Designs on the Future

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Metascience

[Name deleted],

All of us here share a concern for the future. We are not just living from one day to the next. We want to know not just what are going to be our personal options for tomorrow, but also what may be humanity's options for the next millennium.

Forecasting the next millennium is not a scientific project. There is no science of the future, per se.

For the last three centuries science has been the goose that laid the golden egg. Will science continue to be the golden goose for the next millennium?

There are doubting Thomases. I am one of those. I am a skeptic. I am a scientific pessimist.

Need you be burdened by my doubts? No. But any enterprise that has designs on the future of humanity is responsible to examine itself from the widest possible perspective. This wider perspective is, by definition, a metascientific perspective.

I consider myself to be engaged in metascience. Metascientific thinking is crucial to the future of humanity. In my opinion the scientific establishment remains derelict in its duty toward metascience. I am on record with Ron P. for suggesting that it may be my citizen's duty to perform an act of civil disobedience that might, for example, involve a small aircraft and a particular governmental edifice, as a final desperate act to waken the government endowed scientific establishment to its responsibility. Partial documentation to that effect remains on my website.

In the meantime I ply the shallow waters of the Internet, casting an occasional tidbit of metascience.

And you find this annoying?

Dan
 

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rev. 5/4/00