[X] My Assistant

[SFJCody]

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mpml/message/15111

[dvandorn]

Don't delude yourselves, guys -- there is a far larger percentage of the world's population out there who are terrified by the increasing complexity we can now see in the Universe, than are awe-struck and delighted.

One of the reasons so many people in this world retreat into incredibly narrow and limiting, but very well-defined, roles and world-views is because facing up to how complex the world *really* is scares the living daylights out of them.

Since scientists and like-minded individuals rarely, if ever, have to deal with those people in any context other than the extremely mundane, we tend to forget that they're out there. But they are, and they outnumber us hundreds to one. (Note that you'll rarely see one of these people at a lecture by an astrophysicist -- except perhaps to demonstrate against the "relentless march of science" as if it's a bad thing, or loudly proclaim that "your science is all false becasue my god told me so." Just Google up some discussions about Creationism and its teaching in American public schools, if you don't believe me.)

Not that we need, as a culture or as individuals, to hide from the ever-more-complex Universe that is unfolding before us. Just that we need to understand that a vast majority of the human populace is irrational and fears this trend towards complexity-beyond-their-ability-to-understand, and that we need to take that at least somewhat into account when we design classification systems.

(Of course, there is always that relatively small percentage of scientists who *glory* in making their classification systems as complex and unapproachable as possible, so that the average person out there will confuse the system with magic, and confuse the scientist with a magician... but those ego-maniacal scientests tend to be few and far between. I think most of them work for ESA, though... *sigh*...)

-the other Doug