Word: contrarian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...formidable contrarian is Bruce Ames, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. He contends that obsessive concern with cancer-causing chemicals in foods, pesticides and toxic wastes has produced a regulatory tangle at EPA and a superfluous Superfund to clean dump sites. Government restrictions on man-made chemicals are absurdly stringent in proportion to ; their risk, says Ames. He notes that while the public panicked last spring because of trace amounts of the synthetic growth regulator Alar found on apples, many fruits contain natural carcinogens in concentrations 1,000 times as great. Observes Ames: "Eating vegetables and lowering...
Chaplain at Yale, leader in the civil rights struggle and the anti-Viet Nam War movement, pastor at New York City's Riverside Church, he is now the head of sane/freeze: Campaign for Global Security. Once a cia operative, Coffin has been a political contrarian for 30 years, seeing himself as the voice of moral opposition to much of what he believes is wrong with his country...
Wurman's prescriptions are sound enough: be a good listener, be a contrarian, avoid gratuitous precision, avoid cliches. He also makes some more or less fresh points: that all information is inherently selective and subjective, and that the mind is not an ultra-complicated computer but a place full of unprogrammable and meaningful lapses, quirks and non sequiturs. Yet as he approvingly predicts the proliferation of directories of directories and a new Secretary of Understanding in the Cabinet, Wurman seems to be suffering from Information Giddiness...
...fact that we face an ecological crisis without any precedent in historic times is no longer a matter of any dispute worthy of recognition. And those who, for the purpose of maintaining balance in debate, take the contrarian view that there is significant uncertainty about whether it's real are hurting our ability to respond...
...charming tutorial student. He allowed that no matter whom Koch endorsed, he hoped they would remain friends. Koch smiled. That was precisely what he had once told former New York Governor Hugh Carey. Gore replied he knew that, having just read Koch's memoirs. Koch smiled again. A contrarian by nature, Koch surprised his advisers by choosing Gore...