[Osx-nutters] The separation of church and state.

[David Cake]

At 3:22 PM -0500 4/12/07, Patrick Coskren wrote:
>On Dec 4, 2007, at 3:17 PM, Stefano Mori wrote:
>>
>>  On 2007-Dec-04, at 18:35, Patrick Coskren wrote:
>>
>>>  [1] And a science fiction author, no less!
>>
>>  Yeah, like, is that good or bad? I remember Chrichton being 
>>  dismissed for being one too. :-)
>
>It's not really good or bad, but in this case it may indicate a 
>certain propensity for speculation.
>
>In Crighton's case, the problem was that he had no idea what he was 
>talking about, but he had a huge platform to disseminate his 
>misinformation from.  The problem wasn't so much "science fiction 
>author" as "widely popular fiction author", which for some reason
>gave him credibility in certain circles that he didn't deserve.

	Being a science fiction writer is a perfectly reasonable 
activity. I've even slightly indulged myself, and several of my best 
friends are SF authors.
	And being an SF author isn't a negative to a persons 
credibility on science in the slightest.
	The problem is, it isn't a positive either.
	Well, maybe in the very vaguest terms, an Sf author is more 
likely to have a basic grasp of science, and tend to be positive 
about, and engaged with science  more than the average. That is 
fairly faint praise, though, much less indicative of a persons 
general grasp of science than, say 'did science subjects at 
university', which is still setting the bar of scientific 
understanding pretty low. As scientific credentials go, SF author 
doesn't really rate very high. As a group there are plenty that are 
very passionate and involved with science, and a few that really only 
treat SF as fantasy with different aesthetics, and some that strive 
to get the science write, but really aren't interested in science as 
a subject of fiction as such, but really want speculative elements 
that they might know not to be real (SF about psychic powers, for 
example). As literary credentials, though, it rates pretty well - 
writing and selling a commercial novel is pretty hard no matter the 
genre.
	I don't think Hoyles SF (which, I admit, I haven't read since 
I was a teenager) hurts his credibility at all. He had an interesting 
conception of the universe that he thought had some follow on ideas 
that were far too speculative to treat as science, but were awfully 
cool to think and speculate about, so he put them in books.
	The problem with Crichton was that his SF writer status was 
taken as being scientific credentials on areas in which he had no 
scientific expertise.
	And don't get me started on Jerry Pournelle.
	Cheers
		David