The very word science is best avoided, because ‘ordinary people’ find it threatening.*2 When I protest, I am rebuked for my ‘elitism’. A terrible word, but maybe not such a terrible thing? There’s a great difference between an exclusive snobbery, which no one should condone, and a striving to help people raise their game and swell the elite. A calculated dumbing down is the worst, condescending and patronizing. When I said this in a recent lecture in the United States, a questioner at the end, no doubt with a warm glow in his white male heart, had the remarkable cheek to suggest that dumbing
...more
