What's more, some of the pursuits of these venture philanthropists seem more like self-serving science projects: Never mind feeding the poor, let's wire up schools for Web surfing.
In 2000, the self-described math and science geek arrived with a scholarship at Worcester, Mass.
Gilder skeptics--and there remain many--argued that Gilder's self-taught methods produced more fiction than science.
Science fiction is rife with intelligent, self-aware computers, from the benevolent "Mike" of Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress to the murderous HAL 9000 in Arthur C.
This idea of self-treatment is one of the reasons adult stem-cell science is so fashionable.
Science writer Jonah Lehrer has questioned the usefulness and validity of self-experiments.
But while Mr Buchanan explains all this well, he also makes a sweeping claim: that human society too is an example of self-organised criticality, and that it is therefore possible to use science to explain the patterns of history.
If some of this sounds like science fiction, so did manned lunar vehicles in 1950, or self-driving cars in 2000.
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In UK schools, researchers found low levels of self-confidence among disadvantaged pupils, when asked about their approach to a science topic.
They are, with their rational basis in math and science and their clean modernist aesthetic, the perfect antidote to the postmodern, self-referential and celebrity art of the early aughts.
Economists, psychologists and historians of science all tell us (and I am inclined to believe them) that we act within our rational self-interest.
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