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Comment by Loquebantur | Hacker News Reader

You conflate a host of different issues and ultimately miss the point.

Science is an ideal, the pursuit for knowledge for its own sake. Science is a boon for humanity because it provides an unparalleled degree of prediction and control of the natural world.

But it doesn't tell you what to do with that.

A "capitalist" will seek personal, short-sighted gain from it, socializing repercussions, no matter how devastating. They will gladly poison society and the planet and sell it to you as "your own fault". Their life-span is limited still, so what do they care?

Technological capability exceeding human wisdom is the core issue here.

You need scientific understanding on your own side in order to know and judge the alternatives beyond what vested interests feel obliged to tell you.

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I think the actual truth may be more important than we give it credit for. For instance I've noticed that most propaganda consists of lying about factual information, rather than what to do with the information.

The decision about what to do only becomes relevant if the underlying information is true.

Well, what to do and why it will accomplish what you (and everybody else) want and nothing else is the point. The facts being actually true is a necessity to pull that off.

Think of AI as a magic wand or a genie that makes your wishes come true.

While that sounds great at first, actually thinking it through reverses that mirage completely.

Whom would you want to have one? Who should get to decide? How do you control the whole matter and prevent it from going horribly wrong?

Being irresponsible doesn't work already when you're a grown-up human with only your bare hands.

As you said, "Science is an ideal." I think you and I have fundamentally different views of science. You are an idealist, whereas I am a practical person who has seen how the sausage of science is actually made.

Still there's something to the notion of people who prefer Academia to Industry. As much as I tend to agree with your broader points that it's a game and people love the prestige game and they now can pull levers to accelerate their winning in that Prestige game.. still they chose a path that is less about money and more about ideals than industry. It may be less and less ideal driven and less and less of a cloistered monastery but it's still a place for people who chose against industry. I say that as an industry guy who can just feel when I speak to academics that they are driven by something different than those of us industry. And to be clear those resident industry are not only driven by money we're also driven by building and changing the world but it's still different

You're talking about academia, society's attempt to gain economic utility from science. You assume, I didn't know about it based on what?

Exploiting science for economic utility alone misses the incurred second order effects, as I posited above. You completely ignore that crucial part, despite of it being the whole (very much practical) point here.

A practical person would be off doing something else. You have an axe to grind.

Don't you think your comment applies better to your behavior than GP's? At least they are actually contributing to the conversation.

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