Conference Blogging

It’s not the sort of thing I usually follow, but Ethan Zuckerman is blogging about the talks at the Pop!Tech conference (Pop!Tech 2006 site). There’s an impressive variety of topics, and Ethan gives good summaries of the talks (well, at least, the summaries themselves are pretty readable– I can’t speak for the accuracy, as I haven’t seen the actual talks…).

Also, ScienceBlogs local favorite Richard Dawkins does a drive-by talk, so people here might be interested in that. (My personal opinion of Dawkins is closer to that in this David Weinberger post that Ethan cites.)

2 comments

  1. Since they are dear to my Dawkins-loathing heart, here’s another naysayer:

    Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of Human Nature. There are always topics on which otherwise scrupulous minds will cave in with scarcely a struggle to the grossest prejudice. For a lot of academic psychologists, it is Jacques Lacan; for Oxbridge philosophers it is Heidegger; for former citizens of the Soviet bloc it is the writings of Marx; for militant rationalists it is religion.

  2. Not even I can tell you whether the summaries are accurate – there’s sort of a semiconscious fugue state required to blog a conference like Pop!Tech…

    A number of folks at the conference had seen earlier Dawkins talks on the subject of faith and commented that this one was oddly restrained – more a drive-by kicking than a drive-by shooting. The disappointment for me was that the “faith” speaker he was paired with didn’t want to challenge him at all. Having Weinberger on stage to debate him would have made the whole experience worthwhile for me – instead, I had a very hard time not yelling and throwing things.

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