Skeptical Shrink

As I was going up the stair I met a man who wasn't there He wasn't there again today Oh how I wish he'd go away! -- "Antigonish," William Hughes Mearns, circa 1899 People who see real patterns and relationships that elude others are visionaries. There are very few if any in each generation. Anyone with a decent secondary education can tick off their names: Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Curie, Faraday, Einstein. There are others, of course -- but not that many, considering how many humans have trod the Earth since the Enlightenment. These giants did not set out to prove that their unfounded suspicions were correct, but simply to learn -- to find out how things worked and what caused what. People who imagine patterns and relationships where none exist are either delusional in the psychotic sense, or simply willfully self-deluded. They start out already convinced of deliberately hidden, often nefarious connections between unconnected events, and then the...

This letter was sent to Newsday in response to a guest editorial that appeared on 4/9/18: William FB O'Reilly is way off base when he takes the position that yeshiva education that is woefully inadequate in all areas except religion should be protected as a matter of "freedom." He melodramatically declares that "it might ultimately decide the degree to which the state can determine what we are allowed to value and how we are permitted to think." Should we not value English, science, and mathematics? Teaching these basic skills does not dictate how we are permitted to think; it gives us the tools with which to think. By depriving their students of these skills, it is the yeshivas, and not the state, who are guilty of dictating what their students are permitted to think. The argument that the Orthodox have "been at this for 3,500 years" is ludicrous; 3,500 years ago slavery and human sacrifice were widely practiced, but we've moved beyond ancient s...