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Cultureplaces

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      Insights into Cultureplaces provide meaning, significance and purpose which contribute to our happiness. Observations that we accumulate not through “knowing more and more about less and less,” as scholars do, but just by living a cosmopolitan life in the Bay Area. These intellectual perambulations equip us to form opinions that deserve to be explored by others who share an interest in the deeper significance of events. We emphasize dialogue among participants of our salon not passively watching lectures or panel exchanges. As the great polymath Sir David McKay wrote in his book on sustainable energy Without Hot Air,  "Convictions are stronger if they are self-generated, rather than taught" Rafting the Cultural Currents of the New Millennium "To enter the current of this poem is to hurtle downstream through history on a flood of eloquent and passionate language that is in turn philosophic, satiric, tender, angry, ironic, sensuous, and, above...

Cancel Culture Comes to Science

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A scholar with an agenda targets as ‘dangerous’  our conference on filtering out faulty research. By  Peter W. Wood Jan. 12, 2020 5:22 pm ET 598 PHOTO:  DAVID KLEIN An unhappy side effect of the digital age is “cancel culture.” Anyone with an attitude of moral superiority and a Twitter account can try to shut down an event where opinions he dislikes are likely to be spoken. For several years the National Association of Scholars has inveighed against this infantile form of protest, which undermines free expression of ideas and legitimate debate. Now the cancel caravan has arrived at our door. We are holding a conference co-sponsored by the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif., in early February. It is meant to be an exchange among scholars on the problem of “irreproducibility” in the sciences—fake science or failed science, or something-is-missing science. It’s a big problem these days, but there’s no agreement on what to do about it. Our goal is bring togeth...