When science was the best show in America
m.nautil.us
m.nautil.us
My favorite anecdote is the story of Michael Faraday's unusual education. Being from a blue-collar fundamentalist Christian family he just got an elementary education in reading and arithmetic before apprenticing as a book-binder. However he was an ardent fan of the Royal Society's public science lectures. He eventually wrangled a lab assistantship with the college educated scientist Humphrey Davies, eventually to surpass him in important discoveries.
P.S. in a few months (Sept 21, 1821) is the bicentennial of Faraday's invention of the electric motor- one of the most important inventions of the modern era.
2020 has changed how this done with many of them going online (or in suspension). There are dozens to choose from each week during the academic term. I prefer my alma maters where my alumni email addresses give me automatic registration and I dont have to plead with the gatekeeper.
I am not suggesting everyone need learn quantum mechanics, but a basic, qualitative understanding of "science" (uncertainty, experimentation, theory) would help understanding and decision making. In the case of COVID-19: when I read the breathless reports on vaccine announcements, potential treatments and mitigation techniques, most of the popular discussion is profoundly confused. Likewise on climate change. In both cases, as with so many, the need to describe the story 1 - as a clash or people, or as originating in a person whose backstory must take up most of the article and 2 - the need to push the point of the article close to one pole or another (sometimes made up by the author) completely obscures the point.
This is no way to make policy, or, for that matter, live life.
* I think the degree to which this meme is developed (e.g. "democrats are the party of science") is grossly overplayed, even when there are a couple of convenient examples to point it at.
At school, we all learn basic skills read/write to understand each other. But in today's society, a basic grasp of science, a minimal level of scientific literacy is crucial to swim through our techno-society.
To this day, I cannot picture the void in someone's head that doesn't know how computers work. It would surely give a sour taste of powerlessness. Same can be said about anything that explains how the world around us revolves.
Indeed, the only points of contact between the comments I can find is where you agree with GP comment, namely that scientific literacy is necessary.
maybe 'jojo2000's comment has been changed, but it currently says "I deeply agree," not "I disagree"
Some simpler folks need simple world - if this, then that. Critical thinking, complex topics, more than 1 truth etc are just too much. This yes, this no. This confirms my fears/makes me happy to hear, I will vote for it. Of course they are frustrated. But in much simpler way than you would probably imagine, and for shorter time. And quite possibly they don't know that they don't know how computers work. Look, they can turn it on and click on icon and it works. Mission accomplished.
To be honest my mom also doesn't know how computers work, and she has an university degree in economics from times where it was really hard to even get to university back home.
With that said, I think it mainly refers to actually bullcrap research that sometimes comes out of Western (and for some reason, mostly British) universities. For example, back when radio was a thing and I was listening to it in public transportation, the radio hosts would bring up these faux science papers - e.g. "Some British University found out that chocolate actually helps you lose weight. That's some great news to start off the weekend". And after a million of these papers that were most likely flawed in methodology, misinterpreted by media or simply fake, what would you expect?
That was a hoax to expose bad science reporting, not bad science itself. So the radio fell for it too.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/05/28/410313446/wh...
The catch is high cocoa content chocolate (>80%) is an appetite inhibiter. So the recommendation is that people who need the "sweets/sugar" rush in certain situations to eat a piece of dark chocolate, because it gives them the "rush", but also reduces their appetite, unlike many other sweets which have been designed to want more.
Many words just to say that often this is more about the science reporting than the science.
What isn't, nowadays?
I think that the main problem of the modern education systems is not that people don't learn some basic things, but that they forget that knowledge very fast as they don't use it after they finish their education, and education itself. So everything abstract and not obviously useful for life or job is under constant threat of removal from the programs by the pressure from adults complaining that kids these days learn too much unnecessary things as these adults forgot what these things were for.
As an alternative I imagine a system where education never stops, so for example instead of a person abruptly leaving an education institution and starting a job we would have a gradual change in the number of days in the week dedicated to the education and to the work, with at least one day (I propose Wednesday as a middle of the work week) staying dedicated to the education for the rest of the live.
I understand that it all sounds very idealistic and hackernewsish because for the most people the school is a kind of jail that they want to leave as soon as possible, but seems like Scandinavian model sort of solved that. And of course all education must be public and free.
Individual Democrats are often scientifically ignorant, on a wide variety of issues. But they haven't made hostility to science a party party platform, the way it has for a long time with climate change and evolution.
but that show has so much more competition nowadays, with the scope of information exploding from local communities to the whole world (and beyond), because of technology, that exploits our natural social tendencies to peer at each other to see where we stand. now we're trying to hopelessly keep track of so many more people than we can keep in our heads, which creates the winner-take-all mechanics we see around us everywhere and that traps our collective attentions. whether we like it or not, we're building a global social hierarchy to replace millions of local ones.
how this is good or bad in the long run is a fascinating show in itself (even if each atomic unit of attention-seeking is trite).
Framing it as a competition for supremacy against other countries really seemed to get people with different political views to unite.
I'm not advocating for returning to the political and social climate of the 50's and 60's, there's a lot of obvious problems in that time period too. But it was striking to realize how intertwined politics, society, and science was, and still is.
It makes me think the solution to today's anti science bias isn't just "educate more".
Based on my reading of history, it seems unlikely that this day will ever come through voluntary means, so I wonder if it could be brought about organically via incremental improvements. I wonder what percentage of people can agree on the general notion of whether the aggregate actions of the media divides people, for now completely leaving aside whether this is intentional or not. It would be fun and informative if HN had polls on questions like this, and perhaps could even lead somewhere.
> It makes me think the solution to today's anti science bias isn't just "educate more".
I agree. It's weird how outside of technology and science, we insist on coming up with solutions before even trying to analyze what the problem is, while simultaneously complaining about people being anti-science.
Now, society is getting back to explore science more and more, but with a better, lasting attitude. See, for example, Space X. Likely, they'll send someone to Mars without deaths or even huge accidents that could only be justified by a lack of financial responsibility in NASA's early days.
I think it’s premature to claim SpaceX will make it to Mars without deaths. They’ve only done two manned space flights to LEO at this point. While it does appear to be easier, cheaper, and safer to send people to space, sending people to Mars has never done before. It is going to be extremely dangerous.
All launches of Mercury era rockets had non-crewed test flights of the spacecraft. And they were on proven boosters. One benefit of using ICBMs is they start out autonomous.
Both launch vehicles for Gemini (Atlas and Titan) were again completely autonomous because they were ICBMs. They were tested and proven before astronauts flew them.
The first Saturn V launch was not crewed.
As I understand all US spacecraft were largely autonomous, especially in the boost phase.
SpaceX has refined that to automate docking but it’s not new.
I’m not sure NASA was financially irresponsible. They were doing things for the first time. Mistakes are going to be made, lessons were learned. That’s even true of SpaceX.
If your prediction that SpaceX gets people to mars with no deaths turns out to be true it will be because of NASA, not in spite of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_crisis
The common enemy went from Anarchism (WWI) to Communism (WWII) to Terrorism (WoT), but now it's each other; the Left's common enemy is the Right, and vice versa. I'll let the reader surmise where that will lead.
The common enemy of both is the moderate in the middle who prefers rational discussion to confrontation.
Which is why center is loosing alot. Except in presidential elections, IMO both Biden and Obama are center by any reasonable definition. Even Clintons were center, but she lost, so.
In my experience, a moderate is a conservative in all things that effect them, and a liberal for anything else.
Most moderates I know revile anything that might effect change, until it effects change. And once the change is implemented, they bristle at anything that might change that.
No political block gets to claim the province of rationality in a world where political disputes are as much about values as they are about coherent policies.
While obviously a generalization, this is very insightful. I never thought of this before, and I admit I might be a moderate.
A hypothetical moderate might believe all of the following:
* Gay marriage should be illegal
* Abortion should be legal
* Firearm rights are important
* Taxes on large businesses and wealthy people should be much higher
* NATO should be scrapped
* The USA should bomb Iran and Syria
* Free markets are good
* Free trade is bad
This person has too many strong and politically diverse viewpoints to consistently back either major US party, and ends up voting based on whichever candidate most effectively signals alignment with the small number of policies the “moderate” voter currently feels most strongly committed to.
It’s easy for someone to come across as a “moderate” if they have a different primary motive for policy preference. A devout catholic might believe that both abortion and firearm ownership should be strictly forbidden, which is hard to fit into either party platform. Someone with a commitment to individual liberty might support gay marriage, unrestricted abortion access, drug legalization, free markets, free trade, and low taxes; very hard to reconcile with a party platform.
These days science is viewed as a means to various ends. These ends are all wonderful...eliminate poverty, curtail climate change, cheaper energy, etc. But what's missing is the idea of doing something for the sake of doing it. It's not totally clear what landing on the moon or maintaining a space station really accomplished in terms of material goals. They're glorious accomplishments because of their difficulty.
I think that attitude is what's missing. Listening to JFK's "we will go to the moon" speech is almost unbelievable today. Politicians of either party absolutely cannot talk like that today.
Climate change is also a similarly difficult problem, but neither of this gives a Hollywood movie style ending in a capsule format the “we are the greatest” crowd really wants - not just America though . Humility, empathy, and non-military-gained peace doesn’t give a movie style ending.
This is also why the mass public doesn’t give credit to leaders for solving issues though diplomatic means
The point about JFK’s moon speech is that it was justifying an endeavor that was a hard challenge without any particularly useful outcome. Nobody thought it was going to solve world hunger or prevent an energy crisis.
It would be like Trump giving a speech to justify sending astronauts on a trip around Venus. It’s super difficult and mostly useless scientifically.
Post-moon, human spaceflight programs seem to be have been largely directionless. The early space stations were probably originally meant as a stepping stone to developing orbital habitation, but the fact that we haven't really expanded much further makes it look more like faffing about. The US developed the space shuttle with the intention of building a low-cost, human-driven satellite launch and servicing service, but the only real success it had there was the Hubble. Instead, a lot of the real purpose probably lies more in geopolitical goals: the US-USSR cooperation helped drive some amount of detente. The ISS in particularly was driven in large part by a desire to keep ex-Soviet rocket engineers gainfully employed and not seek employment with rogue states looking to rapidly develop a missile program.
Is there any documentation of this?
Retroactively misattributing human action to fulfill a moral narrative produces a distorted view of the world, conducive to making dangerously naive mistakes.
That the space program was a friendly front for a highly visible ICBM program doesn't negate the glorious achievement of reaching the moon.
Not everyone working on the space program particularly cared about missiles. I'm certain most of them probably just wanted to reach the moon in the spirit of patriotism and scientific advancement. Their victory was pure. We just shouldn't pretend that their project was only facilitated due to a confluence of circumstances that made it a political necessity.
Friedman, and Zeihan have both proven very prescient over the last decade or so.
Besides, I hardly think there's a lot of latitude for interpretation. As far back as 1958 the USAF was mulling over nuking the moon as a show of force with incidental scientific ramifications. Sagan was involved in it. [0]
I think willfully ignoring those parts of the story stretch credulity within the context where the events of the space race happened borders on historical revisionism for the sake of creating a moral parable about the virtues of human endeavor.
There's a reason we talk about the Space Race and not the International Geophysical Year. Popular and political support for the Apollo and predecessor programs were ultimately driven by the geopolitical goals, and once the Space Race had been "won," that support dwindled to the normal, pitiful scientific research levels. Spaceflight and space research reverted to just being yet another scientific field trying to catch a few drips of the governmental funding pipeline. It's the sad truth here.
This isn't to say that all science is driven by geopolitics. A lot of high-energy physics research isn't, for example (although supporters of the SCC did try to frame cancelling it thusly to try to preserve its funding, though they ultimately failed).
Now the average Joe is pretty fucked, so blaming someone else is a successful strategy.
The promise of prosperity sounds like a long con these days. Science was the gateway for prosperity and hope and now it seems only to deliver bad news.
Here is what the tech and science crowd is projecting these days:
You are no longer the center of the universe, you are infinitesimal and unimportant.
Everything you do is destroying life in someway.
There is no meaning; everything you believe was wrong and misguided.
The world is capricious and your personal security can change at any moment no matter how hard you work. Adapt or die.
Most of humanity is too dumb to understand how great this is!
Who wants to hear that?
The average Joe has lost all faith, so in order to cope they drop all pretense of rational behavior and go with what feels good at the moment.
Science is telling people that everyone driving 20k miles per year in large individual vehicles and flying to a tropical island twice a year for vacation will eventually result in altering the parameters of nature so that it’s no longer possible to do that.
People don’t want to hear that, but they need to hear that. Covering their ears and going lalalala isn’t going to exempt their kids from the future. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem most people are adult enough to face the music.
The first restriction is so alien to much of the population as to be meaningless, the second is a threat to their livelihoods. An accompanying promise of public transit rings hollow for many Americans, who think of their local governments as only marginally competent enough to fill potholes in the road sometimes.
Naturally people will bristle at the abstract of many climate restrictions. Not because the fun will stop, but because they aren't having any fun in the first place, and they just don't want things to get less fun than that.
Then the problem is not that people don't understand the science, it's that profit-seeking entities pay money to muddy the waters and people whose paycheck depends on the non-acceptance of the truth choose to believe the convenient lie.
Worse, because it then becomes a political issue, the side that was originally right starts to fight anyone who says anything at all convenient to the other tribe, even if it's correct.
So you lose the ability to do good science because both sides are polluted by politics and money.
Both socially and economically, the average American was doing ok then compared to today.
Although it must also be said: norms and laws around same sex marriage and Drugs were different too, so this analysis certainly leaves out those parts of American society affected by them.
The legacy of the unfinished great society, the accommodation of racists and poor infrastructure choices is already haunting us.
I'm not old enough to remember but from what I've read, when the Soviets launched Sputnik, the American public was shocked having SSSR machine passing over them and they can't do anything about it and don't have anything to match the soviets. They believed that the USA was the frontrunner in technology but the Sputnik demonstrated that this may not be the case.
So from my understanding, the technology become a populist agenda as a result of that.
It's also interesting to watch old American movies like Rocky or Top Gun where the Soviets are portrayed as the more technologically advanced nation but Americans prevail thanks to their spirit and courage.
Maybe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, science and technology got a pushback in popular culture? When you come to the end of the 90's and the beginning of the 2000's you have movies like Fight Club and Matrix denounce technology as the destroyer of the society or humanity. You even have Lord of the Rings trilogy that tells an epic story about an industrialist who dares to start a mass production and tech research, meritocracy instead of race but "the good guys" are those who are deeply involved keeping the world as-is for thousands of years and value separation between races, masters and servants.
And what we have now? Red pills, blue pills, black pills from the Matrix, quest to restore the manliness from Fight Club, race separation, leader worship and and looking down to technology and multiculturalism from Lord of the Rings. Half Joke, half serious of course :)
Maybe in the movie, but as far as I know LOTR movies did no changes related to that.
And in LOTR Sauron was neither promoting meritocracy nor against racism.
While in TLR more industrialised side was not depicted negatively.
So even if it is referring to TLR then it still makes no sense.
All the good-guy societies are deeply hierarchical. Even Frodo and Samwise, who ought to be equals, immediately fall into “gentleman with his valet” patterns: “Please, Mr. Frodo, sir.”
Anyway, I’m not totally convinced, but with just 5 minutes of remembering I’m finding plenty of material, so you could probably find a counter-narrative with study.
Parts that were shown included plenty of violence, treachery, oppression including slavery and other mistreatment (all included also orcs as victims).
With basically no reward for merit.
> All the good-guy societies are deeply hierarchical.
Yes, but the same is true for evil ones.
And if anything, good guys have less extreme hierarchies. Especially hobbits.
But even then, this analogy falls apart immediately. The uruk-hai were designer soldiers that were the best troops in the army because, you know, they were designed to be the best class of troops.
I do not know of any details in LOTR that goes into the promotion policies of the officers of Sarumans military.
I have not read LOTR and got about 10 pages into the Silmarillion before giving up, but my understanding is that Tolkien designed his world meticulously. If he didn't go into detail on this matter I have to assume that it was for a purpose, possibly either of avoiding unfortunate implications by comparison or of enhancing the dehumanized characterization of the, er, foreign hordes.
Outside of the fandom, LOTR is commonly understood to be problematic in its treatment of "race" and social structure, at least wrt contemporary society and its necessities for peace, order, and dignity. I don't know that this is a controversial take at all.
I do find it funny you reference movies almost entirely from the 90s in you conclusion, movies over 20 years old.
No, the late 70s-80s gave us Terminator, Alien, The Day After, War Games, RoboCop, Cyberpunk, and on and on. There was definitely a palpable distrust and fear of technology even back then. Under the shadow of the bomb, you had people coming to terms with more and more of their world being run by big mainframes in far-away office buildings, whose arcane workings you could maybe get a glimpse of through text on a abyssal screen. I actually wrote a short essay exploring this and the notion that people haven't actually become any more comfortable with technology as it really is, only the increasingly friendly interfaces we interact with. I'd post it, but a few months after I wrote it, I realized that the file had become corrupt and that the first weekly back up of it had come a couple days after when that corruption was likely to have happened.
Robocop did question the technology but also the good guy was a half robot.
Blade Runner is a good example about a tech dystopia but the story is ultimately about the machines quest to be humans, not to destroy them.
If we're being honest, there's a small confluence in that Soviets were often portrayed as robotic, and anxieties about Communism were often pushed onto various movie monsters: robots, aliens, zombies. I think the common denominator is "Future Shock," fear of radical changes in society (that book was 1970).
There are people who do work of all kind all the time but when the public is ready to take it it becomes iconic, that is, it represents the psyche of the popular culture. Sometimes when the public is ripe and there's no current work of art to match the public, you can see old movies, books and music that went mostly unnoticed for years suddenly become popular.
So, it's not like movies/books/music push public opinion but they can become icons of an idea. A materialisation of a thought that people were trying to put into words but they couldn't until they read a book, watch a movie, listen to music.
Sometimes the creators of the art hate it when their work becomes an icon of something they do not support.
One other thing to note of the pre/post-Soviet dissolution sci-fi media: the contrast of dominance over the enemy vs surviving within a status quo that is unlikely to change. That may be part of why you see protagonists "befriending" AI; it's more a reflection of hope than expectation. Once you get to post-9/11 media, relationships with AI become more complex and nuanced: I, Robot, Ex Machina, Her, Transcendence. (Perhaps a reflection of our decidedly mixed, toward the negative side, experiences in the Middle East; as well as the multiple crises that threatened the "end of society" and the subsequent recoveries, all within a generation.)
Really depends who's in power. By the 2000s, film people were obsessed with litigating 9/11, the Iraq war, etc. Avatar comes to mind. Looking at ultra big name top budget stuff, it's going to be a product of its time because that's what's marketable.
M.I.A. has some cuckoo beliefs, but her performance aesthetics and her harping on giant Internet and media companies was wildly ahead of its time. Was that anti-technology?
YouTube is the populist agenda, it is the #1 Internet time sink, did people want technology or did they want free music and TV? How are you supposed to advance an anti-audience agenda?
I don't recall the USSR being portrayed as a more technologically advanced nation in Top Gun, and they absolutely weren't in Rocky (in Rocky IV they were portrayed as more committed to using the power of the state without ethical boundaries in sport)
> When you come to the end of the 90's and the beginning of the 2000's you have movies like Fight Club and Matrix denounce technology as the destroyer of the society or humanity.
Maybe the Matrix; Fight Club focussed on consumerism and blind capitalism, not technology (and even then, the attack on it was literally a manifestation of mental illness.)
But since I mentioned Terminator, it bears more discussion here too. Terminator plays on the apocalyptic fears of that era with an technological antagonist who is literally from the future, and greatly predates the Matrix in that respect: as "dangers of technology" stories go, it's one of the most influential of our time. But even before Terminator there was a cultural moment in the USA that precipitated this fear. It happened, as a lot of things, between the late 60's and early 70's, through a culmination of events: The civil rights and gay liberation movements, the moon landings, the birth of UNIX and modern telecommunications, the shift away from the post-war economy towards the neoliberal regime, the Vietnam war, and yet more.
One of the reasons why the 70's feel less clearly articulated in outlook is because the reactions to all these events were still forming. The conservative and anti-technological backlash to this era's progressive breakthroughs found a voice through a mix of vigilante narratives like Death Wish and Dirty Harry, and slasher horror like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and then as time went on, in post-apocalyptic fiction as well, like the Turner Diaries(explicitly white supremacist and championing a death-cult outlook).
A common thread in this is that the Soviets are just one more shape of the Other, often never even appearing onscreen, but playing a role in the pantheon of threats to society regardless. And so by the time you get to Rocky IV the narratives are simply blended together: Ivan Drago might as well be fighting on behalf of Skynet, and Apollo Creed's place in the series is often a stand-in for race relations, in this case using his death as a punctuation - it is white America that must fight for survival.
The Matrix, then, is in its own way a development and turning point to these tropes. While Neo does act as a "white savior", the critique of technology is through its efforts embodied in Agent Smith to give up his crusade and push him back into the system - into normative white society.
In general, it's more the exception than the rule for any of these stories to be technology-centric, rather using it as one of several themes.
You can read a bit about it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_deficit_model
I don't understand how such big heads cannot understand such a simply basic human situation, and instead they produce videos talking about the scientific method, as if Mr. average Joe is going to go download some papers and datasets and spend thousands of hours reproducing the results.
It's a bit like free software. Why use it? Do you personally go through every source code of every application you use or do you just trust in the community? Now what if I spread a conspiracy theory that actually some big maintainer is injecting malware and other free software developers are in cahoots with him? You might think such a conspiracy theory is ridiculous but others might find it compelling.
What specifically are you referencing here?
I completely agree with you that we need a lot more science explainers. There are already a lot of good content on eg YT, but no doubt it’s not something that gets surfaced to most viewers.
In school, nobody really taught me what the scientific method was. I was never told that Science isn’t just “gospel truths” like scriptures but instead (essentially) this growing body of peer reviewed papers that are used to form a shared understanding of the principles by which we believe the world works.
Meanwhile YT is swarmed with conspiracy theories almost daily, because it’s so fucking easy to make a stupid shocking conspiracy video.
The depressing thing is that people really do genuinely believe this nonsense, and it is the source of much despair in their lives.
Not being a religious person, I classify religious beliefs on the same level as conspiracy theories. Except that, most of the older ones have been refined by religious scholars over centuries to at least be interpreted in socially advantageous ways.
For example regarding climate change: you can construct an argument around the ridiculous idea that scientists are somehow taking on the worldwide fossil fuel industries, and the most powerful and ruthless countries on earth, including the US, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, and they are doing this because by inventing a lie about the earth warming up. The very lopsided power dynamics in this scenario expose the conspiracy theory for the farce that it is.
"Anti-science" is just a propaganda term extremists accuse each other of being. It's a very easy tell.
Nobody is against science. What people fight about is politics. "Man can be a woman", "climate science", "masks vs no masks", "lockdowns", etc are not scientific issues, it's political issues.
"Educate more" wouldn't help because it's not a matter of science, but politics. And there are plenty of educated people on both sides.
Also, when a political group tries to use science to push their agenda, people should be wary. Pretty much all the genocides and horrors of the past 200 years have been a result of politicized science. People forget that modern white supremacy, nazism, communism, etc are all a result of politicized science. People who use terms like anti-science today are the same people who accused supporters of racial equality as being anti-science 100 years ago.
And it's been my experience that people who accuse other people of being "anti-science" have no background in science or understand the history of science. They are just political extremists who undeservedly wrap themselves around the good name of science as if it were a flag to attack their political opponents.
The problem is climate policy determines climate science.
> I also think the blame for that can be placed squarely with those who have chosen to attack institutions of scientific truth
"Institutions of scientific truth". Sounds rather orwellian, but yours is a form of appeal to authority. Institutions don't determine "scientific truth", experiments do.
> because they are opposed to policy that might result from what is clearly true.
Spoken like a true believer.
> Blame the politicization of "science" on the pro oil propagandists that put in the effort to make it that way
Enough blame to go around. And you aren't any better than the oil propagandists.
> The naive "pro-science" stance is a reaction.
Yes. Oil companies funded the oil propagandists. Who is funding the "green" propagandists. I wonder?
Societal policy and morality were issues for politicians and priests, scientists (though they did occasionally chime in). The USSR's technological progress served as a constant reminder that science was an epistemological tool, and not a teleological one.
The public was also directly downstream from the benefits of scientific advancement. Microwave ovens, color televisions, better engine, cheap refrigeration, the increasing ubiquity of plastics, and the jobs they all brought with them were conspiring to raise the American standard of living by leaps and bounds over a short period of time, and automating away many of life's greatest inconveniences. Almost every technological leap raised the tide of human experience, and every boat was lifted along with it.
Science was also the bulwark between the country, and the USSR. The advent of the nuclear bomb showed us how awesomely destructive and game changing a technological advance could be in the field of war. By the mid fifties, it was generally understood that if the US didn't have a riposte for every possible Soviet weapon, then the US could not continue to exist.
Scientific advancement was material, it was flashy, you could touch it. Rocket engines propelled humans beyond heights previously imagined, and jets shrank the world exponentially. Helicopters flew unlike anything we'd ever seen before, and even primitive computers performed mathematical calculations on their own with unprecedented speed and efficiency.
Today, science has advanced much more subtly, especially since the maturation of the microprocessor in the mid 2010s. Many of our physical advancements are refinements to technologies established in the 50s and 60s, rather than fantastical new applications of hitherto unknown physical phenomena.
Advances in material sciences and automation offer large increases in performance for industrial applications, but at the potential cost of employment, in exchange for often only marginal increases at the high-end of consumer products.
The lion's share of consumer-facing advancements in automation in particular, has been developed to manipulate, cajole, and to track our every choice. Our refrigerators remind us we need milk, our coffee makers try to protect us from unlicensed nonproprietary coffee blends. We can't share what we buy, because new technology ensures that we can only license. Every minor convenience we receive is another bar in a gilded cage being constructed around us.
More transformative advances are so abstract as to be inapplicable to the average person's life, too expensive to leveraged, or squirreled behind the closed doors of military and industry.
Scientifically sound advice for society is no longer liberating. Stay indoors, don't work. Get rid of your cars, they're bad for the earth. The words of scientists anymore often advise caution and restriction.
Science is now less often treated as a tool, and more a cudgel to justify social and economic policies. Politicians will launder their beliefs policies through lopsided studies to give their ideologies an air of impenetrable objectivity
A large handful of the population has sought to fill the existential/moral/purposeful void in their lives by looking to our scientists and technologists as if it were a new church. This is perhaps inspired by the legends of 20th century scientists, and profundities of great scientific communicators such as Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
These people tend to be incapable of differentiating between a scientifically sound policy regime meant to fulfill goals that align with their value system, and 'the will of science'.
Others, objecting to these policy regimes, not knowing better, assume these people are right about the 'will of science', and throw the baby out with the bathwater, rejecting scientific knowledge outright, ignoring that nothing about science as an epistemological framework is reasonably morally prescriptive.
'Science says' has become shorthand for _"A group of academics or liberals want this, they think they know how they can get there, no it's not up for debate'_. So most people who don't believe in a neoliberal future ignore, reject, and sneer at the use of the term.
Through all these things, the brand of 'science' has been diluted, and tarnished to the point where much of the population no longer takes it seriously. Especially since 'science based' policies are occasionally accompanied by white lies meant to coerce people into behaving a certain way.
Everything through the grant applications, working with different industries and government groups, presenting our results. Everything ended up being political.
Our data ended up being locked behind a paid government database against the approved plan in our grant application. This came shortly, coincidentally after we ended up discovering an endangered species in an area they hadn't been found before near an active mine site.
I also seen first hand as a wetland restoration project was carried out for absolutely no reason after water samples in a lake pointed to the town golf course being the problem.
Sampling was immediately stopped, there was no more talk of the golf course and a project was approved to mitigate lake pollution by building a wetland on the opposite side of the lake away from the golf course.
Tens of thousands of dollars were wasted on this project. The lake's just as polluted as ever. But the town council just couldn't not have the greenest, green on their golf course.
The whole actual issue was fertilizer run off from the course and it was totally ignored.
With society and the economy completely dependent on science to function, doing science now has a certain speaking truth to power aspect, in that scientific results can threaten wealthy established interests. This does not make science entirely popular among the kind of people who write the mental firmware for the 'America first' crowd.
Several large piles of money have waged deliberate campaigns against public faith in the results of the scientific process [0], and this will certainly have had an impact on public faith in science.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/big-tobacco-kept-cancer-risk-in...
An excert: < "“Whatever the reason we first mustered the _Apollo_ program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of _Apollo_. What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival.
Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again.”
Manuscript: https://www.loc.gov/item/cosmos000039
Here's an amusing quote:
“Mr. Peale’s animals reminded me of Noah’s Ark, into which was received every kind of beast and creeping thing in which there was life. But I can hardly conceive that even Noah could have boasted of a better collection.”
The idea that a there is a golden age of pure truth and reason against which the forces of chaos rallied is as old as time. That itself is the myth of excoriation by which we organize classes of the cognoscenti: there are those who know the original truth and those who do not.
I think rather than pit reason and truth against the circus of spectacle we have to embrace the latter as the former and include everyone in the know, with a laugh.
When someone say they believe in Science, it means they subscribe to fact and evidence based reasoning. And that if there are evidence or facts that overturns their current belief, they'll gladly accept it.
There are no such equivalence in religion.
Agreed that this is the dominant narrative in global culture. However my point is that science appears to be fairly poor at building universal belief, which is something religion excelled at with scientific precision. There are advantages and disadvantages to both cultures. One disadvantage is organizing ourselves around something like global climate change where scientific consensus is near unanimous, but the culture at large is very slow to heed. Religion is very good at getting masses of people to do what they are told regardless of their best interest. Look at the American religious voter for example.
My point is that if science is more than a methodology, if it is a cultural spectacle, then it's probably wise for us all to admit that it is in fact very much like a religion. I am saying that science as a cultural reality can benefit from dropping the claim to be better than, or something other than a religion.
Don't stone me for saying so.
Can you elaborate on this? What, exactly, is this universal belief?
On your statement of scientific precision -what do you mean by "scientific" and "precise"?
I'm trying to follow what you're saying in this discussion, but it's difficult because we do not share the same definitions. EG, you seem to be using science in place where I would use "process for iterating to meet a goal". To me, science is trying to prove yourself wrong a million ways, so you can sort of accept that the null hypothesis is wrong.
Put another way - I would be ecstatic to see undeniable objective proof of a deity. Religious believers would not be similarly happy to have one of their core beliefs destroyed. The difference is religious beliefs are fragile to disorder; scientific beliefs are anti-fragile.
So why not?
My argument is simple. Modern science does not concern itself with telling people what they want to hear to maintain authoritative reality. Religion was a science of telling people what they wanted to hear to maintain authoritative reality. Same methodology, different paradigm. Different objective.
My point is that either way, you area generating reality. So we say, yes but science is more accurate as true, so we have washers and dryers and cars and medicine. But we also have atom bombs and given extinction event and multiple potential ways to wipe ourselves out. We are also more ideologically divided than in any period in history, I'd argue, and precisely when it is most necessary that we be informed and unified.
So science is a more powerful paradigm for building certain technocultural realities at the expense of others. I would say it fails in ways that the older science of cultural uniformity and authority succeeded.
> the scientufic world view is pretty clear on the abortion issue, yet whole voting blocks reject right to choose
What is the scientific consensus about abortion? Do you mean the question of consciousness? That's an important component, but it's not an answer to a challenging ethics question. 55-60% of voters are pro-choice in the US[0], btw.
I don't think voters vote based on the science. This is unfortunate in areas like climate change, but not all that relevant in morality-driven context, like for abortion.
> But we also have atom bombs and given extinction event and multiple potential ways to wipe ourselves out. We are also more ideologically divided than in any period in history.
Is your point here that we have applied science to develop things that are used for good as well as bad? That's uncontroversial, but I'm not sure how that supports your point that modern science tells people what they want to hear to maintain authoritative reality (what the heck is authoritative reality, anyhow?)
> We are also more ideologically divided than in any period in history, I'd argue, and precisely when it is most necessary that we be informed and unified
It might feel this way - it does to me! - but, frankly, I don't think you can accurately measure modern, much less historical, things like "dividedness" or "[it is now] most necessary to be informed and unified".
I'm not going to argue that there aren't big, important, hard problems to solve. But I also think this type of handwringing tone is unsupported by objective evidence.
> So science is a more powerful paradigm for building certain technocultural realities at the expense of others.
Do you mean expense of other realities, like religion? That makes sense -- when one paradigm proves superior to another in describing reality, it is natural that it will replace the less-useful model.
What we currently are focused on is a very small slice of reality. I don't see much reason to think these are new problems, or that they're unique.
> I would say it fails in ways that the older science of cultural uniformity and authority succeeded.
We do know what a lot of the costs for uniformity and authority are. Especially when carried out by imperfect humans - that's what leads to the Inquisition, or racism, or any of the other base instincts we seek to reduce.
[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-abortion-debate-isn...
The latter is what happens when scientifically illiterate people are spreading scientific news. Scientism is treating science as religion, as infallible, as the bringer of truth, while forgetting what science really is; the doubts, the uncertainties, the falsifiability, the hypotheses, the process.
I think this XKCD illustrates it nicely: https://xkcd.com/882/
I don't dispute the difference between the scientific method and the mythological one. All I'm saying is that religion had at it's heart a hard science and mythology was it's product. I am sorry saying that modern science produces mostly mythodology as well. I don't claim that everyone has to agree, but this is how it looks to me.
So I see a world around me made of scientism. Yet you never hear the word, and certainly it's not a legitimate sounding word. So I go a step further and say, our modern religion is science which produces the mythodology which we consume. I think it's a valid position. But of course no dominant paradigm likes to consider it's falacies.
I don't think so. Science has far less variance between cultures than religion. Math, physics, chemistry, etc are largely the same across cultures. Meanwhile diversity and antagonism between religions is extremely high.
The biggest difference is that with science only experts get to truly participate in science. With religions every believer is participating either through prayers, religious gatherings, religious holidays, etc.
To your second point, it was similar when monks were the only ones who could read. But everyone can own a lighter or watch a tv - these are the artifacts and participatory culture of the scientific "religion". I'd argue that they are superior in some ways but inferior in others.
It is explicitly the role of a Prophet, Messiah, Bodhisattva, etc. to do such things — introduce new evidence that overturns or convolutes current beliefs
The day to day practice of all established religions involves reasoning through a historical lineage of commentaries on existing evidence and continually appending to it with new instances. Religion exists at the intersection of jurisprudence (what should be?) and the scientific method (what is true?). Both Law and Science are human philosophies that directly descended from religious primitives.
Really? I think you are confusing the scientific worldview, which is diametrically opposed to religious culture--religious culture says certain beliefs are declared to be not open to question at all, no matter how much your intelligence wants to question them; the scientific worldview says all beliefs are open to question, no matter how much you think they're right--with pronouncements made by particular scientists to lay people, which often do seem like certain beliefs are being treated more like religious beliefs.
It is true that modern society contains pretty fundamentally opposed religious vs scientific factions. My point isn't to take sides but to point out that what you are calling religion is some kind of oppositional faction defined by rejecting scientific fact. It wasn't always the case. But you should judge the nature of religious culture objectively and scientifically, not by it's worst modern manifestations.
Religious reality was originally and for thousands of years the only reality, and it's proponents would have argued as strongly against any alternating philosophy, just at you proclaim that scientific realism is reality and reject any other.
My argument is that scientific culture resemblance to religious culture isn't coincidence, it's the nature of belief in social systems. Meanwhile science culture could learn worlds from religious culture which in my view was very much a science of authority and social unification. That's to say that religious cultural realism was more effective at generating belief and that's because it was a science of generating belief.
No, it isn't, it's a description. I described what I mean by "scientific worldview" and by "religious culture". It should be evident from my descriptions that the two things I described are diametrically opposed. I think my descriptions have fairly captured the two world views in question. If you disagree, by all means make an argument; but just calling my descriptions "dogma" is not an argument.
> which is exactly the feature of religion you claim to have surpassed as a scientific person
I have made no such claim. I explicitly contrasted the scientific worldview with the behavior of individual persons. I also said nothing about "surpassing" anything.
> My point isn't to take sides but to point out that what you are calling religion is some kind of oppositional faction defined by rejecting scientific fact.
Again, if you disagree with my description of "religious culture", by all means make an argument for a different description. My description certainly does not describe all aspects of religion; but I think I have focused in on a key aspect that makes religious culture different from the scientific worldview.
> Religious reality was originally and for thousands of years the only reality
The level of historical ignorance in this statement is staggering. A true statement would be that humans have had religions for as far back as we have historical evidence. But that is a much, much weaker statement than your claim here.
> just at you proclaim that scientific realism is reality and reject any other
I have said no such thing. I have no idea what you are responding to, but it isn't anything I said.
> scientific culture resemblance to religious culture isn't coincidence
Before you start making claims about why such a resemblance exists, you first have to establish that it exists. You have not done that.
I'll give an alternate definition of religion that I think is compatible with a scientific world view rather than oppositional: religion is an ancient applied science of managing authority and consent in large groups of people. That's the reality it dealt with, just as modern science might deal with materials or biology.
I don't mean to give you a hard time. This topic is very difficult to talk about given the intense factions around it. But that's why it's important to talk about it even if it makes folks mad at you initial. Sorry if I irritated you.
Where have I said that?
I have said that science has a much better track record of generating true beliefs than religion does. That is not the same as saying religion never generates true beliefs or never looks at facts.
> religion is an ancient applied science of managing authority and consent in large groups of people
This is an interesting hypothesis, but note a key implication: that this "applied science" involves generating and propagating false beliefs. And given that, an easy alternate way of contrasting the religious worldview with the scientific worldview would be that the scientific worldview does not consider generating and propagating false beliefs to be a good thing. That's not to say science never does that, just that in science, it's considered a bug, whereas in religion, by your description, it's considered a feature.
Also, the term "applied science" implies that there is an actual scientific theory that is being applied. Religion does not have any theory at all about "managing authority and consent in large groups of people". It does that in practice, but it doesn't have any theory about it. So "applied science" is a misnomer in this case: a better term would be "art", as in "religion is an ancient art of managing authority and consent in large groups of people".
Also reminds me of :
"The Use and Abuse of Witchdoctors for Life"
https://samzdat.com/2017/06/19/the-use-and-abuse-of-witchdoc...
I'd say that as a science of authority the theory is clear to those who seek to benefit from the cultural practice. A hypothesis such as "there is only one God" isn't powerful because it's true in the modern sense of having been through a rigorous scientfic process, it's powerful because it results in greater authority relative to other cultural symbolisms. Religion is a science that tests narratives and symbols and cultural signs for effective ability to leverage and maintain authority.
I don't dispute that modern science generates more factual reality, but I think there's a big question around the idea of truth and belief you raise. Truth and belief are difficult to quantify. I understand that you mean when you say "generate true belief", but it's a philosophically tough position to hold. If I claim that "God is love" you will have an impossible time proving that is not true, or that I don't believe it. You might say "the earth is a sphere" is the more true, scientfic statement, but until you have a lot of definitive context for each statement relative to the believer you don't really know how accurate either is.
I think the argument falls apart further in any attempt to evaluate the value of belief. If 90% of people believe in God but 60% reject climate change, does that make climate change less real? I would say no, but I'm the same token you would have to agree that scientfic speaking it is easier to believe in God than climate change. My question is, what makes God so easy to believe in? I would say one could produce a sound theory about why it's so easy to believe in God, and the folks who made him up were thoroughly versed in that theory. These were the scientific minds of their times.
As I understand it in the classical definition science is a branch of art as art is the more general term.
I'm not sure whether you are just historically ignorant or whether you are being deliberately obtuse. The proposition that the Earth is a sphere makes plenty of specific predictions which were confirmed observationally as long ago as ancient Greece.
> If 90% of people believe in God but 60% reject climate change, does that make climate change less real?
What percentage of people believe a proposition is irrelevant from the standpoint of science. The relevant criterion in science is whether a proposition can be tested against observation and experiment, whether, if so, it has been tested, and how the tests came out.
The reason "belief in God" is generally not considered a scientific proposition is that there is no way to test it against observation and experiment, because it makes no particular predictions about what we should observe or what the results of particular experiments should be. Whereas various beliefs about climate change do make such predictions and can be tested.
> what makes God so easy to believe in?
The fact that "belief in God" does not commit you to any specific predictions about what you should observe, so it's easy to adopt such a belief without having to disturb any of your other beliefs. Many scientists, for example, profess to believe in God, and don't seem to see any contradiction with what they do as scientists.
> in the classical definition science is a branch of art as art is the more general term
There is a sense of "art" in which science is one of the arts, yes. But that's not the sense in which I was using the term "art".
If "generating belief" allows the beliefs generated to be false, yes, I agree. Science is much more cautious about "generating belief" than religion is, so it generates fewer beliefs; but it also has a much better track record of generating true beliefs.
> that's because it was a science of generating belief.
You must be joking. Religion's way of "generating belief" is not informed by any kind of scientific study of how to "generate beliefs".
Religious methodology in building a belief generating technology was more organic than we like to think of science today, however it followed the same format as all scientific methodology: observation, question, hypothesis, experiment, modification and repeat. It also was recorded, often in aural memory but also in text, which I would say is the critical feature that differentiates modern science from more traditional scientific practices which we tend to dismiss as not science but which meet the criteria in strict methodological terms.
I don't think I'll be capable of convincing you or anyone who has built their idea of science on the rejection of mythology, however it's worth considering that religious believers made the same assumption about previous cultural realities: theirs was the only right reality.
Science doesn’t make that assumption about Reality. In fact it makes a rather weak assumption: reality is only that which we can demonstrate and prove using the scientific method.
Science only lays down the principles by which scientific discovery might be made, and leaves the description of reality as whatever the outcome of that process might be. It’s something that rational human beings enjoy because it has offered great predictive power which has benefited humanity immensely, in addition to providing theories for how the world works.
The best thing about science is that it allows you to completely change the description of reality if a better theory comes up. This is one of the main reasons why this framework has been successful: it is adaptable and accepting of new realities.
I'm teasing you and I'm sorry if it is offensive. But your are right that a characteristic of scientific culture is relative flexibility. What I'm saying attention to is where that famous ability to reflect and change fails, and nowhere is that more evident than in confronting the evidence that scientific culture behaves a lot more like religious culture than otherwise. And nowhere is that similarity more evident than in the piles of scientfic cultural proponents who attack anyone who dares to point out the commonality.
In fact, to me the most radical characteristic of science as a cultural reality (a religion) and the most clear proof of it is science's ability to deny that it produces cultural realism. I can sum it up:
Science is the god that claims to not exists.
So when I say something like "your science produces monsters", which is a mythological type language, a science proponent will often freak the fuck out and hide behind the fact that science is only a method. Yet science has birthed multiple technologies with the power to obliviate the planet, and mythology predicted it.
All I'm saying is that it's time to call science what it is: a god.
Your other arguments about science zealots arguing doesn’t provide any novel insight either. There are zealots everywhere, using them as the focus for describing the culture seems like a rather silly thing to do.
Some say there are no novel insights. But we still try. Here's one effort: suppose we hypothesize that fiction is more effective at building political consensus. When I say "fiction" I don't say falsehood. I say fiction to mean representation of reality that aim to be convincing rather than truthful. We all have seen this in action.
Suppose I say this is what religion looks like to me: the ancient study of social and political fiction.
I think modern science has lost its way. It has lost moral context. I think it looks a lot like the advanced institutions of the Roman Catholic Church near the time of the Reformation. Not exactly mind you, but in that it's existing to maintain itself rather than as a responsive, living language of healthy communal culture.
I think it's language that fascilitates rapid change in cultural realities. It's this form of religious realism that interests me in critique of modern science institution. That's not because I like to argue with people on the internet, but because I think there's a novel, applied approach that emerges in looking at the problem that way.
But I don't expect that to be clear, and while it's been interesting I'm not much for basic arguing!
I don't think science even makes this weaker claim. Science does not claim, for example, that my preference for vanilla over chocolate ice cream is only valid if I can demonstrate it and prove it using the scientific method. (Science might claim that the scientific method can be used to gain understanding about how my body and brain work that would help to explain the processes in me that underlie my preference, but that's not the same thing.) Nor does science claim that nothing can be known about "reality" in domains, such as law or politics, where our ability to use the scientific method is extremely limited at best.
You are making huge historical claims here that, as far as I know, have no basis in actual fact.
> anyone who has built their idea of science on the rejection of mythology
Where have I said that science rejects mythology?
Science acknowledges that mythology exists, that its ubiquity in human cultures is evidence that it meets some common human need, and that that human need itself is genuine even if many of the specific mythologies that have evolved to meet it include many false beliefs.
What science does not do is accept mythological claims at face value, any more than it accepts any other claims at face value.
> theirs was the only right reality
Science makes no such claim. Science does make particular claims about reality, when it has particular theories that have a strong track record of making correct predictions. But science makes no general claim whatever about its "reality" being "the only right reality". Science does not even make the weaker claim that the scientific method is the only possible way of gaining knowledge about "reality". Particular scientists might, but science as a worldview does not.
But here are some important differences[0]:
1 The willingness to admit ignorance. Modern science is based on the Latin injunction ignoramus – ‘we do not know’. It assumes that we don’t know everything. Even more critically, it accepts that the things that we think we know could be proven wrong as we gain more knowledge. No concept, idea or theory is sacred and beyond challenge.
2 The centrality of observation and mathematics. Having admitted ignorance, modern science aims to obtain new knowledge. It does so by gathering observations and then using mathematical tools to connect these observations into comprehensive theories. And then trying to repeat faked or fluke results
3 The acquisition of new powers. Modern science is not content with creating theories. It uses these theories in order to acquire new powers, and in particular to develop new technologies.
0: https://medium.com/ceoeducation/notes-on-sapiens-a-brief-his...