conformity and the LDS intellectual cartels

 From the WSJ:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-china-media-lab-leak-climate-ridley-biden-censorship-coronavirus-11627049477?mod=trending_now_opn_4

“Conformity,” Mr. Ridley says, “is the enemy of scientific progress, which depends on disagreement and challenge. Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, as [the physicist Richard] Feynman put it.” 

Mr. Ridley reserves his bluntest criticism for “science as a profession,” which he says has become “rather off-puttingly arrogant and political, permeated by motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.” Increasing numbers of scientists “seem to fall prey to groupthink, and the process of peer-reviewing and publishing allows dogmatic gate-keeping to get in the way of new ideas and open-minded challenge.”

...

In Mr. Ridley’s view, the scientific establishment has always had a tendency “to turn into a church, enforcing obedience to the latest dogma and expelling heretics and blasphemers.” This tendency was previously kept in check by the fragmented nature of the scientific enterprise: Prof. A at one university built his career by saying that Prof. B’s ideas somewhere else were wrong. In the age of social media, however, “the space for heterodoxy is evaporating.” So those who believe in science as philosophy are increasingly estranged from science as an institution.

Know Brother Joseph: New Perspectives on Joseph Smith's Life and Character

A wonderful book has been recently released titled Know Brother Joseph: New Perspectives on Joseph Smith's Life and Character.

It's at Deseret Book here.

It's on Amazon here.

It contains around 42 short chapters that introduce various aspects of Joseph's life. 

For example, Mark Staker offers well-documented detail about Joseph's origins n Vermont.

Janiece Johnson introduces her work on how the early Saints incorporated the Book of Mormon into their own language. 

Jay Parry explains that "Joseph was emotionally sensitive even in his youth."

Predictably, there is the inevitable allusion to the SITH narrative, but fortunately it is brief.

Overall, it's a fine introduction to a variety of interesting topics.

_____

Although short, each chapter includes notes to further resources. In a way, the biggest value of the book is the collection of references.

Unfortunately, this book, both print and digital, continues to reference the printed version of the Joseph Smith Papers. These books are very expensive and are not available in libraries outside the Intermountain west.

I suppose the Joseph Smith Papers project wants people to buy the books, but it is exasperating to continue to see references only to page numbers in the printed books when a simple url would let readers see the material online.

I make it a point in all my books to provide a url whenever possible.

Even the digital version of this book gives references only to the printed books. 

That's right: your Kindle version does not include links to the websites it references. It doesn't even include full urls that you can copy and paste.

True, we can go to https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/ and search for terms, but even if you come up with the optimum search term, you often get multiple results to sift through.

The Joseph Smith Papers could resolve this problem by enabling their search engine to find references based on volume and page number, but they don't.

Here's a typical reference:

Journal, Aug. 23, 1842, in JSP, J2:115-16.

If you go to  and search for J2:115, you get zero results.

If you search for "Journal, Aug. 23, 1842," you get 11 results. The top result takes you to the Aug 18, 1842 letter from Joseph to the Whitney's (not exactly the result you want). The second result references the journal page only in a note, and so on.