For several years, I taught a personal reading course that had the students review all the books they had ever read. Well, we tried to do that. It only took a few minutes for people to start complaining that they couldn't remember all the books they had read. They were correct as shown by the next few days. Many students would look over another person's list and suddenly remember that a title on the other's list was also a book they had read but forgotten about.
It was only natural in such a course for students to start asking each other and themselves, which book was their favorite? We found as a class that the question is much more useful in a slightly modified form. Instead of asking for the best book, it worked better to ask someone to name a few books that they really liked.
An important part of modern life is science. By that word, I just mean questioning what we do and thinking of alternatives we might try. We could take as a rough date of the beginning of modern science the year 1500. We have been in a science age for about 500 years. There is plenty of evidence that humans go back much further than 500 years. There is also evidence that many of us get uncomfortable with too much questioning and experimentation and innovation, even though, at the same time, we appreciate modern electricity, medicine, communication, entertainment, transportation. We are learning steadily about better ways of using our genomes, interacting with microbes and better use of machines, smart and otherwise.
All this modern invention produces new and exciting things and ideas, but we can come to understand that descriptions of new things and ideas are scraping the bottom of our adjective barrel in a frantic search for still more superlative words. We are beginning to doubt colorful claims that your new invention, his new book, their new movie, that corporation's new hiring methods are so fantastic, so pioneering, so wonderful, so amazing. We are getting to the point where we just want to hear about the new thing, what it can do, and what it costs in both money and environmental damage. We are getting immune to hype and baloney and even thrilled, excited voices. Just tell us what you have and what evidence shows about its effect.
