Through the quotidian rhythm imposed by the online Schwartzreport (www.schwartzreport.net) I sit at my computer and watch streams of data trek across my desk, the influences shaping America’s future. The details teach the trend if you can find the pattern and, once you do, you can see it swell and retreat, like a melody in a symphony. The trick is to put all judgments aside and just follow the data with no cherished outcome. Some of the trends are easy to track and describe. The evolution that has brought us to the iPad and the iPhone (Apple, Cupertino, CA) and the effects they have are easy to see, and the data does not threaten values. Certainly, there are some people who scorn computers. But they are not a force. With some trends the principal problem is the signal-to-noise ratio. Climate change is such a trend where the most notable thing about it is the complete divorcement of data from political debate. The Denier movement upon close examination is almost entirely fact-free. This is part of an even larger trend: the growth of Willful Ignorance-a worldview notable for being formed through the deliberate exclusion of relevant data. Creationism is climate change […]