The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Invasion of the Mechanical Turks How a notorious automaton foreshadowed the collapse of empirical science CHRIS BATEMAN “You tell me you can predict the world of 2100. Tell me it’s even worth thinking about. Our models just carry the present into the future. They’re bound to be wrong. Everybody who gives a moment’s thought knows it.” - Michael Crichton In 1770, Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled his wonderous automaton, later dubbed ‘the Mechanical Turk’. A wooden man stood behind a cabinet upon which sat a chessboard. Kempelen showed the audience the elaborate mechanical gears controlling the movements of the mannikin, styled after an Ottoman magician. To the delight of the Hungarian monarch, Empress Maria Theresa, the device mechanically moved the chess pieces in response to a human player taking their turn at the board - and frequently defeated them! In 1783 at an exhibition in Paris, it beat Benjamin Franklin much to his astonishment, and although a Parisian grandmaster was able to s

  Don't hate the player, hate the game On Patrick Brown, Science Wars, and the Academic Publishing Business JESSICA WEINKLE From the internet In a remarkable essay  at  The Free Press , Patrick Brown,  a researcher at The Breakthrough Institute,  gave the world a lesson on how the sausage is made in headline stirring climate change science. Start the research with the publication outlet end in mind. The editorial practices of elite academic journals such as  Nature , matter for how society understands the state of knowledge and how we relate to the world. On occasion matters arise that bring attention to the fraught activity of gatekeeping at the journal and its broader family of journals.  For instance, in the late 1980’s,  Nature , published a research article  under the condition  that the journal could send investigators to the lab to review the researchers’ methods. The  investigating team  included the journal’s editor, a peer- reviewer with a negative opinion of the work, an