/lit/ - Literature

>>14583676
This

I know this is /lit/ heresy and for good reason but I actually enjoyed stuff like Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker and Carl Sagan. Their enthusiasm was infectious and got me reading other stuff that was a better treatment of the subject, though maybe not as hypey.

>>14583686
>They’re important, they generate public interest which leads to funding. It makes people feel like academia is less of an ivory tower.
These sentences are mutually exclusive. If people felt like academia was less of an ivory tower, they would start doing research themselves without paying scientists for their "expert" insight.

>>14583693
>people want to seem smart, to others or themselves, without actually going out of thrir intellectual comfort zone or tensing their brain. and i tell you, illusions sell the best.
You're referring to pop science, but this actually applies better to the rat's nest of jargon and abstract notation in professional sciencedo you really need to say "neonate" instead of "newborn"? LOL.

>>14192001
>Practical Character Reader
That's the one I was thinking of! I thought OP's pic looked familiar.

>>14192152
I see your point, but science isn't Moses coming down with the tablets. You have to suspect something already to make a hypothesis. Science just tells you how far to trust your hypothesis.

>>14191988
IIRC the conventional wisdom is that beauty standards evolved around indications of good health: a weird-looking person might have birth defects.

According to Zahavi, indications of health can become attractive for their own sake, and evolve out of control until they're actually unhealthy again.

>>13843722
Over 9000 hours of practice at his field of expertise

>>5925258