Your Kindly Inquisitors

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i read your kindly inquisitors when it came out, and that was 93. We started sceptic magazine in 92. So you were, were addressing, i've always wanted to, i was the one, i'm the one. O, well, but you dealt with the creationists,. If i rerecall, in that book, and we were addressing them at the time. And there was some, you do, kind of movement among scientists whell these people should just be cancelled, censored, whatever words they were using at that time. But jonathan rouch made this great argument that their argument shou be heard in the public form. Let everybody have their voice

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In episode 190, Michael Shermer speaks with Jonathan Rauch as he reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge” — our social system for turning disagreement into truth. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.