This is a little off topic so apologies, but I was watching a documentary on nasa's project mercury last night, and one thing that struck me was how pro science the "america first" crowd was.
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".
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 :)
Dig a little deeper into the LOTR backstory. It was not so much a conflict between men but between supernatural forces, angels. It is a biblical metaphor, a story of higher powers settling bets by sending agents to earth to promote various agendas.
>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.
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.
There are always counter examples but what sticks most? Terminator 2 in 1992 was way more successful maybe because in 1984 it was the soviets who were supposed to drop the bomb but in 1991 there were no more soviets so it's was more plausible to fear from the machines?
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.
Well, Terminator 2 was 1991, and obviously filmed before that.
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).
I think the reception of the work by the public gives it away, not the work itself.
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.
I'm not sure where you're going with that, as all of the mentioned works still represent a time before people in general were forced to reckon with a post-Soviet world. Even with it on the horizon, it would be several years before we would fall into the thought and habits of what that "means."
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.)
> 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.
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?
Rocky 4 is 100% propaganda. But it's not really the Russians have better science. But rocky movies are about the underdog. You can't have 3 time world champ rocky be an underdog unless it's one dude vs a country. AKA rocky 4. That at the constant american beef at the time w the olympics that the Russians were using unholy science like doping and roids in their state run sports programs, while the Americans were all 'real scrapy amateurs'. Then of course the dream team.
I do find it funny you reference movies almost entirely from the 90s in you conclusion, movies over 20 years old.
The orcs were deeply meritocratic, born as equals from the mud and distinguishing themselves through tooth-and-claw. The same can also be said of Saruman at a different level.
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.
LOTR goes into enough detail about Orc society about as much as knowing the tax policy of Aragorn as King of Gondor.
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.
Insofar as there is any hierarchy in among the orcs, it must have come from certain individuals showing themselves to be more capable, brutal, commandeering, or whatever else, than others.
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.
If it is a reference to The Last Ringbearer then it is quite weird as depicted world in that book takes some names from LOTR. With nothing else matching between this books.
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.
> 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.
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.)
Rocky IV absolutely did have a theme of technology in it, but I would agree that it doesn't align cleanly with a simple "Soviet superiority" narrative. The usage of technology - with a robot wishing Pauli happy birthday, the Vince DeCola synthesizer score(which is excellent) backgrounding every scene, and Ivan Drago portrayed as a Terminator-esque technological superman through contrasting training montages, rather characterized Rocky and his peers as ordinary people trying to keep up and adapt during a time of complex change, with the narrative effect of humbling Rocky so that he can remain an underdog against the odds.
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.
The "anti-science" crowds are all about trust. They aren't anti-science per se. Education as it is currently done won't really help much because it is not focused on what are actually persuasive arguments to these people.
The fundamental problem is that "science" in practice means trusting in scientific institutions.
To tackle anti-science you need to make the argument for why trust in universities and other scientific institutions is justified.
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.
> 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.
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.
I see scientists who put themselves in the public sphere behaving like this mostly. They double down on the science, when people are questioning the whole institution rather than whether or not some particular science is correct.
The thing is though... there is no way around the "trust" problem, whether it comes to science or anything else. Plato's allegory of the cave makes this quite evident IMO. In the end, we're all ignorant, all have our set of beliefs, and all must willfully choose for ourselves what's persuasive. Science just sees pointing to evidence as the most practical way of testing beliefs. And quite honestly... what else is there for testing beliefs? Making a different argument for the nature of something that could also be reasonably plausible (e.g. a conspiracy theory)? Well that's a hypothesis, which is also a belief, and so we're back to square one... which is everything is ultimately a stack of willfully chosen beliefs that we deem trustworthy.
You can make persuasive arguments that might not appeal to the scientifically literate rationalist, but will appeal to the somebody who is just using very crude heuristics and might have ended up believing in a conspiracy theory.
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.
Yes, you can make different arguments. The point I'm making is that it's ultimately upon them to decide what to believe in. They may or may not accept your alternative argument as convincing. Everyone ultimately chooses what they believe and trust in as evidence. There is no way around this, so you cannot force anyone to accept something. But yes, you can keep trying by presenting different arguments/evidence...
Science is highly politicized still. It's part of why I stopped doing that kind of work.
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.
The difference was that it was a time of prosperity. “Progress” = wealth. A lot of that prosperity was false as well — unsustainable development, a requirement for growth that ultimately kills many businesses, etc.
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.
Who can afford to fly anywhere more than once every few years (assuming no surprise expenses), or not to drive 20k miles a year across urban sprawl to their jobs?
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.
Climate change is also tied up in politics, because the fossil fuel industry is worth more than a trillion dollars and employs millions of people.
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.
I don’t agree the prosperity was false. Federal minimum wage was quite decent. Labor unions were stronger. Income inequality was lower and so was partisanship in politics.
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.
Fair points, but the ability of the government to use social security surpluses to fuel massive defense and public works (automotive focused) expenditure and that nonpartisanship in Congress created serious issues that are already defining the 21st century.
The legacy of the unfinished great society, the accommodation of racists and poor infrastructure choices is already haunting us.
I suspect the popular tide against science, especially among the 'America first' crowd, turned once science came up with results that threatened to make certain very large piles of money slightly smaller.
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.
This spirit is captured elegantly by Sagan in the Pale Blue Dot chapter The Gift of Apollo.
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.”
> It makes me think the solution to today's anti science bias isn't just "educate more".
"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.
Climate science is not political, climate policy is. You aren't wrong that some people misunderstand what it is to support science, and conflate that with certain policy preferences. I also think the blame for that can be placed squarely with those who have chosen to attack institutions of scientific truth because they are opposed to policy that might result from what is clearly true. Blame the politicization of "science" on the pro oil propagandists that put in the effort to make it that way. The naive "pro-science" stance is a reaction.
> Climate science is not political, climate policy is.
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?
Wonder no more, as absolutely no one is out to get the oil industry just for the sake of harming it. Plenty of people will lie and are paid to lie for the sake of helping it. The green propagandists are funded by themselves and philanthropists, by people who understand greenhouse gasses and the need to be miserly with our oil consumption to reduce human suffering. Some grifters have tried to make money on green products, but that is no different than in any other industry of mostly honest motives.
Thinking about how wasteful was the early exploration of outer space gets me thinking if it didn't backfire. There could've been a moment in society where people where supportive about it, when the costs weren't clear enough. However, once the taxpayers realized these were not only huge endeavours, but had huge costs just for the rush of being the first at all costs + many catastrophic system accidents... clearly society put these things on hold.
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 don’t know that taxpayers “thought” about the cost of the space program and decided to give up on it. It could be true, but that’s not how I’ve seen politics work. I think it more had to do with the fact that we beat the USSR and the USSR stopped competing. There weren’t any really major milestones to be had after the Moon, either. Sputnik proved to Americans that the Soviets could fire a missile from Russia and hit the US, and we didn’t have a similar capability. Nothing has been quite that scary since.
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.
You're right. Politics doesn't work this way, and taxpayers have no say on this matter (lest civil unrest, but it didn't went this far). To be honest, I only ended up saying taxpayer because I know how people here are and I was unconsciously avoiding to get down voted for my libertarian-minded opinion.
SpaceX rests on the shoulders of all previous space programs. They did not invent space travel. They iterated.
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.
Why do you think SpaceX won’t have deaths or accidents? SpaceX has had plenty of accidents and going to Mars is so much more dangerous than any space exploration ever attempted.
SpaceX seems to have an ability to test without human risk that far exceeds past space missions. (Thanks to reusable rockets and autonomous / remote systems)
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.
Exactly. I'd argue also that NASA was specially bad regarding safety in its infancy, probably because it was very militaristic and they don't need to care about profit, given its nature – so dozens of accidents might happen and they might still be in business.
What are these dozens of accidents? How many fatal human space flight accidents did NASA have? I can only think of three, two of which came during the shuttle program.
In those days, science was chiefly thought of as a framework to further our understanding of the natural world, and how we could utilize that knowledge for the betterment of our collective ends.
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.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Historically, a competitive framing has made it much easier for States to motivate their populace. A friendly competition over who does better in fighting a common enemy would absolutely have made everyone be more careful and wear masks more often (it would be seen as a patriotic duty).
Instead we have a POTUS constantly downplaying the threat, accusing China of being responsible for deliberately infecting the rest of the world with this (supposedly nonexistent?!) threat and masking is seen as treading “freedoms”.
It's because we had a common enemy, the USSR. The USSR also launched Sputnik, which alarmed the country. Of course this was the backdrop of the Cold War.
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.
I don't think moderates favor rational discussion so much as they disdain conflict.
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.
There’s research showing (at least in the US) that the “archetype” moderate, who believes all things in moderation, is basically nonexistent. Moderates instead are made up of people who have perhaps a few “moderate” views, but mostly have a roughly even mixture of left-wing and right-wing views, with no particular combinations being particularly common.
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.
Moderate center prefers status quo and dislikes confrontation. But, it does not actually prefer rational discussion, rational discussion only sometimes favors statis quo.
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.
This has very much become the case, and what a wide centre it has become - I’d have said I was left wing until the poles pushed so far apart I fell into the central void.
I think you're partly right but I also think there's something a bit deeper at work here.
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.
Human spaceflight programs have struggled to justify their existence pretty much their entire lives. Non-human spaceflight has had clearer rationales: the development of rocket technology is intertwined with long-range missile technology, and satellite technology has long clear military ramifications from the launch of Sputnik. The Space Race grew past its missile origins largely because it was a competition between the US and the USSR for prestige points. Once Apollo 11 successfully landed a man on the moon, both of them quickly lost interest in manned space travel to the moon.
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.
Your post shows how significant events are stripped of their meaning by the dictum that there must be some material end behind every act. But it's a decision to look at history and explain everything in terms of geopolitics. Can't people get together and do something for the glory of doing it?
When a government chooses to (or not to!) spend a significant portion of its budget advancing a particular scientific research program, that is pretty much by definition a political motivation. And if the motivation is driven by international relations, well again, that is the definition of geopolitics.
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).
In theory? Yes. In practice? Rarely, if ever at scale.
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.
Predicting, advising, and describing political behaviors within the bounds of their constraints are geopolitic's raison d'être. 100% accurate all the time? No. But then again, neither is any other predictive field.
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.
> 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.
Energy independence (from Middle East) was once unthinkable, but we did it, and also included a speech. Sure, not the same level.
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
Shale oil isn't going to last long, and then what? (And probably shouldn't have been extracted in the first place considering the low energy return and climate change...)
Energy independence is a huge obvious prize in itself. It was very easy to get people to agree that it would be something good to have.
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.
Imagine if the media used it's impressive persuasion powers to unite the public on issues rather than divide them, what kind of a country and world could we live in?
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.
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".