Intelligent Fiction

Or How Bright Minds Manipulate Facts to Make Progress Look Believable

In a 1957 speech foreseeing an end to the age of fossil fuels, Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover started by presenting a reasonable state of his present day. But when he moved on to explain “the rise and fall of civilizations”, he got nearly everything wrong.

Let me use this speech as an example of how bright minds can twist facts around in order to convince p…