Synogenes.com

There is a petition currently running on the government site proposing the separation of church and state, removal of religion from schools, and a bunch of other sensible, rational policies.

It's available for signing at:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/secular/#detail

Please support it. It currently doesn't have many signatures, doubtless because it hasn't been widely publicised yet.

There has been a movement for some time to make available high quality educational materials free to anyone who is interested and one common criticism is that without the high quality peer review of that knowledge, it can't be trusted. Publishers of journals are very keen to support this view because their business is all about copyright of research so it can be sold back to those who need access to it, in many cases other researchers, through their libraries. It's a very lucrative business.

But there's an alternative that is being explored increasingly using the web as the means of dissemination. By posting on the web, the lengthy editorial process is shortened, and providing those reviewing the material are trusted, the final quality could even be improved. Time-sensitive material, such as in technical or scientific areas, get wide dissemination quickly and because of the ease of access to the web, it reaches a wide audience even quicker than a library subscription.

Some examples of this work are at:
Directory of Open Access Journals.

The model of open source has also been taken up in education more generally using the wiki model and providing software:
Open Source Educational Foundation.

The TED conference (Technology, Education, Design) makes available a load of very high quality talks at:
Ted Talks.

There's also a whole load of courses now available for download from some universities who are breaking out of the publishing mold:
MIT Open Courseware.

Carnegie Mellon.

Open University.

As the web matures and learning gets out of academia, we may well see a significant change in the assumptions behind copyright and the restricted access to learning. That challenges the idea of ownership of knowledge and the right to profit from it. It'll be interesting to see how academia and the publishing industry responds.

We are often exhorted to throw off the shackles of rational thinking and just go with our gut feeling, and it can often seem the right thing to do. We persuade ourselves that we’d automatically gravitate towards the right decision, that somehow we have an innate means of making sensible choices. How do we end up with that belief?

It’s certainly true that lots of things taken for granted as common sense in earlier times have turned out to be nonsense. And yet we always seem to regard common sense as something of value.

Word of mouth is a powerful teacher and there is a collective knowledge in any community forming a distillation of the collective experience. Not all of the collective wisdom is correct but generally enough of it is to make it worth listening to it. There are the more ludicrous suggestions (like putting butter on a wart to cure it) together with some very sensible ones (don’t eat yellow snow) and so long as overall there are no harmful consequences in following the advice, folk wisdom is often accepted.

But is that the same thing as instinct? And if, in our childhood, we were encouraged to accept folk wisdom, oft-repeated by parents and relatives, gravitating to those answers may well feel like a gut reaction, an instinct. In reality, it’s more likely to be a quick way of not thinking.

There is an entire field of study devoted to evolutionary psychology which looks at just these influences. Common sense is a learned response which in most cases turns out to be occasionally useful.

But this is not the same as science, subjecting what we think might work, to the demand for evidence that it does work. Common sense is a simple rule of thumb that sometimes, but not always, works and for those without the time or inclination to find out more, it's often enough.

If we choose to follow out instincts thinking that this is somehow a built-in genetic mechanism to protect us, we'll be disappointed. Although there are human instincts, we've largely suppressed them for our own safety and well-being, and we even sometimes refer to this as a process of civilisation. We could revert to instinct and do so in extreme circumstances, fight-or-flight being one example.

But since we don't need to rely on pre-scientific notions to guide us, relying on common sense or instincts is under-estimating the power of our own intelligence. We don't need to sit in the fog because reason clears it away and we can see things as they are.

It's nice to allow an element of risk now and again and we might dress it up as taking a chance and that's what we are often doing when we follow our instincts. But it's not much of a rule of thumb for anything we really care about - it's too likely to be wrong.