From: Billy Brown (bbrown@conemsco.com)
Date: Thu May 13 1999 - 12:25:56 MDT
J. R. Molloy wrote:
> I take it back. Don't read _Consilience_. You have more important things
to
> do than to try to understand a new idea.
<insert lengthy book review>
> =======================
>
> But they're probably just a bunch of kooks.
If you look back over what I've written on this thread, you may notice the
fact that my comments address claims *you* have endorsed. Since you have
yet to offer a substantive response to anything I've said, I must assume
that either you can't support them or you aren't interested in discussing
them. Either way, it appears that there is no point in pursuing the topic.
So far as the book is concerned, your comments make it sound like yet
another "we have to sacrifice everything to save the planet or we'll all
die" tract, with a health dose of luddite technophobia thrown in for good
measure. Of course I wouldn't waste time reading something like that - I've
got a 3-foot stack of productive reading I'm working through right now, and
that's as small as my to-read list is likely to get in the next decade.
The review you quote paints a very different picture. While not one of the
ideas mentioned therein is actually new, the idea of combining them into a
coherent whole has enough promise to be worth looking into. Anyone who
addresses that many topics in one book probably has something interesting to
say about something.
So, which picture is correct? Is _Concilience_ a scholarly work devoted to
the time-honored goal of connecting all of human knowledge into a coherent
whole? Or is it another environmental doomsday scenario?
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@conemsco.com
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