andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1281 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Peter Woit reports on the sympathy that well-known physicist Freeman Dyson has with crackpot theorists. The interesting part is that Dyson has positive feelings for these cranks, even while believing that their theories are completely wrong : In my [Dyson's] career as a scientist, I twice had the good fortune to be a personal friend of a famous dissident. One dissident, Sir Arthur Eddington, was an insider like Thomson and Tait. The other, Immanuel Velikovsky, was an outsider like Carter. Both of them were tragic figures, intellectually brilliant and morally courageous, with the same fatal flaw as Carter. Both of them were possessed by fantasies that people with ordinary common sense could recognize as nonsense. I made it clear to both that I did not believe their fantasies, but I admired them as human beings and as imaginative artists. I admired them most of all for their stubborn refusal to remain silent. With the whole world against them, they remained true to their beliefs.
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Peter Woit reports on the sympathy that well-known physicist Freeman Dyson has with crackpot theorists. [sent-1, score-0.306]
2 The interesting part is that Dyson has positive feelings for these cranks, even while believing that their theories are completely wrong : In my [Dyson's] career as a scientist, I twice had the good fortune to be a personal friend of a famous dissident. [sent-2, score-0.212]
3 Both of them were possessed by fantasies that people with ordinary common sense could recognize as nonsense. [sent-6, score-0.198]
4 I made it clear to both that I did not believe their fantasies, but I admired them as human beings and as imaginative artists. [sent-7, score-0.201]
5 I admired them most of all for their stubborn refusal to remain silent. [sent-8, score-0.201]
6 I agree with Peter Woit that “this sympathy for a great physicist who headed down a wrong path in his later years is easy to understand, but the case of Velikovsky is less so. [sent-12, score-0.186]
7 Velikovsky was a well-known author of crackpot best-sellers starting in the 1950s . [sent-13, score-0.168]
8 ” Woit quotes what Dyson “wrote as a proposed blurb for Velikovsky in 1977″: First, as a scientist, I [Dyson] disagree profoundly with many of the statements in your books. [sent-17, score-0.15]
9 Second, as your friend, I disagree even more profoundly with those scientists who have tried to silence your voice. [sent-18, score-0.232]
10 You are a prophet in the tradition of William Blake, a man reviled and ridiculed by his contemporaries but now recognized as one of the greatest of English poets. [sent-20, score-0.154]
11 Your poetic visions are as large as his and as deeply rooted in human experience. [sent-26, score-0.226]
12 The mythologies of Carter and Velikovsky fail to be science, but they are works of art and high imagining. [sent-31, score-0.117]
13 I don’t think such voices should be silenced (as Dyson puts it), but it’s probably a good thing to keep these theories off the nonfiction shelves. [sent-35, score-0.205]
14 I see the appeal of poetry and literature and philosophy and all sorts of things that aren’t science, and I recognize that poets, philosophers, etc. [sent-36, score-0.113]
15 His visions are part of who he was, and I wouldn’t trade Valis for anything, but without the art the visions aren’t so exciting. [sent-40, score-0.473]
16 My impression is that the problem with crackpot scientific theories is not that they are not beautiful but that they lead to no scientific progress or understanding. [sent-41, score-0.447]
17 It is only if his theories point toward scientific understanding that they have value. [sent-43, score-0.194]
18 In contrast, Blake was an artists whose visions are appealing without any necessity for them to correspond to scientific reality. [sent-44, score-0.263]
19 To me, a good analogy would be with the fascinating “ outsider art ” done by schizophrenics, where an entire canvas is covered with tiny scribbles relating to the nature of the universe. [sent-45, score-0.289]
20 Whatever people think of William Blake’s scientific ideas now, he is admired as a poet and artist. [sent-51, score-0.334]
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Introduction: Peter Woit reports on the sympathy that well-known physicist Freeman Dyson has with crackpot theorists. The interesting part is that Dyson has positive feelings for these cranks, even while believing that their theories are completely wrong : In my [Dyson's] career as a scientist, I twice had the good fortune to be a personal friend of a famous dissident. One dissident, Sir Arthur Eddington, was an insider like Thomson and Tait. The other, Immanuel Velikovsky, was an outsider like Carter. Both of them were tragic figures, intellectually brilliant and morally courageous, with the same fatal flaw as Carter. Both of them were possessed by fantasies that people with ordinary common sense could recognize as nonsense. I made it clear to both that I did not believe their fantasies, but I admired them as human beings and as imaginative artists. I admired them most of all for their stubborn refusal to remain silent. With the whole world against them, they remained true to their beliefs.
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Introduction: I put it on the sister blog so you loyal readers here wouldn’t be distracted by it.
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