2. 考研
  3. We have a deep, probably intrinsic desire to know the future. Unfortunately for us, the future is deeply, intrinsically unknowab

We have a deep, probably intrinsic desire to know the future. Unfortunately for us, the future is deeply, intrinsically unknowab

admin2013-09-16  14
问题     We have a deep, probably intrinsic desire to know the future. Unfortunately for us, the future is deeply, intrinsically unknowable. This is the problem Dan Gardner tackles in Future Babble; Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Belter. It knows one big thing: that the future cannot be foretold, period, and that those who try to predict it are deceiving themselves and the rest of us. In defense of that theory, Gardner dips into the science of unpredictability and the psychology of certainty. And he provides case studies of failed prophets, in which the environmental scientist Paul Ehrlich, the historian Arnold Toyn-bee and the social critic James Howard Kunstler come in for a particularly hard time.
    Many recent works explore similar ground, so if you’re in Gardner’s target audience, you’ve most likely encountered much of his material. Competition is not its own criticism, of course, but Gardner struggles to distinguish himself. Witness his fondness for overdetermined analogies. A video about the 2008 housing-market disaster "spread like a California wildfire in an abandoned housing development. "
    More worrisome than the literary lapses are the intellectual ones. First, Gardner repeatedly fails to distinguish between different kinds of forecasters — e. g. , Ehrlich and the evangelist Hal Lindsey. Undoubtedly we should be skeptical, but the reasoning is wrong. Just because a policy analyst and Mysterious Madam Zelda both mispredict the future doesn’t make their predictions equivalent. The analyst’s prediction is moored in theory and evidence; if all other variables could be controlled, Fact A could cause Forecast B. Of course, all other variables can’t be controlled, and so the analyst may be wrong. Religious and occult predictions, however, boast no causal logic whatsoever. Even when they’re right, they’re wrong.
    More troubling still, Gardner perpetuates misunderstandings about the human mind. "We live in the Information Age," he writes, "but our brains are Stone Age. " That is, we make mistakes because our minds are eons out of date, This idea is the Noble Savage of pop neuroscience: a catchy, culturally convenient notion that is flat wrong. It’s easy to tell Just So stories about why we are the way we are, but they can’t be proved, and they often collapse under even mild scrutiny. Gardner, for all his concern about prediction, has no worries about retrodiction, even of the distant, unknowable past. He writes enthusiastically about how we are "hard-wired" for this or that trick — say, to crave; certainty.
    What is most frustrating about all this iffy evolutionary psychology is that it represents Gardner’s only real effort to understand why we obsess about the future. True, back in the day, we needed to predict whether the rustling in the bushes was a predator or dinner. But "What happens next?" is a deep and wide question, one that extends far beyond Paleolithic-perils. It is about suspense, curiosity, tension, desire, death. Gardner touches almost none of that.
The author suggests that the effect of analogies in Future Babble is______.
选项 A、disappointing
B、desirable
C、profound
D、questionable
答案A
解析 第二段首先指出，加德纳所探讨主题并不新颖，在此之前已有多部类似作品。竞争虽不值得批评，但加德纳却在竭力使自己的作品脱颖而出。紧接着指出，加德纳在文中偏好超定(过于武断的)类比写作手法；第四段首句随即指出，比这一文学失误更为令人担忧的还有知识失误。可见，作者并不看好加德纳的类比写作手法，不但没能使作品脱颖而出，相反起到了负面作用，成为败笔。[A]选项最符合文意。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/MbO4777K
0

考研英语一

相关试题推荐
随机试题
最新回复(0)