Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Robert B. Reich, professor of economic and social policy at Brandeis, was U.S. Secretary of Labor from...
...addressing a central problem from opposite points of view: the problem of contradiction in a formal system. For Turing, the problem is a practical one: if you design a bridge using a system that contains a contradiction, "the bridge may fall down." For Wittgenstein, the problem was about the social context in which human beings can be said to "follow the rules" of a mathematical system. What Turing saw, and Wittgenstein did not, was the importance of the fact that a computer doesn't need to understand rules to follow them. Who "won"? Turing comes off as somewhat flatfooted...
...when Louis met and fell in love with 20-year-old Mary Nicol, he already had a family, but in flagrant disregard of the social norms of the time, he divorced. The synergy of Louis and Mary's union was obvious from the outset. In contrast to Louis' charming, gregarious, outgoing nature, Mary was shy, reserved, socially uncomfortable and, in her own words, not very fond of other people. Mary preferred to carefully evaluate scientific evidence before reaching any conclusions; Louis, on the other hand, was often impulsive and cavalier in his proclamations. Rigorous in her approach, intensely focused...
...score on an IQ test are the same thing. Long before IQ was invented, America prided itself on being a country without a class system, in which the talented and industrious would rise and be rewarded. The advent of intelligence tests did not dramatically affect the degree of social mobility in the U.S.--at least not enough for any change to show up in the social-science data. If IQ tests measure a trait that is genetic, and therefore inherited, or a trait that is culturally transmitted by parents and social class, they would, either way, be unlikely to upend...
...Congress's Office of Technology Assessment had all the virtues sometimes claimed for science fiction. The OTA was concerned with genuine hard-core technological prediction. It paid close scholarly attention to technical trends and their social implications with facts, figures and footnotes--and Congress abolished it in the mid-1990s. The OTA didn't work out; science fiction suits us better. American society prefers having supergizmos dropped on its head out of nowhere, with no time to prepare and no real thought of the consequences. We love it that way. It's livelier, funnier, freer and just more American. "Leap...