Carl Sagan, as "Mr. X," Extolled Benefits of Marijuana 263
New submitter Colin Castro writes with an exceprt from the San Francisco Chronicle that reveals a different side of Carl Sagan: MarijuanaMajority.com founder Tom Angell spent a few days this summer in the Library of Congress researching the iconic American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist and author and has come away with a bounty. Angell says he found some never-before-released writings on marijuana policy from the author of classics such as 'Contact' and the TV show 'Cosmos', which is the most widely watched series in the history of American public television. ... I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs,' Sagan wrote in 1971, under the name Mr. X.
1996 called (Score:5, Funny)
They want their Carl Sagan news back.
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Slashdot: yesterday's news today!
Re:1996 called (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, I knew that. I heard Lester Grinspoon give a lecture in which he talked about Carl Sagan smoking pot. It might have been in 1996.
http://motherboard.vice.com/bl... [vice.com]
Funny thing is, I went to Colorado this March for a medical conference which actually had a panel on marijuana. Denver is a great place, finally pot is legal, people were offering me grass, and I couldn't smoke any because I had to work.
Useful tip: Leela's European Cafe is a great bar.
Another useful tip: The Colorado newspapers checked and no one has ever been arrested in Denver airport for trying to bring pot home, airport screening notwithstanding.
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Grain of salt: A lot of people have been arrested in various California airports for trying to bring pot home.
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I know the cops on the Kansas turnpike see it as a gold rush. They will stop nice cars just because they want them. Pretty much the same as near the Mexican border.
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Re:1996 called (Score:5, Informative)
What's even worse is that a story like this is still even news.
I was a senior in high school in 1997 when I did my own research and found the evidence that marijuana prohibition has cost our society dearly. I knew it as truth back then; my paper was called "Be Wise, Legalize".
It's taken over 15 years since then for us humble folks from the cowtown that is Denver to change things. If you've been here even for just the last 3-4 years, you've seen the amazing economic benefits of legalizing cannabis.
How did it take this long to realize this, and why is a 40+ year old quip from a smart person regarding cannabis reform still fucking newsworthy? Has nobody been paying attention?
Re:1996 called (Score:5, Interesting)
Lifetime-use numbers did skyrocket through the following decades, reaching near to 50% by 2000. But politically it was/is still a very loaded issue. It's something that's easy to ignore and maintain the status quo, but political suicide to suggest to change, until it becomes such a *big* issue that the number people who know someone who's been fucked by prohibition gets to be bigger than the number of self-righteous assholes who won't listen. Gallup literally did a double-take in 2012 or 2013 when their polls showed, for the first time, that over 50% of the US favored legalization. They had to run the poll a second time. With stats like these rolling in, the political trepidation around this topic will begin to dissolve in short order. I think we've now reached the tipping point, just 40 years later than everyone thought. Presidents and governors now admit that they've smoked pot.
Revolutions happen from the bottom up, not the other way around.
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Re:1996 called (Score:5, Funny)
As someone who first tried cannabis while Cheech and Choong were still making records, that makes me feel very old.
Re:1996 called (Score:5, Funny)
You feel old? Try having a three-digit account number!
(And who is this Toommy Choong guy?)
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Re:1996 called (Score:5, Funny)
Positive role model? (Score:5, Funny)
Sure, if you smoke pot, you might end up like Carl Sagan, but you could also end up like Obama, Bush, or Clinton.
Do you want your teen to grow up and have 27% approval ratings? I thought not.
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Sure, if you smoke pot, you might end up like Carl Sagan, but you could also end up like Obama, Bush, or Clinton.
Do you want your teen to grow up and have 27% approval ratings? I thought not.
Marijuana must be much more potent than I thought. Clinton didn't inhale and look what happened. [youtube.com]
Woah, like billions upon billions of stars...dude! (Score:2, Troll)
>> Carl Sagan Extolled Benefits of Marijuana
After hearing Sagan prattle on about "billions upon billions of stars" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan#Phrase_.27billions_and_billions.27), is anyone really surprised?
unsolicited dolphin penis (Score:5, Funny)
A male dolphin.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
A frustrated romance of Sagan's played a small role in Lilly's most famous dolphin study. One night in St. Thomas, Sagan dined at a remote mountaintop restaurant. The hostess caught his eye. She was an attractive young woman with dark hair and a healthy, tomboyish quality. Her name was Margaret Howe. She told Sagan that she was bored. Her job as a hostess was evenings only. She wanted something else to occupy her on the island.
Sagan tried to get Howe into bed. Howe rebuffed him, but the meeting had one result: Sagan introduced Howe to anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who was then running the St. Thomas facility. This led to a job and plunged Howe into one of the most unusual experiments of the 1960s.
In the summer of 1965, Howe lived in the company of "Peter," a male dolphin, 24 hours a day, six days a week in a simplified flooded house. There are surreal photographs of Howe working efficiently at a desk or chatting on the telephone, eyed curiously by a dolphin as her whole environment is sopping in 24 inches of water.
"A dolphin is more like a shadow than a roommate," Howe said. The thing would stay by her all day and never leave. She could talk on the phone for hours. The dolphin wouldn't get bored. It wouldn't leave. As weeks passed, Howe was subject to depression and crying jags. "I have found that during the day I will find any excuse to get out of the flooded room," she wrote in her diary. (Lilly meanwhile was contemplating a flooded car for the future bi-species society.)
Peter began exhibiting courting behavior. He lightly nibbled Howe's legs, getting erections, and rubbing against her ardently. As a matter of expediency, Howe took to giving the dolphin hand jobs. Peter would "reach some sort of orgasm, mouth open, eyes closed, body shaking, then his penis would relax and withdraw." Dolphin libidos being what they are, this had to be repeated two or three times; then, finally, the dolphin could concentrate on its lessons.
That made for a pretty good conversation stopper. Otherwise the experiment's results were debatable. It seemed that Peter learned to say "hello" and "ball" and parrot consonant sounds. When Howe asked Peter to get the ball, he would often get the cloth.
* * *
After this experiment, Sagan visited St. Thomas and played a game of catch with Peter. Sagan threw the ball to Peter, and Peter dove under it and batted it back with his snout. His aim was as accurate as a human's. Then, after a few volleys, the dolphin began returning the ball far to the side of Sagan. Peter was toying with Carl, performing an "experiment" of his own. Figuring that two can play that game, Sagan retrieved the ball one last time and held it, treading water.
For about a minute, both mammals stood their ground. Peter gave in. He swam into Sagan's side of the tank, circling him, repeatedly brushing past him. This puzzled Sagan. It didn't seem like the dolphin's tail flukes had brushed him. Then he realized the dolphin had a hard-on.
The frustrated triangle of Sagan, Howe, and Peter was worthy of Sartre. There was a further twist. Peter was one of Lilly's ex-actor dolphins. Sagan had been propositioned by Flipper.
Prove him right some more (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact that you call this "prattle" illustrates Sagan's point - because of his altered perception, he was able to grasp the magnitude of what he was working with. Smaller minds more easily dismiss it as foolish and inconsequential because their brains just can't handle the idea of "billions upon billions".
I mean this in the nicest possible way - go smoke some weed and stare up into the stars. It helps put things into perspective.
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Brain chemistry. There's a "sense of the profound" that's a product of brain chemistry. It can happen naturally on those rare occasions when you actually learn something profound. Or, you can smoke pot*, and have the same "sense of the profound" from whatever random crap you happen to be thinking. This is not a new kind of perception, it's a chemical illusion, no more valid than the brain chemistry that makes you hear voices, or makes you unable to stop obsessing on stupid shit.
*It's likely that all or
Re:Prove him right some more (Score:5, Insightful)
And what sort of perception is not "a chemical illusion"? Is the feeling you get when you comprehend Cantor's diagonalization proof an illusion? The feeling you get from listening to the music of Bach? The feeling you get when you look up and see a meteor streak by? Everything you experience supervenes on neurochemistry, and a cannabis experience is no less valid on that basis than any other.
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In order to have any rational approach to living in the universe, you have to assume some fundamental stuff - basically that induction works (sense data may be inaccurate, and occasionally way off, but there's some objective universe and some validity in our sense of it). If you accept that axiom, then science works and there's no mystery at all to this - you're tricking your brain into believing that random crap is profound, full stop.
If instead you reject that axiom, then there's no basis for rationality
Re:Prove him right some more (Score:5, Interesting)
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Little kids think all kinds of "random crap" is profound
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Back before the science was banned, there was quite a bit of research with psychedelic drugs, mostly LSD, on the mentally ill and quite often between the drug and having a good guide, people were cured of their irrationality, or perhaps a better description was that they were helped to be more rational.
Wiki is one place to start, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Prove him right some more (Score:5, Insightful)
And how can our internal experiences (feelings) be meaningless when they're the essence of what we are as conscious beings and are the only things we can be certain of?
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I used to think that it was important for people to experience the drug "sense of profound" to get an understanding of what your brain should feel like in "deep mode." Later, I realized that you can get this "sense of profound" watching e.g., inane TV show while high; thus, in fact, the chemical modification was useless. Better off not wasting your time with the drugs, just get on with trying to learn how to think.
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Is it a false sense of the profound or is it a momentary access to the profound in the ordinary? Some of the great discoveries in science have come from taking a long hard look at something that was thought to be mundane and well understood.
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Probably the one which aligns with objectively measurable facts about the nature of our universe.
Than again there are many perceptions which are at least superficially so aligned, but even in that case the ones that dismiss other perfectly valid perspectives as "prattling on" are likely still wrong.
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Correctness may be hard to show, but we can at least ballpark utility. Sagan had an award winning television series several successful books, many awards for achievements in science and education, and is recognized by practically everyone. The dude that calls it prattle has...
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If you don't want to alter, just go out into the deep country. The effect is much the same. I've done both.
Most people haven't seen the ribbons of change in the Milky Way with their own eyes. It inspires awe regardless.
Misleading summary and title (Score:5, Funny)
I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs
So wait, Carl Sagan is saying our school systems and our culture are so fucked up that we need drugs to understand what the fuck we should actually be thinking?
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But if we change, who will provide cheap prisoners (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody thinks of the economic impact of freeing millions and millions of American citizens from indentured servitude.
How will the prison industrial complex get cheap labor if we legalize MJ, which is used to imprison non-whites and seize all their assets without warrants?
If the South has to give that up, it could be the end of the plantations!
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Posted by timothy (Score:2)
Posted by timothy on Thursday October 09, 2014 @02:20PM
Sorry Timothy, you're a couple of hours too early to get posted. ..or perhaps we are not in the same time zone.
Saganesque Space Dub (Score:4, Interesting)
We're called the Sagan Youth Boys. Check us out on Soundcloud for a taste. https://soundcloud.com/sagan-y... [soundcloud.com]
Our 2nd album is coming out in a few months that'll be a hard sci-fi concept album based on a manned mission to Enceladus.
What 20 years of research on pot has taught us (Score:2, Troll)
What twenty years of research on cannabis use has taught us [addictionjournal.org]
Read the full study [wiley.com] in the journal Addiction
What twenty years of research on cannabis use has taught us
In the past 20 years recreational cannabis use has grown tremendously, becoming almost as common as tobacco use among adolescents and young adults, and so has the research evidence. A major new review in the scientific journal Addiction sets out the latest information on the effects of cannabis use on mental and physical health.
The key conclusion
Re:What 20 years of research on pot has taught us (Score:5, Insightful)
> Adverse effects of acute cannabis use
- Cannabis does not produce fatal overdoses.
Indeed! There is no LD50 for Cannabis that I'm aware of ...
It is hypocritical that some far worse drugs have social acceptance such as caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol, while safer drugs [wikimedia.org] are socially ostracized.
Re:What 20 years of research on pot has taught us (Score:5, Informative)
LD50 of Tetrahydrocannabinol (active ingredient found in Cannabis): 3000 mg/kg in dogs and monkeys.
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wi... [wikipedia.org]
Same page says Oral LD50 of Table Salt: 3000 mg/kg in rats. So, marijuana is roughly on par with potato chips.
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Awesome find! Thanks!
LOL, marijuana is just as "deadly" as potato chips. That will make it easy to remember. :-)
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Those are some salty chips. Pure salt vs. salted chips.
BTW suicide by salt is a (likely mythological) Japanese Samurai method. Sepaku is for pussies. Real men kill themselves by eating lots and lots of salt.
What 20 years of research on pot has taught us (Score:2)
I dunno. Lots of association-or-causation questions there.
I read Nora Volkow's review article in NEJM. Here's a good article in MedPage Today commenting on it. http://www.medpagetoday.com/Ps... [medpagetoday.com]
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the scientific journal Addiction
That's sound like an unbiased source.
Even if we take all of those adverse affects at face value, they're either statistical noise or questionable casual link. It's not like smoking tobacco where the odds of developing lung cancer go up 23 times that of non-smokers. It's also not like alcohol, where tens of thousands of people die from overdose alone each year.
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Why don't you read the study for yourself, or look into the veracity and quality of the journal.
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Did and did.
I do recommend reading it! It is a concerted effort to try to find problems with cannabis use in the mountains of research produced over the last 50 years, with scant results, requiring a fairly low bar for most of them to be admissible.
Lets look a couple of the claims:
"Regular cannabis smokers have a higher risk of developing chronic bronchitis."
What is the evidence they have for this? Well what their cited study (also a study of studies like theirs) actually found was "No consistent associatio
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You missed a few "we don't know whether the link is causal" disclaimers there - namely all the ones related to psychological effects. We do know that regular users are at a higher risk of being diagnosed for a number of psychological issues, but those conditions could also easily be preexisting predispositions which increase the appeal of the drug. Seems to me a drug that includes calming and a general sense of well-being among it's primary effects could have a great appeal to an undiagnosed or prepsychot
This isn't news (Score:2)
Have you ever watched Cosmos... (Score:2)
...on weed?!?!
1999 slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
I always suspected this! (Score:2)
Neil, have you been out with Carl again? (Score:2)
Check out the influence Sagan had on Neil DeGrasse Tyson:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Re:Argument from authority (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it's more valid than the status quo that imprisons millions of people for dumb-as-hell reasons derived from 1960s moral panics and 1920s racism.
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I think if you actually read the article, you'll find Sagan had *gasp* justifications.,
Re:Argument from authority (Score:5, Funny)
But my number was from the national institute of rectal studies.
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Disregarding the fact that i kan reed pulled his number from the "national institute of rectal studies," in principle, it's possible that both numbers could be true. Maybe there are 'about 40,000' people currently imprisoned for marijuana, but there are millions of people who were jailed marijuana at some point in their lives. (Or maybe there have been millions of instances of people being sentenced to jail for marijuana, which is a different statistic again.)
Re:Argument from authority (Score:4, Interesting)
Good point. Another thing that muddies the stats is that many of the people who actually do time for MJ are people who had previously served time for some other offense, and the MJ offense winds them up in jail as a probation/parole/3 strikes violation, which depending on the jurisdiction may or may not get counted as "being imprisoned for marijuana".
For some numbers not pulled rectally, according to an ACLU analysis: "Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana." Remember that arrest means you were charged and it goes on your record. That alone should be enough misery to end this stupidity.
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Two things that you seem to be off on here:
A. I certainly didn't say "only racism". It's more than a little disingenuous of your to imply I did, especially when I specifically cited another major factor. And I won't even pretend it's just those if you ask.
B. Racism absolutely did play a role. Harry Anslinger, who you could consider the godfather of the war on drugs, put his racism about it in no uncertain terms. [liberty-tree.ca]
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Disputed because wikiquote editors thought that "hispanic" wasn't in usage in the 1930s. Hm. Okay. Still sourced.
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Yeah, but I'd contest that that claim is spurious [google.com]
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Re:Argument from authority (Score:5, Interesting)
Allow me, please. :)
The industrialization of America after the turn of the century began to bring sizable numbers of US Southern blacks into the ghettos of our northern cities. They replaced the Italians, the last white group out of the ghetto, who themselves followed Irish and Jews, among many others. This is around 1920, and there's still plenty of racism, everywhere; even in New York City. But from the very beginning of New York City, there was a small contingent of black people. Not descendants of US slaves, but Caribbean immigrants, mostly.
These Caribbean immigrants were themselves descendants of slaves from sugar plantations and such, mostly run by the British, but also some French and Spanish. Slaves in the US were stripped of all their African culture; not a shred of original names or language or customs or anything survived. Not so much with the British, and especially the French and Spanish. They let them keep a lot of their culture; voodoo flourishes to this day in Haiti. Many were not even slaves per se; more like indentured servants or serfs. But even British slaves had it better than US slaves.
One of the things Caribbean blacks held onto, was the recreational use of marijuana. Marijuana has been known to the white man forever, and was not a big deal for about 1900 of the last 2000 years. It was commonly prescribed by doctors in the 1800s certainly, and before. But the white man, pretty much, never smoked marijuana as a common recreational thing. The white man's drug is beer. Well, and scotch. I don't know that they get complete credit for wine, but I think they get most of it. The white man loves his alcohol. He's been working on it for about 2000 years, at least.
Now, you need that liver enzyme to be able to enjoy your alcohol; some of us have it; really, most of us don't. Well, most of us didn't. And those of us white people that didn't, well, there's a good chance we died in the gutter as alcoholics and didn't have babies. Fast forward 2000 years, and most of us alive today can handle our liquor. Still not 100%, as we are all well aware. Asians and American Indians; severely lacking the alcohol friendly liver. If you haven't seen a full blooded Asian chick drink a whole glass of champagne, well; she's falling down drunk for an hour and a half. In the white man's world of super cheap beer and liquor, that lack of ability to casually drink alcohol plagues our Native American population to this day.
The black man in America is generally somewhere in between those two extremes. Beer was not completely unknown in ancient Africa, but was not a common thing in the deep jungles where slaves came from. But, he has been pressed into our white man's society for more or less, the last 400 years, so the law of liver selection has done it's work there, somewhat. Certainly, Caribbean blacks know what rum is for a long time now. And weed. Actually, there is a slightly Christian mysterious religion with roots in Africa, that uses pot as a meditation tool. Surely everyone knows who I am talking about.
So, back to our story of US Southern blacks migrating into our northern ghettos, at first filling out, and mixing with, the existing Caribbean immigrants, who have been filtering in for hundreds of years at that point. It's their turn; Black People; the Italians just did it, the Irish did it, hell, even the English WASPs did it when they carved it out of the woods, when bears and Indians and brigands could kill you at your front door. Pretty ghetto. The ghetto is the gateway to American society. Beginning in the 20s, the ghetto started becoming black, and the racists began to panic. One of the first things they did was to make pot illegal. White people didn't even know what it was, until Reefer Madness and all the hype; completely made up political BS. A tool, to keep the black man in the ghetto, and prevent him from integrating as he would otherwise.
And that racist BS persists to this day, although very few realize just how racist the anti-marijuana laws are
Re:Argument from authority (Score:4, Insightful)
He seems to have gone into it with an open mind, made observations, and drawn conclusions...if you study the process by which cannabis became contraband, "no more valid than anybody else's" starts to look a little silly.
Re:Argument from authority to counter an ad hom. (Score:3)
Knowing that some of the greatest minds of our era are marijuana smokers disproves that misconception.
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Re:Argument from authority to counter an ad hom. (Score:3)
"Stoner" is the marijuana stereotype equivalent of "the town drunkard" (and thus counts as an ad hominem).
We all know that the "drunkard/alcoholic" stereotype does not apply to the vast majority of alcohol consumers. The next step is to get the public to understand that "the stoner" stereot
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What you did was exactly what the subject line of the OP was saying.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V... [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
You must be high.
Carl Sagan has 168 scientific publications, 10 of which have been cited more than 100 times. Many of them are in exceptionally high impact journals (e.g., Nature, Science).
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
Even more important, his Erdos Bacon number is 7
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Even more important, his Erdos Bacon number is 7
Six, actually. More important than that: His Erdos Bacon Sabbath number is 10.
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Can we take Carl off the pedestal yet? I know, it's hard to let go of childhood heroes, but almost all of his "contributions" to science were of a metaphysical nature, which is to say, not really scientific contributions at all. These writings included.
This. He's a feel-good scilebrity.
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True, Carl Sagan was more insightful then scientific, but he inspired people to think about the bigger picture; witness:
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
Hmmmm...I'm a scientist. Your comments trouble me.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, there's a strong anti-intellectual and anti-science force in America. It frequently obscures the fruits of our scientific labor, it weakens our laws and culture, and it endangers people's lives through ignorance.
Sagan, et. al., are useful to society because they bring scientific ideas and theories to the mainstream. They explain it to the layperson. You know, the lay person, who in a democratic society...has the power to vote. If the masses don't understand science, they will vote against it.
So thank you Sagan, thank you for giving science the "marketing" it needs in order to help make the world better.
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>You know who is the best popularizer of science? Good lecturer at the university.
Unlikely.
1) Very few people go to university
2) Even those that do, very few have the technical chops to follow a good science lecturer.
The skill of a good lecturer is to convey useful and interesting information to competent people who are already at least interested enough in the subject to have learned the precursor knowledge and pay to build upon it. That's a very small subset of the human population, and it's a very di
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Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
You seem to be acting on the assumption that the only benefit of popularizing science is to attract future scientists into the field - and in that context I would agree, good K-12 science teachers would be better. But then again, how many of those do we actually have, especially in backwater places where they may be under undue pressure to skip ? And really, we've got plenty of scientists, more than the available funding can support.
What I see as one of the great benefits of popularizing science is that it helps make the general population less ignorant and more willing to listen to (and fund) scientists. Sure, you're not going to convert a lot of Creationists with Sagan's brief summary of evolution, but you'll increase the number of people who understand the science well enough to not be suckered in to that fantasy land. So long as churches and snake-oil salesman of all types are allowed to spread their foolishness we need a cultural counterweight to spread the voice of reason among the populace.
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>Hard work, imagination, creativity.....
Will? Or at least might?
Well there you go then, I think you've just made his argument for him. Our culture and education system embraces hard work, but largely goes out of its way to crush imagination and creativity. Meanwhile smoking weed has a reputation for enhancing both. (stoners notwithstanding - but then you wouldn't judge the value of alcohol by looking only at drunkards)
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8 edgy me
Re:what an idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, your comment shows you narrow-mindedness.
Sure, people who are under the influence of perception-altering drugs seem annoying to listen to or be around. But being "unable to think straight" means they're thinking in very non-standard/non-traditional ways. I think attributes such as one's creativeness, imagination or even intelligence level, aren't subject to change just by taking drugs. But the creative mind, under those conditions, might well come up with some very interesting things that it wasn't likely to come up with while the brain was functioning normally.
Driving is a task that requires a particular set of skills and behaviors; none of which would be enhanced (or even remain unaffected) by getting drunk. That's pretty irrelevant to asking if, say, the artist under the influence of LSD might create more interesting music or artwork than he/she did without it.
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Anyone under the influence of illegal drugs think they're sooo intelligent and creative and imaginative and infinitely smarter. In reality, they can't even think straight.
And yet, the structure of DNA was figured out by a man who was on drugs (LSD) at the time.
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Also, I forgot Mullis, who was using LSD when he figured out PCR. So two of the greatest advances of the 20th century, right there, off the top of my head...
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A little googling and I see nothing to indicate Grinspoon is dead. There are no mentions of death in his Wiki bio or anyplace else that I can find. If you have solid evidence (e.g., obit in a newspaper or something) then update Wikipedia.
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The daily telegraph? you need to cite something better than that.
Re:Paradox. (Score:4, Funny)