“I had an absolutely wonderful high school history teacher, Dave Corkran. I dedicated On Disinformation to him. He taught me to think for myself and not to be afraid to express what I thought. And in college, Richard Adelstein, a very philosophical economist, who basically said, “Do not go to graduate school in economics, they won't let you do what you're interested in. You've got to go to philosophy graduate school.” So he was really my mentor in thinking that I could become a philosopher. Then there’s my mom. She didn't go to college, but was extraordinarily intelligent and interested in all sorts of things. She was fascinated with Einstein and wanted to understand physics. When I was a little boy, she would wrap me up in a blanket on cold nights, and we would look at the stars. I was four years old, so I would ask, “What are the stars?” And she said, “They're suns. They're just very far away.” I also asked, “So all those stars in the sky, do they have planets like the Earth?” I still remember this to this day. She said, “Probably. We just haven't found them yet.” And this was 1967, so they hadn't found any yet. But when I gave her eulogy a few years ago, they had found 4,000 exoplanets, so she was right. What my mom was saying in 1967, that yes, there are other worlds out there, we just haven't found them yet, was so inspiring to me. She really was the one who made me become a philosopher. I try to channel the teaching she did in raising my own kids. The answer should never be “Because I said so.” It should be “What do you think? Let's have a conversation.” We never talked baby talk to our kids because my mom never talked baby talk to me. She treated me seriously as if my opinions mattered. My mom taking me seriously as a thinker from the age at which I could talk allowed me the confidence to go forward. Even though we grew up in a blue collar family, my dad became disabled, we were poor, I went to terrible public schools for the first part of my life, I always had it better than the other kids because I had parents who believed in education and a mom who talked to me.”

Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a Senior Advisor for Public Trust in Science at the Aspen Institute. He holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. He has taught philosophy at Colgate University, Boston University, Tufts Experimental College, Simmons College, and Harvard Extension School (where he received the Dean’s Letter of Commendation for Distinguished Teaching). Formerly Executive Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, he has also served as a policy advisor to the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as Associate Editor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His books include On Disinformation and How to Talk to a Science Denier and the novels The Art of Good and Evil and The Sin Eater.

https://leemcintyrebooks.com
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730833/on-disinformation-by-lee-mcintyre
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545051/
https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-art-of-good-and-evil/
https://leemcintyrebooks.com/books/the-sin-eater/

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