Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”
If anyone wants to learn more about Bell's inequality, the simplest (real, no bullshit) explanation I've ever seen is by David Griffiths. You can follow it if you know the basics of calculus:
I'll add another recommendation for Tufte's writings on the Challenger explosion. It should be required reading for all engineers. People who criticize Tufte for oversimplifying miss the point entirely. It's not about analysis, it's about communication. It's one thing for domain specialist to have a complex, multi-dimensional understanding of their specialty; extracting a relevant summary for non-experts is something else entirely. If you've ever been in a meeting where you had trouble getting your point across, you should read this. Make diagrams like Tufte does to get your point across, make more detailed ones as backups if you need to dive deep into details.
The opposition to Galileo was not really religious or scientific. More than anything, it was political. You can't understand what happened outside the context of the religious wars of the time. His findings undermined the authority of the Catholic Church.
There are plenty of examples of political suppression of science in our own time. The Nazis and Communists were two extreme examples.
In our own society, religion doesn't have this kind of power any more. But there are still political pressures on researchers to be PC. I'll let you think up some examples yourself.
1) Syntax without semantics is not understanding.
2) Simulation is not duplication.
Claim 1 is a criticism of old-style Symbolic AI that was in fashion when he first formulated his argument. This is obviously right, but we're already moving past this. For example, word2vec or the recent progress in generating image descriptions with neural nets. The semantic associations are not nearly as complex as those of a human child, but we're past the point of just manipulating empty symbols.
Claim 2 is an assertion about the hard problem of consciousness. In other words, about what kinds of information processing systems would have subjective conscious experiences. No one actually has an answer for this yet, just intuitions. I can't really see why a physical instantiation of a certain process in meat should be different from a mathematically equivalent instantiation on a Turing machine. He has a different intuition. But neither one of us can prove anything, so there's nothing else to say.
Also, I can't believe I forgot to mention Walter Duranty. He was writing around the time of these Hitler articles. As far as I know, no one paid him to do what he did - he just did it for the sake of journalist activism or something. There's a lot of that too.
This kind of thing still happens. I'll bet if you dug into the history of those Hitler pieces, you'd find out the Nazis paid some PR firm to arrange those articles. That's how it happens now. I'm sure it was the same then.
“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inaminate real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could go back to personal names, it would do a lot of good.
Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so to refer to people … The most improper job of any many, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity …
There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamating factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien, letter to his son, 1943 (from The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien).
... a very good book, by the way.