Insightful post. James P. Hogan, a fan of true scientific inquiry, has some good fictional examples of this process in his "Giants" novels and some others (including his last).

I can ask if the scientific process as a skill (including critical thinking and assessment of intent as you put it) is learnable to any significant degree in the day-to-say environment for most of today's kids? So many kids are caught between forced schooling and entrancing but mostly passive media consumption, while they are also generally being fed crap nutritionally and essentially denied sunlight and exercise by all the demands and distractions.

From John Taylor Gatto from around 1991:
http://www.informationliberati...
"After an adult lifetime spent teaching school, I believe the method of mass-schooling is its only real content. Don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son's or daughter's education. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love -- and lessons in service to others, too, which are among the key lessons of home and community life.
  Thirty years ago [in the early 60s] these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television [[or now also computer games and the web etc.]] and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time as well. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.
    A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a path of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know."

I am, to some extent, a creation of highly-regulated 1960s and 1970s TV. There was not that much on of interest to kids, and much of what was on of interest to kids often either had a moral purpose (even cartoons or comedies/dramas like Yogi's Friends or Batman or Thunderbirds or the Andy Griffith Show) or was connected to scientific or cultural literacy (PBS, Sealab 2020, Wild Kingdom). The pacing was slower then, too, making it more feasible to, say, build with blocks while sort of half-following the screen. So, a limited amount of TV could be a boon even without much parental supervision -- while still leaving plenty of time with nothing interesting on TV to trigger boredom which lead to other things to do which lead to skills connected to science and engineering and citizenship, like in my case building with TogL's (somewhat like LEGO), electronics experiments or eventually computer programming, reading Isaac Asimov novels, playing with our dog, going outside with other kids on the street or a park, going to a summer day camp for sports and arts, or going to church on Sundays. Today's distracted and overwhelmed parents (typically both working full-time, if there even are two) have a much harder (perhaps impossible) job of navigating a complex media landscape for their kids -- even as they may also have a much broader range of good stuff than ever before (including, say. a classic like Mr. Rogers Neighborhood available on-demand on Amazon alongside an amazing range of scientific documentaries and pro-social media programs and movies). The latest Kindle Fire with parental controls on specifying kids' media is perhaps a step in the right direction there, as is the OLPC tablet and pre-selected educational content. There probably still is more room for innovation there. And doctors now recommend zero screen time for kids under two, and highly limiting it afterwards. Although, as with anything, it depends on exactly how it is used -- we homeschool/unschool, so screen time has a different meaning to us. (Disclaimer: I am currently working in the TV broadcast industry.)

And to talk about "pseudoscience", homework demands for many kids have also grown in many places into craziness (if homework was ever a good idea in the first place):
http://www.thecaseagainsthomew...

And much of the danger kids used to learn to deal with in the rest of their time from moving through the neighborhood on their own to experiments with full chemistry sets and so on is no longer allowed for most kids. So, it's hard to imagine where the next good general scientists are coming from in the USA, even ignoring that much of key US scientific advancement came from importing German scientists after WWII. I've heard NASA rocket scientists bemoan the trouble finding any young people with hands-on explosive experience like you used to get from farm kids and such. See also:
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever...
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_r...
http://richardlouv.com/books/l...

There are endless resources around that celebrate science and engineering and can be consumed in a passive way from "Mechanical Universe" to "The World of Chemistry" to "Myth Busters" to "Blue Planet" to "World's Toughest Fixes". But, where are today's kids going to have the open-ended hands-on experiences that might make them have a scientific outlook? Maybe the best hope for many is subtly-educational computer games involving a lot of trial and error and experiments? Things like Fantastic Contraption or various other physics games (just as one area)?
http://www.physicsgames.net/

In the 1990s, my wife and I tried to increase scientific literacy by spending seven or so person-years of our own time and money to create an open-ended free garden simulator:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.c...

Can't say there was much support for that kind of thing back then, or probably even now. And we ran out of money before we could make it even better, sadly. We then spent years digging out financially from that by working for others on unrelated stuff. People may talk about the need for STEM education, and there may even be a lot of money supposedly for it such as for related schooling programs, but since the US educational system is so broken, the money rarely can be spent on things that might make a significant difference. As Seymour Papert said about Lego/Logo, you can create an open ended system to teach inquiry, but as soon as you put it in schools full of bureaucracy and lesson plans and "learning objectives", the spirit of the thing gets crushed. Lego/Mindstoms at home remains an alternative though. Even today's Lego and FIRST robotics contests (a step forward in schools, true), by the nature of being contests, teach some problematical things...
"No contest: the case against competition"
http://www.shareintl.org/archi...

Still, I can hope the internet is overall empowering more people to develop a healthy attitude to inquiry and skepticism (although I think we need better tools for that). Social media makes possible the rapid collective reflection on mainstream media (which indirectly guides it somewhat through rapid feedback). I'm also hopeful that there is a huge upside potential that HTML5 is making possible a whole new range of easily-accessible educational simulations powered by JavaScript (accessible by cheap smartphones and Chromebooks) -- it would be nice to see something better than our Garden Simulator as am HTML5 app. And self-produced instructional videos, say of MineCraft techniques, is a growing area of more peer-to-peer-level communications where a community is educating itself for free in a "unschooling" way. But all that is a very different world than I grew up in.

Great pattern you've discovered for a rebuttal.

Step 1. Ad hominem attack.
Step 2. Make vague references to vast numbers of rebutting examples without actually supplying any.
Step 3. More ad hominem.
Step 4. Ignore actual citations (like in Tart's latest book).
Step 5. Claim area is under study by reputable people without naming any.
Step 6. Profit? :-)

== Some links related to healthy democratic education reform

BTW, from 2006, not that I agree with most of their business-oriented recommendations:
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/...
"That's the conclusion of a bipartisan group of scholars and business leaders, school chancellors and education commissioners, and former cabinet secretaries and governors. They declare that America's public education system, designed to meet the needs of 100 years ago when the workplace revolved around an assembly line, is unsuited to today's global marketplace. Already, they warn, many Americans are in danger of falling behind and seeing their standard of living plummet."

Reform in what direction? We didn't get where we are today in public schooling without a hugenumber of powerful interlocking factions, as explained here:
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"This is not to say sensitive, intelligent, moral, and concerned individuals aren't distributed through each of the twenty-two categories, but the conflict of interest is so glaring between serving a system loyally and serving the public that it is finally overwhelming. Indeed, it isn't hard to see that in strictly economic terms this edifice of competing and conflicting interests is better served by badly performing schools than by successful ones. On economic grounds alone a disincentive exists to improve schools. When schools are bad, demands for increased funding and personnel, and professional control removed from public oversight, can be pressed by simply pointing to the perilous state of the enterprise. But when things go well, getting an extra buck is like pulling teeth."

Chris Mercogliano, previously of the Albany Free School, is an example of a true reformer, with 30+ years of success including with some of the toughest kids rejected by mainstream schools, a success almost almost totally ignored:
http://www.chrismercogliano.co...

Or on homeschooling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
"During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.
    They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency, nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier enrollment of students.[9] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent, with superior long term effects - even though the mothers were "mentally retarded teenagers" - and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical western children, "by western standards of measurement."[9]
    Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results that were cut short by enrollment in schools, and could neither be replaced nor afterward corrected in an institutional setting.[9] Recognizing a necessity for early out-of-home care for some children - particularly special needs and starkly impoverished children, and children from exceptionally inferior homes- they maintained that the vast majority of children are far better situated at home, even with mediocre parents, than with the most gifted and motivated teachers in a school setting (assuming that the child has a gifted and motivated teacher). They described the difference as follows: "This is like saying, if you can help a child by taking him off the cold street and housing him in a warm tent, then warm tents should be provided for all children - when obviously most children already have even more secure housing."[9]"

Or in Gatto's words:
http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
"Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
    But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.
    Now let's look at the strangers of which you (interviewer) was one and I was one. Regardless of our good feeling toward children. Regardless of our individual talents or intelligence, we have so little time each day with each of these kids, we can't possibly know enough vital information about that particular kid to tailor a set of exercises for that kid. Oh, you know, some of us will try more than others, but there simply isn't any time to do it to a significant degree."

Is this what you are defending?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"The War on Kids is a 2009 documentary film about the American school system. The film takes a look at public school education in America and concludes that schools are not only failing to educate, but are increasingly authoritarian institutions more akin to prisons that are eroding the foundations of American democracy. Students are robbed of basic freedoms primarily due to irrational fears; they are searched, arbitrarily punished and force-fed dangerous pharmaceutical drugs. The educational mission of the public school system has been reduced from one of learning and preparation for adult citizenship to one of control and containment."

And some stats:
"ADHD, medication rates in U.S. continue to rise"
http://aapnews.aappublications...
"More than 3.5 million American children (6 percent of 4-17 year olds) were reported by their parents to be receiving medicine in 2011, a 28 percent increase from the numbers reported in 2007. .. Nearly one in five high school boys and one in 11 high school girls in the U.S. were reported by their parents to have been diagnosed with ADHD."

Based on that, US education has far worse issues than some people believing in ghosts without a lot of peer-reviewed evidence. Still, maybe they are connected? Why do so many people believe in ADHD as a druggable offense without much evidence? Are we back to "Step 6. Profit?" if we follow the money?

Certainly no one is showering the Albany Free School with money for educating ADHD-labelled ids without them needing to be drugged, from a decade ago (2004):
"School Treats ADHD Kids Without Medications"
http://news.google.com/newspap...

And:
"Teaching the Restless: One School's Remarkable No-Ritalin Approach to Helping Children Learn and Succeed
http://books.google.com/books/...
"We've all read the stories about medicating hyperactive (ADHD) kids. The controversy shows no signs of ending, as parents and doctors debate the merits of diagnosing and medicating children at younger and younger ages. Chris Mercogliano has a strong opinion on the matter, and he enters the debate as an educator. In Teaching the Restless, Mercogliano issues an urgent call for a shift in how our society perceives hyperactive children -- away from theories of faulty brain chemistry and toward an understanding of childrenâ(TM)s lives. Mercogliano codirects the Albany Free School in Albany, New York. There, he and his faculty have developed numerous ways to help hyperactive children relax, focus, modulate emotional expression, make responsible choices, and forge lasting friendships -- all prerequisites for learning -- without assigning pathological labels to the children or resorting to the use of biopsychiatric drugs."

So, who's engaging in "magical thinking" here about ADHD -- mainstream schools or the Albany Free School? It probably also helps that Albany Free School kids get to be out in the sunshine a lot getting exercise which probably helps with Vitamin D deficiency.

Can you truly say these seven lessons (from 1991) are no longer taught in most schools most of the time to most of the students?
http://www.informationliberati...
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And over time this training has shaken loose from its own original logic: to regulate the poor. For since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to the point that it now seizes the sons and daughters of the middle classes as well. Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, preempting the teaching function, which belongs to everyone in a healthy community. "

I am not a fan of much religious dogma, nor am I a fan of uncritical acceptance of paranormal claims, yet sometimes the only thing that can stand against bureaucracy-out-of-control are things like our religious impulse (and related stories about morality and good ways to live) and our connection with the infinite (and a related longing for something more).

You are correct of course. Thanks for pointing that out. I should have written "proof". Likely Tart puts it better. To agree with you, from:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/A...
"There are a few caveats to take into account to refine what a lack of supporting evidence says about a hypothesis. Absence of evidence is not necessarily strong evidence that outright disproves the hypothesis in the way that an observation that contradicts the hypothesis would be. ... As such, absence of evidence acting against a hypothesis is only a probabilistic approach and works best in a full Bayesian-style framework, which also takes into account other probabilities and other evidence."

== Some rambles on weighing the meaning of absence of evidence in US society

First, Tart claims evidence os paranormal activity from research studies. People may dispute that including by questioning the studies, so let's just assume there still is no evidence for the sake of discussion.

An important factor in weighing the meaning of the absence of evidence is the intense competition for research funds which is increasingly corrupting science. See: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals."

For example, when Pons and Fleischmann submitted their "cold fusion" results to a peer review process for grant funding, it turned out one of the reviewers was working in the same area and was about to publish on it. This conflict (whoever is most at fault) ultimately lead to the press conference announcement (against the scientist's preferences) at the university wanted to claim priority on the discovery (via creating artificial scarcity through patents). A handful of hot-fusion scientists (especially at MIT) after fairly brief and limited attempts then claimed the results could not be duplicated an that failure to replicate was essentially proof that Pons and Fleischmann were wrong and "cold fusion" could not exists given popular conceptions of nuclear physics at the time. Pons and Fleishmann may have been wrong in several ways, including in calling it "fusion" of any sort and also in their neutron measurements. But these were expert chemists well experienced in heat measurements and that part of what they did was likely valid, and likely they did detect excess heat. But for *decades* any mention of doing cold fusion research became academic suicide based on the handful of failures to replicate by people whose short-term interests were served by not finding results. Only a few (mostly older, tenured) people continued to work on that. Related:
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/r...
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...
http://undsci.berkeley.edu/art...

"Cold Fusion" (now LENR) Research has been picking up in the last few years though, such as with this LENR conference ironically at MIT:
http://world.std.com/~mica/201...

Another example is when Halton Arp was denied telescope time to pursue his "electric universe" ideas. Ignaz Semmelweis is another example from centuries ago, where his evidence of how to prevent disease by hand-washing was dismissed as in conflict with conceptions of health and disease at the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Although it's also true that the "germ" model of disease is incomplete, as only some strains of germs (bacteria, viruses, fungi, prions, etc.) tend to cause disease and only then generally in susceptible individuals in favorable contexts.

Science is a social process, funded by social systems with political dimensions. The book "1984" is a great fictional example of a society that goes so far as to be constantly rewriting its history based on the current political dynamics. In the current day USA, sometimes evidence does not exist in some area because funding is actively denied in an area by dominant groups of scientists who uphold particular modes of thought (almost equivalent to religious dogmas). Even if evidence can be collected and organized, then these same groups will make it hard to publish it in a way that will attract notice. If contradictory evidence can't be collected or organized or published because of the actions of these dominant players, these dominant groups are assured of continued prestigious employment. See also the book "Disciplined Minds":
http://disciplinedminds.tripod...

Freeman Dyson argues that ultimately the truth wins out, but I wonder how long that takes if indeed it does happen, especially given how it seems popular understandings can even go backwards. Jane Jacobs talks about this in "Dark Age Ahead".

The "Rat Park" experiment and its consequences of the Drug War or research studies on addiciton (none) was a classic example of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
"Rat Park was a study into drug addiction conducted in the late 1970s (and published in 1980) by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself.[1] He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can."[2] To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the floor area of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16 - 20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters.[3]:166 The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment."[1] Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments. The two major science journals, Science and Nature, rejected Alexander, Coambs, and Hadaway's first paper, which appeared instead in Psychopharmacology, a respectable but much smaller journal in 1978. The paper's publication initially attracted no response.[4] Within a few years, Simon Fraser University withdrew Rat Park's funding.[5]"

Other drugs can work on different brain neurotransmitter paths with perhaps different affects. But ignoring the policy implications of this Rat Park research has just been a disaster for the USA in so many ways with so many millions of lives damaged by bad policy -- even if additive-like behavior is an increasing problem in many realms (including computer use). So it is quite possible for entire industries and countries to ignore and defund inconvenient research. Even if, yes, many decades later some part of US drug policy about something like marijuana is starting to shift at the state level.

Another example is the general ignoring of all the evidence for centuries of the value of nutrition (and fasting and sunlight) in health, for example work by Shelton based on millenia-old ideas:
http://www.soilandhealth.org/0...
http://www.soilandhealth.org/0...

Dr. Joel Fuhrman has done a good job of connecting these ideas with the scientific literature, even if his findings and those of similar-minded MDs are mostly still ignored in medical practice. Sadly, just today I read in the NYTimes of a person getting US$100,000 drug infusions (per application) for a condition that likely is treatable with diet and vitamin D:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04...
"For Jeffrey Kivi, 51, a chemistry teacher at Stuyvesant High School in New York, it meant recently giving up an intravenous drug that, as an outpatient, he had had infused every six weeks for years to keep his psoriatic arthritis at bay. Before taking that drug, Remicade, Dr. Kivi was on high doses of steroids for debilitating joint pain that left him unable to walk at times. But when his last three-hour infusion at NYU Langone Medical Center's outpatient clinic generated a bill of $133,000 -- and his insurer paid $99,593 -- Dr. Kivi was so outraged that he decided to risk switching to another drug that he could inject by himself at home. That is true even though his insurer did not require him to make up the difference."

Consider that unhealthy guy's picture in the times, and contrast with someone else (Joe Cross) with a chronic skin condition who healed himself with a juice fast, sunlight, and exercise and then helps another person he meets with the same condition do the same:
http://www.fatsickandnearlydea...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

Despite such (anecdotal) success, it remains tremendously difficult for people to get funding to do research on dietary interventions. Yet there are billions of dollars available to research the next proprietary blockbuster-promising drug. So, doctors can truthfully say, there is not evidence that dietary intervention helps X, yet research shows expensive drug Y helps with X (0.01% more than a placebo in one study after discarding all the failed studies all funded by the drug company, but no need to mention that).

US political agricultural subsidies are completely opposite what they should be for public health based on even what science is out there. Literally trillions of US dollars are poured into magic bullets instead of low hanging "fruit" (and vegetables). This is another example of a complete disconnect between existing evidence and dominant funding paradigms. "Evidence" can be weighed differently by different people with different objectives. The "Four Food Groups" was the worst sort of profit-oriented pseudoscience in the classroom for decades (but the US Dairy industry made free posters available), and has I feel done a huge amount more damage to the USA that people wondering about whether paranormal things happen sometimes. Related:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/8904...
http://consumerist.com/2010/03...
http://www.alternet.org/story/...

Does this de-facto suppression of research funding/organizing/publishing inconvenient things apply to "paranormal" research? Hard to say. From what I've seen just in the social dynamics around Princeton in the 1980s, yes, there is a strong degree of it though. Most of the people in the other groups wanted to distance themselves from the PEAR lab -- and yet, isn't the mystery of consciousness one of the most fundamental aspects of our existence, along with how consciousness interacts with the fundamental mystery of our reality? The only reason PEAR had a chance to exists was because the founder, Robert Jahn, had been a long-time and otherwise respected Dean of the Engineering school.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Did restricting funding for systematic controlled paranormal research always apply or is it the result of decades of failed experiments and worse? I don't know for sure. Clearly there are a lot of failed and flawed experiments. And there have been a lot of profit making charlatans -- like a 60 Minutes expose on one "psychic" and how she would scare older people by various fraudulent means into handing over more and more of their life savings to ward off evil.

In the end, the one thing the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Lab lab seemed to excel at most was figuring out every way a signal could be unknowingly injected into a system in order to factor it out (e.g. satellite periodicity, radio programs, nearby heavy equipment turning on and off, and so on). But even that by itself was a solid contribution to science. When someone seriously engages any subject, whether cold fusion or the paranormal, there are bound to be more aspects of the "truth" about the universe that are engaged with and then documented. They may not be what the investigator intended, but if they are honest with themselves, there will be a contribution to human knowledge.

Contrast with, say, well-respected but self-deluding AI researchers who seem to think that the way they think they think is how everyone else really thinks: :-)
"Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence" by Diana E. Forsythe"
http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id...
http://sss.sagepub.com/content...
"This paper presents an anthropological study of knowledge production in the expert systems community within AI. Expert systems are built by knowledge engineers, specialists in the task known as 'knowledge acquisition'. This is a complex process of interpretation and translation; not surprisingly (to an anthropologist, at least), it presents a troublesome 'bottleneck'. However, knowledge engineers have a different perspective on why this is so. Typically positivist in approach, they see knowledge acquisition as conceptually straightforward. In their view, it is difficult, not because of the nature of knowledge or the complexity of the process, but rather because it requires extended face-to-face interaction between knowledge engineer and expert. Believing that automation will 'get around' the inexact and uncontrollable nature of this interaction, they seek to automate it. Drawing on ethnographic material, the paper explores the knowledge engineers' epistemological stance, noting its characteristic deletions, and suggesting that they are reflected in the resultant technology."

Does the field of the paranormal have charlatans who do it for the money or kicks of feeling superior? No doubt. And as a slashdot article a year or two ago pointed out in relation to people overgeneralizing "spirit", it is better for survival to see a rock as a bear than to see a bear as a rock. There are also other evolutionary reasons for collective human behavior related to religion. So, all those suggest much (or all) of paranormal claims could be bunk.

Still, the bottom line is we still don't know much from a scientific perspective about the underlying nature of consciousness or the underlying nature of reality (including whether we are living in a simulation). And we may never know such on this plane of existence. It remains a gross overgeneralization to think that all we currently can see and all we currently know is all there is to see and know. And it is then even worse to think only that which is published in mainstream journals is what is true. Some quotes I've collected related to that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...

Just looked at some of the questions and they look mostly like standard read input and spit out an optimization answer. As someone else said on Slashdot years ago, the problem with such puzzlers is they select for people who like solving complex tasks, not for people who like avoiding such tasks and like helping others avoid them (as in people full of diligently applied hard-working laziness). For a company like Google that supposedly prides itself on making easy to use software, this would seem to indicate they generally are hiring the wrong sort of person (as much as the world and/or Google needs some great algorithm designers and implementers). What about the skills to know what is a good question to ask? Of course, our entire mainstream pipeline of schooling engineers and scientists has that sort of problem...

Related by the then Vice-Provost of Caltech, David Goodstein:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."

See also: http://books.google.com/books/...
"In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. "The Difference" is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities.
    "The Difference" reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. He examines practical ways to apply diversity's logic to a host of problems, and along the way offers fascinating and surprising examples, from the redesign of the Chicago "El" to the truth about where we store our ketchup.
  Page changes the way we understand diversity--how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences for the benefit of all."

"You get what you measure." Google's hiring model focusing on puzzlers etc. in some sense is filtering out various kinds of diversity... Such as those who focus more on stories or feelings than algorithms or numbers, those more interested in psychology than technology, those who are older and more interested in customer service than impressing potential customers, and so on... I'm not saying hiring is easy; it isn't. Google may even do a better job than most in some areas. But overall, it seems a narrow way to select the people who are creating much of our future information technology infrastructure at all levels (including, implicitly, civic aspects). For example, the San Francisco busing conflict is maybe a symptom of some deeper issue in terms of not being able to foresee it and prevent it...

Yes, you are right. I should have said "was", as MD merged with Boeing in 1997.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

These can sometimes help. A collection of health links I put together:
https://www.changemakers.com/d...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Laughter can help too. http://www.humorproject.com/

Medically-supervised fasting can also help sometimes. http://www.healthpromoting.com...

Better nutrition implies avoiding various problematical food additives. http://fedup.com.au/factsheets...

Getting enough sleep is also important of good health. Try to avoid looking at screens a couple hours before going to bed. And before going to sleep, try to make a mental list of all the things that you would still want to be there in the morning and that you are thankful for (e.g. enough to eat that day, water to drink that day, a safe place to sleep, garbage collection services, etc.), as gratitude helps mental health, and what you think about before going to sleep often programs the subconscious mind as to what to think about.

A lot of people creating startups and working long hours may ending up eating poorly, not exercising, and not getting enough sunlight for vitamin D. So they are at risk.

Deeper issues in the sense that we live in a crazy-making society with many organizations emphasizing unhealthy aspirations, even celebrated ones: http://www.pdfernhout.net/read...

Good luck!

Typos:
"What we need if more and deeper" should be "What we need is more and deeper".
"learning technical school" should be "learning technical skills"

And I should have been clearer that is was the same James McDonnell who created both the foundation and the aerospace company, not that the foundation itself is owned or controlled by the company.

https://www.princeton.edu/~pea...
"The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program, which flourished for nearly three decades under the aegis of Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science, has completed its experimental agenda of studying the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes, and developing complementary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality."

Disclaimer: I worked in a joint program with them when I was managing the PU robotics lab in the 1980s. The program was funded in part by the McDonnell Foundation (of McDonnell-Douglas) in part because supposedly strange unexplainable things happened in fighter cockpits especially to pilots under stress in emergency situations. Rather that give the money just to the PEAR lab, it was decided to give the money to a group of labs that would work together somehow exploring aspects of human consciousness (or something like that, not saying how effective all that was). Dean Radin is the researcher who connected the groups back then and has been active in parapsychology work since: http://www.deanradin.com/

Another person active in this field of consciousness studies is Charles Tart (unrelated to PU, but interesting in the field).
http://www.paradigm-sys.com/
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/...

Related items at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (founded in 1973 by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell) which include mention of Dean Radin and Charles Tart:
http://www.noetic.org/search/?...

Mainstream science has been apparently useful, even if it is more the tinkerers and engineers who actually invent and bring to production useful things. But ultimately, if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit we don't very much understand the nature of consciousness or the deeper nature of reality, which together, as much as we think we know about them, still form a "great mystery" (a term some Native Americans used for God and such). And, no, mapping a few or even many neural pathways or having a chemical analysis of brain neuro-transmitters does not equate to understanding the mystery of consciousness. As Charles Tart points out, there is a step where many otherwise good scientists move from apparently solid ground in their specialties to claiming fallacious things like "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" and so create essentially a new religion of "Scientistic Materialism".
http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/a...
"His [Tart's] and other scientists' work convinced him that there is a real and vitally important sense in which we are spiritual beings, but the too dominant, scientistic, materialist philosophy of our times, masquerading as genuine science, dogmatically denies any possible reality to the spiritual. This hurts people, it pressures them to reject vital aspects of their being."

Anyway, mass compulsory schooling in "classrooms" (intended by 1920s eugenicists to segregate people by social class so they interbreed and stratify, see Gatto) is also in general another way of hurting people:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real. ... Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive. At the age of twelve, Admiral Farragut got his first command. I was in fifth grade when I learned of this. Had Farragut gone to my school he would have been in seventh. ... The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn and it isn't supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason's words, "the control of human behavior." ... Something strange has been going on in government schools, especially where the matter of reading is concerned. Abundant data exist to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent, wherever such a thing mattered. Yet compulsory schooling existed nowhere. Between the two world wars, schoolmen seem to have been assigned the task of terminating our universal reading proficiency. ... Presumably humane utopian interventions like compulsion schooling aren't always the blessing they appear to be. For instance, Sir Humphrey Davy's safety lamp saved thousands of coalminers from gruesome death, but it wasted many more lives than it rescued. That lamp alone allowed the coal industry to grow rapidly, exposing miners to mortal danger for which there is no protection. What Davy did for coal producers, forced schooling has done for the corporate economy ..."

Our choices of what to research and what to invent are themselves moral and/or spiritual choices.

The fact is, religion (especially morality and moral philosophy, including moral stories) and education are inseparable. Religion (seen broadly) and science also form an interacting pair. See what Albert Einstein wrote on this for example:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/ao...
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
    But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly."

In that sense, what we need if more and deeper religion in education, not less. Religion is an essential part of being human, And by this I mean not specific religious dogma, but the deeper religious impulse that is part of humanity for many reasons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://evolution-of-religion.c...

Schooling is only tangentially related to education and true science though, as Gatto points out. For example, science is about inquiry and skepticism, whereas schooling is generally learning to memorize supposed facts provided from authority. Education in its higher forms included personal self-development and unfolding and becoming an empowered citizen, not just learning technical schools to become a thoughtless worker drone. See also "The Skills of Xanadu".
http://books.google.com/books?...

Anyway, there are a lot of deeper issues here.

Ac wrote: "A handful of successful children from a single stable marriage require far more effort than the half dozen kids from various failed relationships who, because they never experienced stability in their home life, will go out and and repeat the behaviour seen in their parents, the latter approach also tends to ensure a better spread of genes, breeding occurring at a younger age when fewer complications are likely to occur and fewer genetic defects are likely to arise. Being successful and a good person is great, but it's not necessarily the best strategy for passing on one's genes, i suspect that in reality that accolade goes to being scum, living in council flats and breeding like rabbits, sadly."

Way too much insightful truth in this. :-) See also R-selection vs. K-selection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
"In ecology, r/K selection theory relates to the selection of combinations of traits in a species that inversely relate parental investment and the quantity and quality of offspring. Each selection seems to promote success in different environments. r-selection species spread parental investment across many offspring whereas K-selected species focus theirs on a few. Neither mode of propagation is intrinsically superior, and they can coexist in the same habitat; e.g., rodents and elephants."

And also some New Yorker or Atlantic article a year or so ago that said, why are people surprised when someone like Bill Clinton or any other successful powerful politician "throws away his career for some fling" when to some extent that is in some sense the whole point evolutionary of amassing power?

All that said, humans have memes as well as genes, and so our behavior also has a moral component with collective social consequences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"Nunez descends into the valley and finds an unusual village with windowless houses and a network of paths, all bordered by curbs. Upon discovering that everyone is blind, Nunez begins reciting to himself the refrain, "In the Country of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is King". He realises that he can teach and rule them, but the villagers have no concept of sight, and do not understand his attempts to explain this fifth sense to them. Frustrated, Nunez becomes angry, but the villagers calm him, and he reluctantly submits to their way of life, because returning to the outside world seems impossible.
    Nunez is assigned to work for a villager named Yacob. He becomes attracted to Yacob's youngest daughter, Medina-Sarote. Nunez and Medina-Sarote soon fall in love with one another, and having won her confidence, Nunez slowly starts trying to explain sight to her. Medina-Sarote, however, simply dismisses it as his imagination. When Nunez asks for her hand in marriage, he is turned down by the village elders on account of his "unstable" obsession with "sight". The village doctor suggests that Nunez's eyes be removed, claiming that they are diseased and are affecting his brain. Nunez reluctantly consents to the operation because of his love for Medina-Sarote. However, at sunrise on the day of the operation, while all the villagers are asleep, Nunez, the failed King of the Blind, sets off for the mountains (without provisions or equipment), hoping to find a passage to the outside world, and escape the valley."

While I loved the cartoon version of "A Connectuct Yankeee in King Arthur's Court", plus similar stories ("Lest Darkness Fall" etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... and even "Coneheads"), in practice, it seems that being significantly different in cultural outlook from a backwards society can be a huge handicap leading to isolation (e.g. "Stranger in a Strange Land" or the religious story Doug Adams called being nailed to a tree 2000 years ago for suggesting people might try being nice to each other).

Another take on all that:
http://www.fromthewilderness.c...
"Start building your lifeboats where you are now. I can see that the lessons I have learned here are important whether you arethinking of moving from city to countryside, state to state, or nation to nation. Whatever shortcomings you may think exist where you live are far outnumbered by the advantages you have where you are a part of an existing ecosystem that you know and which knows you. If the time comes when it is necessary to leave that community you will be better off moving with your tribe rather than moving alone."

What did brilliance in the end get Tesla? Or Semmelweis? Or Shelton? Or Gatto? or CH Douglas? Or Charles Fourier? Or even Galileo? Or Dee Hock founder of Visa and the Chaordic Commons or Michael Philips founder of MasterCard? Or Theodore Sturgeon and "The Skills of Xanadu"? Or Doug Engelbart and "The Mother of All Demos" and the mouse? Or even Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and others with the increasingly forgotten-but-continually-badly-re-invented Smalltalk (e.g. Ruby & Java & many others)? See on Kay in particular:
https://www.google.com/search?...

How many of them have most people even heard of? Yet they provided many of the better ideas that shape our lives today. There are many other mostly forgotten people we could add to that list, even if there may be some small subgroup of fans at some point in time. And the people I list are even on the upper end of the scale as at least having been recognized as mostly ignored or forgotten despite being brilliant, unlike legions of other people who have contributed to society such as those who bred potatoes or apples or rice to the amazing foods we have now.

It's true that the right kind of brilliance in the right circumstance might do well. But in general, no one likes having their paradigms shifted -- even if trying to shift them may sometimes be a moral and practical necessity.

Nothing new, Plato supposedly said it over 2000 years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
"The prisoners, according to Socrates, would infer from the returning one's disorientation (on account of the cave's darkness) that the upward journey out of the cave had damaged him and that they should not undertake a similar journey. Socrates concludes that the prisoners, if they were able, would even reach out and kill any whom attempted to drag them out the cave. (517a)
    Despite the hardships which the returning one would face, Socrates insists that the enlightened must return to the cave in order to share in the lives of the prisoners. By analogy, Socrates is implying that the enlightened philosopher must descend from a continuous intelligible contemplation of the good to share in the visible lives of his fellow citizens for the well-being of the whole. (520a-c)"

You may also be underestimating all the knowledge and skills "caveman" hunter/gatherers have acquired from their culture from birth without which you might fairly quickly starve, be poisoned, be eaten, freeze to death, die of dehydration, die of sickness, or have an accident. Read "The Walking People" by Paula Underwood for example to get a sense of the cultural and practical complexity of such cultures.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Walk...

Anyway, somewhere in the might be a parallel to life as a high functioning autistic person in mainstream society?

"As somebody who's going back to college, I'm really surprised to see how big the "ADD generation" is. They're everywhere, they can't focus, and they have a million ideas at once. I always thought the ADD craze you mentioned was bullshit too, but being around younger people I can see they are considerably different from the people I worked with back when I got my first degree. It really was a night and day difference when switching from being around thirty-somethings to twenty-somethings."

Explained in part: http://www.amazon.com/Supernor...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
http://www.paulgraham.com/addi...

So, always on smartphones full of interesting content are just like sugar-laden donuts -- killing you with a seeming treadmill of pleasure that totally displaces other less-fun-or-pleasurable-in-the-short-term behaviors and nutrients needed for well-rounded health and success.

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

To the extent gluten free helps, I wonder if it may be because it also usually avoids a lot of mainstream junk like foods with artificial colors and flavors that can create general problems? What might just make some other kid a bit cranky or a bit hyper might push some other kid past some meltdown threshold. So, excellent diet (e.g. Dr. Fuhrman, Dr. Hyman) help take away at least some potential problems which autism is going to possibly amplify.

But yes, practical behavioral interventions can make a big difference. One aspect of autism is too many connections in the brain relative to other kids where the neural connections die off in the womb or in the first years. So, what may seem to come more naturally to other kids regarding social norms has to be more explicitly learned. There is some software and books for leaning about facial expressions, for example.

Also perhaps of help are homeshooling/unschooling and free schools that can be more accommodating of strong focus.

Good luck.

http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
http://drhyman.com/blog/2010/1...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/chil...

That said, there are other factors besides sunlight and poor diet (esp. junk food additives etc.) as well as other odd factors like too much vitamin A relative to vitamin D in supplements. Society was more formally structured (with "manners") decades ago, which made it easier to navigate for people on the autistic spectrum. Kids were allowed to be kids a lot more. Mothers spent more time with young kids (including working from home together on farms) rather than farming young kids out to day care and preschool all day. And so on.
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.chrismercogliano.co...

Plus furniture for such "aliens" to sit on: http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Even without DNA manipulation or 3D printing, AI and robotics are rapidly taking us "where no one has gone before". Although, that perhaps ignores slave holding elites throughout the ages, although slaves still had to be managed and could easily revolt?

In many ways, I consider Amazon to be a lot like a 3D printer -- just a very slow one that takes a couple days to print almost anything. Except I don't have that many replication ration units compared to a post-scarcity society, so I still have to make hard choices, plus I feel bad that many people in society can't access the Amazon replicators, which reduces my enjoyment plus makes society a riskier place to be. And I can't easily unprint stuff when I am done with it or want to store it.

By me from a decade ago on funding to create a Star Trek society: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

Practical aspects: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

Political ones: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...

Education ones: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...

Economic ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/medi...

Others: http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...

With enough energy (such as from LENR someday perhaps, or hot fusion, massive solar, or thorium otherwise), almost everything become easy to recycle or clean up, like via huge mass spectrometers used to separate different atoms.
http://www.freeenergytimes.com...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Others who make related points about abundance as well as its challenges to conventional economics:
http://worldtransformed.com/
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
http://www.thelightsinthetunne...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion is a 1998 book by American author Ken Wilber. It reasons that by adopting contemplative (e.g. meditative) disciplines related to Spirit and commissioning them within a context of broad science, that "the spiritual, subjective world of ancient wisdom" could be joined "with the objective, empirical world of modern knowledge". The text further contends that integrating science and religion in this way would in turn, "have political dimensions sewn into its very fabric"."

And see also stuff by Charles Tart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

The mystery of consciousness (where it come from, what it means if anything, where is goes, how it changes, and so on) remains a fundamental unknown and maybe unknowable of our lives on this plane of existence. The uncertainty ranges across all sorts of religious ideas to also include things like whether we are living in a computer simulation or computer game of some sort. That mystery is intertwined with the great mystery of everything.

Both links above are Wikipedia links to show Wikipedia can be useful as a starting point, if you go to it aware of its limits including expecting bias. Here is another example of an article on economics which it seems to me is being aggressively policed for years by a "deletionist" who won't let anything but pro-mainstream-Capitalist economics be on the page regardless of whether the other material includes a citation from a notable published source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...

To avoid being misled by Wikipedia, especially on health issues or economic issues, one must be aware that Wikipedia does suffer from some sort of mainstream bias most areas. Looking at past versions of the pages or related discussion can sometimes help overcome those biases. Example including a recent edit war of reversions in the last month or two:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde...

One alternative to Wikipedia was Google Knol. Aside from being owned by a for-profit with a history of abandoning projects, there was something good to the now-defunct Google Knol with the notion of articles from a point-of-view authored by either one person, a small group, or everyone. Peer review is a form of censorship (several essays on on it on the web), PhD training produces "Disciplined Minds" (the name of an enlightening book), and peer review is getting more problematical with increased competition for funding (see Dr. David Goodstein on "The Big Crunch"),

Related things I've written:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...

And also, on trying to think more deeply together about health and other issues:
https://www.newschallenge.org/...
http://opengov.newschallenge.o...
http://www.changemakers.com/mo...
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...

More on the important of discussion by Hugo Mercier:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes....
"We do not claim that reasoning has nothing to do with the truth. We claim that reasoning did not evolve to allow the lone reasoner to find the truth. We think it evolved to argue. But arguing is not only about trying to convince other people; it's also about listening to their arguments. So reasoning is two-sided. On the one hand, it is used to produce arguments. Here its goal is to convince people. Accordingly, it displays a strong confirmation bias -- what people see as the "rhetoric" side of reasoning. On the other hand, reasoning is also used to evaluate arguments. Here its goal is to tease out good arguments from bad ones so as to accept warranted conclusions and, if things go well, get better beliefs and make better decisions in the end. ...
  Finally, and maybe most importantly, we are not saying that people should not use reasoning. People should use reasoning. But we claim -- and provide a substantial amount of evidence in support of this claim -- that when people reason, they are usually better off reasoning with people who disagree with them rather than with like-minded peers or on their own."

Some future system beyond Wikpiedia is going to have to support two things Wikipedia avoids, while still preserving good aspects of Wikipedia:
* Like Knol, supporting articles from a point-of-view but having multiple such points-of-view for a topic (where such POV articles could split further, like for example Supreme court opinions, which may overlap and also dissent)
* Supporting active discussion about a topic, from which will emerge the range of points-of-view that should be covered in POV articles. This discussion should be supported by a variety of sensemaking tools, including ones developed by the intelligence community precisely to deal with making sense of a variety of points-of-view and a variety of evidence of different qualities.

Perhaps one might argue the world wide web as a whole does all that? Still, it would seem there could be room for improvement with better tools and better standards for encoding such information in machine readable form to link together as a social semantic web or semantic desktop.

Anyway, I continue to work towards such tools and standards in my spare time. My most recent project and proposal in that direction:
http://twirlip.com/
http://twirlip.com/pointrel/po...