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When feelings matter more than rationality or facts, education is a doomed enterprise.
The Death of Expertise
Tom Nichols
In marked contrast to this, almost none of our man-made engineered artifacts and systems, whether automobiles, houses, washing machines, or television sets, invoke the power of fractals to optimize performance. To a very limited extent, electronic equipment such as computers and smart phones does, but compared with how you work they are extraordinarily primitive. On the other hand, human-engineered systems that have grown organically such as cities, and to a limited extent corporations, have unconsciously evolved self-similar fractal structures which have tended to optimize their performance.
Now, it’s true that the world’s poor have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower middle class, and if I were an American politician I would not publicly say that the tradeoff was worth it. But as citizens of the world considering humanity as a whole, we have to say that the tradeoff is worth it.
Enlightenment Now
Steven Pinker
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