Offense of Reason: Discerning Truth from Dissembling Narratives - Softcover

DiMauro, Maurizio

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1735756830 ISBN 13: 9781735756837

Publisher: Daelan Draco Press, 2020

Synopsis

How to rigorously question anything and everything – A practical epistemological guide providing a concise set of criteria anyone can use to judge the validity of any narrative...

The practice of cultivating one’s own intellectual independence is naturally threatening to those who personally benefit from the fruits of establishment credo, which is why official pronouncements have traditionally been taken with a grain of salt.

But alas, today the “Question everything” ethos appears long dead. In this post-reason era one is likely to be lambasted, or unceremoniously de-platformed, for “doing your own research” and openly lauded for blindly following the herd.

Offense of Reason is offered as an antidote to this unfortunate zeitgeist by motivating a method––a set of criteria––anyone can use to parse the practical validity and utility of personally impactful narratives and propositions, especially those arising from the vaunted annals of establishment science.

It is part common sense and part application of the epistemological principle of falsifiability. But It requires no academic-level grasp of the latter school of philosophy nor professional expertise in the example topics to which the method is applied, which include Climate Change (Anthropogenic Global Warming), Darwinian Theory of Evolution, IQ (theory of intelligence), virology (epidemiology, pandemics), vaccination, COVID-19 (coronavirus) and civil rights.

About this title

About the Author

Maurizio DiMauro is a co-laureate of the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He holds degrees in Physics and molecular Biology and became a professional in the interrelated fields of Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning following tenures in academia and national laboratories as an experimental physicist. He resides in the High Desert Southwest region of the United States.

From the Back Cover

How would you rate the importance of cultivating one's ability to discern a scientific proposition from a pseudo-scientific one? Many well known claims in the public sphere, though promulgated in the guise of science, reason and logic, are practically religious beliefs.

There is nothing wrong with religion per se, but there is arguably something wrong with selling religion as science.

At best, the conflation of such polar opposites qualifies as grave disservice to informed consent or dissent. At worst it is deception harboring tyranny. If the government calls on you to take perilous action for the perceived greater good, such as risking life and limb in war, playing Russian roulette with your own health to ostensibly safeguard that of others, trading liberties for presumed communal safety, and so on, would you not want to know if the compulsion is predicated on testable theory versus categorical decree?

The century-old tool of choice for making that differentiation is philosopher Karl Popper's acclaimed falsifiability axiom, which asks a simple question: Does a given theory admit a test of its own falsity? The challenge is that real world ideas can be convoluted, esoteric, fraught with hidden assumptions and may even be tainted with deliberate obfuscation. They may seem falsifiable when in fact they are not, or may be falsifiable but difficult to recognize as such.

In this book I develop a set of criteria to determine the practical falsifiability of virtually any proposition and demonstrate the surprising falsity of some prominent theories, without requiring deep expertise in the associated disciplines.

Edition details

• Publisher: Daelan Draco Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1735756830
• ISBN 13: 9781735756837
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 181