This is one of my favorite albums. Every single track is great. I love Jay Lane’s drumming, he plays cool stuff, makes it sound easy and fits perfectly with the groove. Charlie’s 8-string guitar is really cool and he is the man for it. Fortunately, he doesn’t make an ego-trip out of that and cranks out great tracks. David Ellis’ saxophone stuff is also just great.

My favorite tracks probably are Fred’s Life (#1), Fables of Faubus (#5), Dance of the Jazz Fascists (#6) and Faffer Time (#10). But I repeat, I really dig every track.

Basically I enjoyed the book. If I understood correctly, it is a collection of editorials.

There were a few aspects that I did not like about it. Sometimes I got the feeling that the author suggests that many problems of thought or psychology may be solved or at least understood by finding a neural correlate. Now it is certainly interesting analyzing that. But I wonder about the pragmatic value of it. Did you really understand a problem when you understand what parts of the brain are most active in its context? It certainly gives insights, but I also think that this should not be treated like the grail that solves all your problems as I sometimes got the impression here (”... Scannen ist besser”).

In several instances I also noticed a certain “ex cathedra” style of writing that I do not like at all. Like selling scientific beliefs as facts.

Another issue that annoyed me is the numeric significance issue that hits hard here. For the author, significance of results is apparently equal to a p-value below a certain threshold. At least he usually states this value. I know that this is everyday jargon for many scientists, but there are many caveats here. A certain p-value does not mean much if the method itself is flawed. I did not investigate in the cases here, and hope that they are indeed “significant” when claimed, but the uncritical numeric significance use annoyed me quite a bit.

Apart from that, I had fun with the book and learned about several interesting things.

I just finished reading this (in German), and this is my first entry on this page.

I expected much more of this book. The episodes themselves were to some extent entertaining (I already knew about a few of them), but I really hated the “corrupt scientists suppress fresh young ideas” rants in which the author indulges throughout the book. I think they become unbearably repetitive after a while, and moreover I do not think that they are justified in the extent found in the book.

Moreover, some of the stories are quite shallow and not only once the author just stopped when I expected some more in-depth treatment of the case.

The basic thing that I did not like about this book is how Bürgin illustrates the fact that several discoveries first met fierce resistance in the scientific community. While in several episodes the arguments brought up by ‘enemies’ of the new discovery were quite bad and without foundation, I do not think that doubting the validity of new radical theories or data is a bad thing per se. Perhaps the author agrees on that, but that was not always clear to me while reading.

Indeed, I think it is fair and good that scientists will defend a well-proven theory against some new, rival data or theories. The question is only how you do that. If that defense gets down to the personal level or involves dogmatic arguments, I fully agree that this is bad or even evil. But if the arguments are rational and to the point, I do not see a problem. Unfortunately, Bürgin in my opinion fails to draw this distinction and ends up in the (for him) comfortable position to condemn all defenses that have later turned out to support an invalidated theory.

Sometimes the author is also quick to write things like “[Wenn wir] übersehen, dass sie [manipulierte Resultate, gekaufte Gutachten] sich derzeit in nicht geahntem Ausmaß häufen”. Somebody who blames scientists for all sorts of things should also give sources and reasons for his own statements. Maybe the rate really rises, but does Bürgin really know that? I doubt it. I don’t write in favor for anybody who manipulates data etc, I just write against the writing style which claims things for effect without citing sources or backing to the claims.

An iconic line at the end of the book is “Können wir es uns wirklich noch leisten, den Fortschritt weiterhin durch unsere ständige Zweiflerei zu behindern?” What the author means is that ‘alternative science’ should not be doubted as much as it is now (or at the time of writing), if I got him correctly. I consider this quite strange for a number of reasons: The uncritical use of “Fortschritt” (progress), as if it was clear which developments are progress and which are not. The ‘ständige Zweiflerei’ argument can be equally applied to this book. By the time I read this sentence I was so annoyed about the continuous accusations against a nebulous science establishment (sure, they control everything) that it seemed to me that it just doubts traditional science and favors alternative science, however obscure. Now I exaggerated a bit, and the author also states in the end that he thinks that traditional science is a good thing, but on the pages before I got a different impression. Finally, just a few pages earlier the author cites Popper, falsification, the quest for finding errors etc. Now I would just summarize that as ‘Zweifel’. Oh well.

Summarizing, I wouldn’t recommend that book. I didn’t learn much out of it, and the repetitive, undifferentiated ranting annoyed me quite a bit.