Mr. Bean. ... The other is Michael Crichton. At a speech entitled "Fear, Complexity, Environmental Management in the 21st Century" that he gave before Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy, Crichton described one the major unrecognized dangers stalking the world: bad information. Crichton meticulously showed how grossly hysterical coverage of Chernobyl reactor incident, for example, caused deaths far more numerous than the incident itself. He went on to trace the history of public policy fads, Global Cooling, the predicted Y2K meltdown, the Population Bomb, Electromagnetic Fields and so on, and shows how we have nearly forgotten them in our rush to replace them with new ones. We live once again, in Carl Sagan's phrase, in a demon-haunted world.
My comment was as follows:
Crichton has a point, though not necessarily a new one. Several social scientists have noted the tendency of ideas to spread through populations in a manner not unlike the ways innovations diffuse (bell-curve, S-curve) or the contagious diseases do. One interesting group of studies by Eric Abrahamson of Columbia Business School has found the population of managers, or managerial discourse to be precise, is very susceptible to fads and fashions promulgated by management theorists and consultants. One of his more interesting findings is that at the peak of every fad is the genesis of the next, one that is usually posed as the anti-dote or correction to the excesses of one then so in vogue.Abrahamson made no qualitative judgment as to the worth of the theories that became fads or that spread like them. As I understand it there is no reason to think apriori that "bad" ideas are more (or less) prone to rapidly and widely diffuse than "good" ones. That having been said, I could easily envision an argument that posits bad ideas spreading faster, doing more harm, outnumbering and drowning out their betters.
Anyone wanting a copy ofAbrahmason's papers can drop me a line at starlingdavidhunter at gmail dot com. I'll grab them from a academic paper database and send to you via email.
Comments
Like your site, and your comments. Those you've posted on Wretchard's Belmont Club are usually among the best-structured and most appealing.
I've read several of Michael Crichton's essays ("addresses" as they're characterized in some places) and found them to be gratifyingly unapologetic to the hysterical left. There is some hope provided by history that in the fullness of time, the idiots will be shown to have been wrong. But while they prevail, they do much mischief. Thanks for carrying on the struggle.
Posted by: David March | June 10, 2006 12:02 AM