NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a recent interview that his “foremost” mission as the head of America’s space exploration agency is to improve relations with the Muslim world.
WTF?
Though international diplomacy would seem well outside NASA’s orbit, Bolden said in an interview with Al Jazeera that strengthening those ties was among the top tasks President Obama assigned him. He said better interaction with the Muslim world would ultimately advance space travel.
Of course! Better relations with Muslims will give us access to their world-class technical capabilities in the areas of… um… er… Wait, what? Exactly what technologies or capabilities do they have that would help advance space travel?
“When I became the NASA administrator — or before I became the NASA administrator — he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering,” Bolden said in the interview.
Ugh.
Rather than putting effort into wordsmithing my own opinion on this, I’ll just echo Charles Krauthammer, who already said it quite well:
“This is a new of fatuousness. NASA was established to get America into space and to keep us there. This idea of ‘feel good about your past’ scientific achievements is the worst kind of group therapy, psycho-babble, imperial condescension and adolescent diplomacy. If I didn’t know that Obama had told him this, I’d demand the firing of Charles Bolden.”
It occurs to me that I am reaching the wrong audience here on The Thinker. I rarely get any folks stopping by who aren’t already interested in critical thinking and skepticism to begin with. But the disinterested and uninformed ones are the exact people whom I am most trying to reach. To make a stoopid analogy: I am trying to evangelize to the unsaved, but for the most part, I am really just preaching to the converted.
So, to extend that analogy (and with tongue planted firmly in cheek), it occurs to me that perhaps I should steal a page or two from the fundie evangelists’ playbook.
One thing I could do is to start an organization like Gideons International, with the goal of putting copies of Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark in hotel rooms around the world. (Come to think of it, that might not be such a silly idea.)
And, I guess I’ll have to do some protests and demonstrations, too.
I’ll also put together a critical thinking tract, to hand out at public gatherings, airports, malls, and such:
Dear Friend,
I am asking you the most important question of your life.
The question is: Are You Saved?
The question is not are you comfortable in your beliefs, but are you saved? The question is not are you cozily wallowing in the warm glow of opinion-reinforcing groupthink, but are you saved? The question is not are you believing what you want to believe, or what’s fun and exciting to believe, or what others tell you to believe — but are you saved?
Are you saved from stupidity?
Stupidity is the real evil Satan of modern times. We know from the Book of Daniel (Webster, that is) that stupid is defined as “marked by or resulting from unreasoned thinking or acting.” Another source, the Encyclopedia of Stupidity, says that “stupidity is… the persistence in error, often against better judgment.” And Princeton’s online dictionary defines stupidity as “a poor ability to understand or to profit from experience.”
In short, we could say that stupidity is the opposite, or absence, of critical thinking.
So how can you be saved from stupidity?
To be saved, you must first admit that you are an imperfect human, prone to stupidity and subject to a multitude of cognitive biases and logical fallacies. Friend, nobody is perfect, and when we pretend otherwise we commit the sin of intellectual arrogance — thinking that we are smarter and more right about things than we in fact are. Intellectual arrogance blinds us to our own cognitive shortcomings, keeps us trapped in the cycle of stupidity, and makes us opinionated asshats. You cannot be saved from stupidity until you cast away those shackles of intellectual arrogance by admitting your own fallibility.
Second, you need to realize that there is another way. To be saved from stupidity is to be saved by critical thinking. And to become a critical thinker, you must commit yourself to The Truth before all else — and to moving your opinions always and ever closer to The Truth, even if that Truth is not what you wish it to be. For it is written, “it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring” (Sagan). No matter how satisfying and reassuring it may be, you should not believe something just because it makes you feel better. “Heroin also makes people feel better, but I wouldn’t recommend using heroin” (Randi).
To be committed to seeking The Truth in all your opinions, you must adopt those characteristics, habits, and attitudes that befit a critical thinker. Foremost among these characteristics is intellectual humility — an awareness of and willingness to admit to the prejudices of one’s viewpoint and to the limitations of one’s own knowledge and abilities. There are many other characteristics, but true intellectual humility will lead you to those: intellectual courage (a willingness to challenge one’s own beliefs), intellectual empathy (ability and willingness to examine issues from others’ viewpoints in an open-minded manner), intellectual integrity (ability to consistently apply good standards of thinking), intellectual perseverance (willingness to overcome obstacles and adhere to rational principles despite irrational objections from others), and fair-mindedness (treating all viewpoints equally without regard for one’s own feelings or vested interests).
To faithfully adhere to these characteristics requires one more ability: introspection, the ability to routinely examine one’s own thought processes and seeking to overcome biases and errors introduced by human limitations. For it is only by introspection that you can catch yourself backsliding into the old wicked ways of stupidity.
And it is only through governing our rational and logical thought processes by means of these critical thinking characteristics that we can be assured we are moving our opinions closer to The Truth.
Dear friend, if you are willing to stop trying to “be right” your way and instead denounce stupidity and intellectual arrogance in all its forms, you can start down the path to being saved right now! It’s now up to you! Just admit to yourself that you are an imperfect human, guilty of many cognitive biases and logical fallacies, but that you believe critical thinking offers a way out. It takes practice, and through introspection you will catch yourself failing many times — even great thinkers like Einstein and Asimov had their own faulty opinions — but you will no longer be a slave of stupidity!
I’m sure there’s more I should be thinking of here… do any of you have some ideas?
“The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity” begins at the point where the science of stupidity can no longer be distinguished from the stupidity of science…
My starting point is a quip: no man is intelligent enough to grasp his own stupidity… The only fruitful solution is a reversal of perspective: intelligence is nothing but the result of a series of more or less unsuccessful attempts to come to grips with stupidity. And perhaps stupidity is nothing but the externalization of our abortive attempts to define intelligence…
“The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity” is broad enough to make room for all writings of stupidity, including itself. Inspired by Elsevier’s “Vogelgids” (Bird Guide) of 1965, which is perversely covered in imitation snakeskin, I have had several copies of the encyclopaedia bound in ass’s hide, to emphasize the stupidity of the whole project.
This book is simultaneously fascinating and maddeningly esoteric. It’s the nonfiction equivalent of an Umberto Eco novel. The author uses a plethora of literary and artistic allusions to make various points about the nature of stupidity — for example, he refers to a print from Jacob Cat’s emblem book “Zinne-en minnebeelden” to show that stupidity (at least in this particular instance) is not characterized by dullness but by rash behavior. But these references are as close as he comes to characterizing stupidity. He never does explicitly define what he means by the word.
Stupidity is unfathomable; it can only be defined negatively, by contrast with another quality or as a defect. That does not mean that stupidity does not exist. We see the effects of it every day all around and inside us, but we are always too late to pin it down. Stupidity is a frontier we invariable miss – only in retrospect do we realize that we have crossed it.
From 
