> There’s nothing unusual about this: In the premodern era, doctors were routinely mocked as worthless charlatans, and all areas of scientific inquiry were larded with total lunacy well through the eighteenth century.
It perhaps _is_ unusual that our scientific (really, scientistic) institutions now combine the charlatanism of the 18th century with the prestige of the 20th.
It is unusual, but it can't last. The gap between performance and hype can only be papered over with PR for so long before it gets eaten by cynicism and sheer disinterest.
maybe not; the movement towards equity (equal outcomes) in all institutions, means that the growth at the bottom of the stack will accelerate until there is zero movement in any direction. And since "This confirms my general suspicion, that postwar expansions to science (and academia more broadly) have happened via increases to the number of less prestigious schools, less talented professors and less intelligent students. The whole enterprise has been inflated at the bottom, in other words, and not at the top, such that we’re wasting huge amounts of money for very little added advantage." We keep admitting less than the best and brightest to the elite institutions as well. Student loan relief would be the worst move at this point, allowing more marginal students to aspire to the U, and accrue such debt.
This is such a good quote I'll just paste it again: "increases to the number of less prestigious schools, less talented professors and less intelligent students".
This is what happens when every biological product is expected to go to college, and many of those want to play the publishing beauty pageant game.
Meanwhile nobody's building a decent rock fireplace or landscaping the sides of the highways or sewing in proper linings in dresses anymore.
It would be great, but who would be the gatekeepers to decide what is truly new? I fear it would be just like the peer review process which plays no small part in the mediocrity of contemporary science.
Since the Covid scam, I have thought that there should be both peer review and some kind of non-peer review, by intelligent people capable of critically looking at research and pointing out flaws with it, as peer review often appear to be one big club - gender studies and the likes are evidence of this. There has been plenty of decent data analysis done with the covid / vaccine data often seen here on substack that comes to vastly different conclusions from what the peer reviewed papers tell us.
One major problem seems that prestigious journals seem to have been bought off by vested interests. The Lancet and Nature to name two.
The first "big" step (for most). Because they own EVERYTHING. They already truly "own" most people. "Debt Slavery" is about the nicest thing one can say...
Isn't that a creation of most particularly the US government and their hands in most universities now? the government provides big money and the Universities build huge fancy cafes, climbing walls, luxurious living conditions and use the rest to subsidize the fair amount of students that should not be going to college anyway, just for fairness and it looks good.
Yup. This only gets worse as merit is officially killed. But I think this cycle has to happen for real change. That Yale kid that only complains is actually the long term solution.
The loss is of the diversity (in its traditional, not its contemporary sense) of that "total lunacy". The ideas of a Darwin or an Einstein were lunatic to most of their peers. We have lost the top and bottom of the distribution curve. The demands of a careerist twenty-first century scientist made by employers, funders, peer-reviewers are for bland conformity.
"our democracy" knows how to recruit and to organize its thirsty servants in the natural fourth class. Sometimes these servants are dull manual laborers; sometimes they have degrees in maths, fysiks, chem, cs, accounting, finanance, mrktng, PR-journalism, and so forth. Alas, we have neither a good first class nor a good second class to bring members of the third class under control and to keep them that way perdaily. (Yep, just making up my words as I go.) This explains much of our derangement and the ongoing menace of "Western" civ and its copycats to the whole biosphere. A badbiosis is our religion.
Probably the corpcap of our times differs not so much from the corpcap of the early 17th and late 16th. Maybe there are irreversible solutions for this problem, too?
Joe: For the last time, I'm pretty sure what's killing the crops is this Brawndo stuff.
Secretary of State: But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.
Attorney General: So wait a minute. What you're saying is that you want us to put water on the crops.
Joe: Yes.
Attorney General: Water. Like out the toilet?
Joe: Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be out of the toilet, but, yeah, that's the idea.
Secretary of State: But Brawndo's got what plants crave.
Attorney General: It's got electrolytes.
Joe: Okay, look. The plants aren't growing, so I'm pretty sure that the Brawndo's not working. Now, I'm no botanist, but I do know that if you put water on plants, they grow.
Secretary of Energy: Well, I've never seen no plants grow out of no toilet.
Secretary of State: Hey, that's good. You sure you ain't the smartest guy in the world?
Joe: Okay, look. You wanna solve this problem. I wanna get my pardon. So why don't we just try it, okay, and not worry about what plants crave?
Attorney General: Brawndo's got what plants crave.
Secretary of Energy: Yeah, it's got electrolytes.
Joe: What are electrolytes? Do you even know?
Secretary of State: It's what they use to make Brawndo.
Joe: Yeah, but why do they use them to make Brawndo?
Secretary of Defense: 'Cause Brawndo's got electrolytes.
Save the inconsistency of what people get jabbed with, the self-selection here may be even better than John Campbell's proposed abolition of prescription laws for reducing overpopulation and increasing average intelligence. Where's cGMP when we need it?
And shit and piss and regurgitate (*just like University “education” from the elitists who only seek to protect and justify “their” sacred domain and cast out all heathens who deign to espouse new ideas. Heretics, of which I am proud to be one!!!
This certainly matches my own experience, in which the 'revolutionary' work tends to be 'someone did a computer simulation and confirmed an idea that was first put forward in the 50s'. Time and again I'd come across old papers and think, wow, we're still debating exactly the same shit we were discussing two generations ago, using exactly the same paradigms, with the main differences being prettier graphics and huge computational resources invested into really nailing down those uncertainties.
I'm a little more sanguine about the future, though. As the academy pushes out the talented in favor of midwits with fashionable perversions, it will lose its ability to impose intellectual conformity on the geniuses, whose time will furthermore no longer be sucked up by precisely the unrewarding minutiae you opened the piece (justifiably) complaining about. Instead, they're going to start having much more interesting conversations in the ad hoc ersatz academy of Internet U. That intellectual ferment is likely to be productive.
Of course in the short term we'll see even stronger divergence between the hyperrealities of offialdom and the renaissancists. Attitudes towards all things corona are an obvious example of this. The wholesale, reflexive rejection of the ideas put forth by Hancock et al. within the legacy institutions, as compared to the interest and widespread acceptance of these concepts within alternative spheres, is another (not that Hancock is necessarily correct, just that the split in how the ideas are received is reflective of the pattern).
Society is going through a full schizoidal schism but in the long run I think the midwit Marxcissists are just gonna make themselves irrelevant due to how boring they are.
"Time and again I'd come across old papers and think, wow, we're still debating exactly the same shit we were discussing two generations ago, using exactly the same paradigms..."
In the social sciences and the humanities, we're 99.9% still debating the exact same points as 2 500 years ago.
Take philosophy. The only new thought since pre-christian times is Nietzsche's works. The entirety of french philosophy (excepting Descartes) is the old greek classics re-packged in french.
The social sciences and the humanities of today are what the catholic church was pre-Luther: dogmatic, utterly corrupt, and a faithless vulgar racket.
I think we see that in terms of interesting conversations, already today Internet U has eclipsed official Academia by miles (this very substack is proof of that). However, I think in terms of the Sciences, Engineering and Medicine it will be much more difficult, primarily for financial reasons, to create any sort of ersatz structure.
Yes, philosophy etc. are relatively easy, which is why that's what has migrated first. Funding infrastructure is required for physical sciences, engineering, etc.
OTOH most of the sciences exist now just to keep the grants flowing, not to actually do anything useful or interesting. If scientists have to crowdfund their research, they're likely to work on things that matter a bit more. Maybe. I'm still not 100% sure about that.
But, worth pointing out that powered flight was achieved by two brothers working out of they garage on a budget scraped together from spare change, whereas a lavishly funded government funded research program that had proceeded for many years achieved nothing but failure.
actually, the back room of their Wright Brothers bicycle shop in Dayton. They used the same bicycle tools to construct parts for the planes. Their interest was spurred by a childhood gift of a toy called the Flying Bat that was designed by a French engineer. They broke the toy, and fashioned copies of it themselves.
I knew a man who was an airframe engineer for Boeing, and he had all his childhood airplanes he had built. Moral of the story, kids can carry inspirations into adulthood, so encourage them.
Well said. Most "lavishly funded government funded research programs" produce nothing but MORE lavishly funded government funded research programs. They become, or are designed to be, institutional black holes. Money flows in - and NOTHING comes out.
The balsa wood gliders I played with as a ten-year old (around 1960) were infinitely modifiable in terms of position, angle and profile of the wings and tail. Today toy planes are rigid plastic, able to be put together in only one configuration, and the penknife is too dangerous to be put in the hands of children.
Astute observation Richard! Virtually all of the chemistry sets, model kits, real boats, and real guns that I played with in the fifties have long since been banned. In the interest of safety, of course.
We also eliminated dangerous things like creativity and self confidence. Pity.
ooohh, fancy Christmas present toys. We were too poor most of the time and made do with sticks, rocks, chalk and bikes. And old blanket tents and forts. Board games, scouts, movies at night with popcorn. Book reading contests. If the grid goes down, we will have to dust off those memories and amuse little kids.
Yes, and they'll be oh so much the better for it. Reminds me of hoping for occasional power outages as I raised my kids, to force the whole family to go back to more healthy and productive activities. (The fight and struggle to do so otherwise was/is exhausting, as we all know; and gets worse over time.)
The modern world of electronics is rife with foolish temptations.
And pickup baseball, hide and seek, tag, making dams in the gutter, etc. Now it’s just buying a kid some piece of plastic junk...or, an electronic thingy with a screen (even worse).
In the EU children are not allowed to climb trees on school grounds.
Because trees are not EU-bureaucracy approved pedagogical-didactic playing equipment for the edification of young minds.
In PE, setting the bar for a passing grade the same for everyone is discriminatory and BadWrongEvil, even if said bar is something like "must run 5km under 45 minutes at least once per semester".
Education has spent 50 years making children into helpless obedient little automatons. This development correlates 100% with women becoming the dominant majority among faculties, staff and school politicians.
My father was an aeronautical engineer, designing both commercial and military aircraft. Spent his entire career at Douglas Aircraft/McDonnell Douglas. When we were kids, he designed and built our kites from balsa wood and tissue paper...the ‘regular’ triangular as well as box kites, and other designs. He was constantly building balsa wood gliders and model airplanes in the garage.
I remember buying the kits, of wooden sticks and precut paper, and spending an hour with glue putting them together. Lucky if they lasted all afternoon.
Fusion may turn out to be a good example. The billions poured into tokamaks like ITER seem to have resulted mainly in more billions poured into tokamaks. It's all about making sure the researchers stay employed endlessly researching the one thing they know how to research, rather than actually solving the problem.
A whole slew of statutes, starting with the RICO act, and regulations in the '70s criminalized home chemistry. Note Linus Pauling, who won 2 Nobel prizes, 1 for chemistry (Electronegativity), was the pyrotechnic terror of Condon, Oregon. No more. Chemophobia won.
Old NASA engineers are fun too, what with their homemade fireworks, miniature rockets and fire sculptures. I don't know where they find everything, I think most of them are using up their stashes before they pass on.
They'd better beware BATFE and Feral persecutors wielding the RICO act. Many of these displays likely utilize dynamite fuse it defines as functioning by way of explosion, even though it doesn't. Use electrical ignition instead?
How ironic, Gates the Maverick is now an ardent elitist protector of status quo, slurping at the trough of our public funds (our tax dollars. Pisses me off, he, gropin’ joe and bootygigger probably also giving each other hand jobs while lecturing us on humanity and ethics.
If you study the history of say, the Wright brothers for example, you'll consistently find that the best-funded teams typically got beat by the bootstrappers chasing the same or similar breakthroughs.
It would be weird if it didn't happen in someone's "garage."
And it will likely be more practical, and more accessible, because the methodology didn't require the kinds of inputs they're currently throwing around in the fusion space.
There´s also this aspect that technological progress is subject to political redefinitions. For example, if one accepts that reduction of CO2 emissions (or emissions for any allegedly climate-destroying chemical) for every particular technology is what now constitutes progress, then a lot of resources may be poured into the pursuit of such goals, with the results also leading to any number of papers and patents.
However, this kind of progress, with all the trappings historically associated with technological advances, would not result in the kind of improvement that the general public is used to from "progress". By defining essentially arbitrary goals, you can keep the technological progress circus continuing for a while.
This is definitely a thing. A lot of the 'progress' of recent years amounts to replacing a perfectly good technology with a much more expensive, less functional equivalent.
You don't use "full-strength" tobacco. That would be Mexican/Rustic tobacco (up to 9% nicotine by weight). The reason you can't get it is you only need a tiny bit to get your fix, and that's harder to monetize.
Take nicotine or cytisinicline with vitamin C to reduce the hazard of nitrosamines. You claim these things target lungs and mouth with those alkylating agents? Do you stringently avoid secondary amines and easily demethylated tertiary amines?
Decline and fraud. Lack of original thought and innovation. Not just here. Look at the entertainment vertical. How much is recycled rebooted sequelled formulaic garbage?
It's so true. Just look at the mainstream personalities in the US now; little dictator Fauci, junkfood eating facist Dr. Hotez, senile China Joe, General Milley, Darth Vader costumed Lloyd Austin. All these people and so many others who have ascended to significant leadership roles now look like and behave like villains in a comic book. It's positively unreal!
Milley and Austin are going to get us all killed - these dudes are incompetent and therefore scary given their position and power...Milley should have been court-martialed for contacting the Chinese on Jan 6 - the guy is a power hungry doofus...Austin clearly botched Afghanistan
Everything going forward is going to be a recycled version of something that went before, but with a "diverse" cast. Diversity being limited to skin tone and sexual preference of course.
You had me at "There are assistants who should in theory do this work for me, but I have learned that their involvement is to be minimised, as they’re just as likely to introduce more problems as they are to solve them". Yep, if it has to be done right these days, you're often stuck doing it yourself. I fully relate!
Many colleges & universities have shifted the work formerly done by professors onto graduate students who work for a meager stipend and an advanced degree.
THEN the academic market is flooded with newly minted credentialed academics who cannot find a tenure-track job, which is the reason they enrolled in graduate school in the first place.
My advice to anyone contemplating graduate school--especially in the humanities: enroll in a trade school! Become an electrician or plumber!
I have worked as a software developer in a few academic institutions. The quality of PhDs these doesn't seem up to much. During covid, very few of the seasoned scientists I know questioned anything and didn't seem distinguish science from pseudo-science.
Decline and fraud. Lack of original thought and innovation. Not just here. Look at the entertainment vertical. How much is recycled rebooted sequelled formulaic garbage?
I can't help but wonder if part of this problem is the ever growing government grant system that has established guidelines for universities and corporations to meet in order to qualify for funding. This approach has created competition by new research students to meet the guidelines with something, anything that will qualify for funding. Grad students are pressed to come up with something, anything that will qualify for funding or they won't move forward. Overly narrow research gives less significant advances but it's a safe move and on the career path to success in the academic/corporate world I suspect. And each year the ball can be slowly moved down the field with follow on small advances. It's all about the career perhaps.
I've heard reports that academic papers are now routinely encouraged (read: commanded) to cite purported academic authors who are "Persons of Color" or some other purportedly "marginalized" people, regardless of the value of that "research." I believe this is called "decolonizing" academia.
Add to that outright laziness and the result is as you report.
In one sense, this is to be expected. The universe always trends towards equilibrium. Disruptive research presumes disequilibrium.
In another sense, equilibrium, viewed from the perspective of the laws of thermodynamics, is "heat death"--change ends, and the system becomes static.
What the sciences need are the new agents of disequilibrium, the Einsteins, the Max Plancks, the Michaelson and Morley types, or the Watson and Crick types, in order to shake things up a bit.
Let's please recognize them and give them funding. Because anyone of that intellectual caliber is going to get bored pretty quickly spending months on end writing proposals for a single idea, while 80 other ideas pile up.
A recent commentator (I can't remember who) said "we were promised flying cars and we got 80 characters". Thanks for this timely and important post - I've been worried about it in Physics as the last real breakthrough was a century ago and that was quantum theory. Lee Smolin (I think) said that string theory has cost tens of thousands of man-years and hasn't produced a single testable prediction. This is because you can get grants to do String Theory but not anything else.
If one good comes out of the Covid mess then it might be that it has awakened us to the failure of our scientific institutions: mainly biomedicine but more and more the other 'hard' sciences. The reasons for these failures are many and varied: but boil down to commercial, political and ideological interference combined with, as someone commented below, a culture of risk-aversion. We all need to man up.
Even in the hard sciences, innovative ideas have a little to no chance without a credential. Lee Smolin might deplore the lack of innovation, but even he wrote to someone I know that he wouldn't even look at your work unless you had a PhD.
Understandable, as people like Smolin are inundated with ideas written in crayon. But a sad state of affairs for the few geniuses laboring in isolation out there.
When science was really making progress back before the first half of the 20th century, much of it was done by gentlemen of leisure or men of the cloth as these were people who had the money to live and the time to spare thinking great thoughts. In those days a teenage James Clerk Maxwell could have a paper read (by a grown-up) at the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
More recently with the commercialisation of education and research a new breed of scientist has arisen - someone who is as much marketeer as scientist; someone who can extricate big bucks from governments to build huge projects (and an empire).
I wouldn't worry about the few(?) geniuses out there. Ideas with merit always come through - just not as soon as they might.
Professional philosophy seems to be in the same boat, from my experience. I witnessed an acceleration in careerism just in my short (less than a decade) career as a philosopher. The overspecialization is also plague, and the two always seemed obviously connected to me. People make whole careers out of raising miniscule and useless objections to older, established views, and then supplying the solution to that useless objection. This is the general pattern to publication and it leads exactly nowhere. Attempting to publish anything that might actually sunder one of these established, dead-end views is either ignored or ridiculed (mostly the former).
Even worse is the proliferation of waman philosophers, who need their hands held through grad school but, brimming with conscientiousness and ass kissing, they make perfect early career professors. I taught in a dept that was 90% female and it was like living in some kind of bizarro world philosophy nut house where only affirmations were welcomed and where legitimate criticism got the silent treatment. I felt like I had been sucked through a wormhole and into some kind of Sunday school in hell.
Phony people with phony personalities and phony credentials. Its like someone somewhere decided colleges were places for adults to have play time dress up and every is supposed to pretend to not notice.
The smartest people are undoubtedly leaving the field as soon as they graduate. I imagine the diversification of philosophy will be complete in a decade or so.
There is so much fertile comment that may be made here. The politicisation of science, the policy based 'evidence', the extensive invalid modelling, all products and 'tools' of this conformist moment. If it is possible to generalise here, or perhaps at least capture a portion of the observed phenomenon with a generalised statement, perhaps one looks at "performance based research funding" (PBRF) as the means by which a careers are advanced and "output" (almost anything that sounds impressive of acquires through sleight of pen, an impressive metric) both individual and institutional becomes a metric for funding. Then there is the torture of grant application, the reams of nonsense to satisfy the exigencies of political correctness, neo-Marxist DIE ideology, rainbows, institutional and community unicorns. A further point, is that the methodologies of yore often left much to be desired, and the application of new methods to old processes of investigation frequently lead to new and valuable insights.
A while back I read a hypothesis that suggested we would enter a period of apparent stagnation, following the scintillating period of progress to which you allude. It was conjectured it would be a 'pause' a consolidation, prior to the next accelerando of insight and discovery.
> There’s nothing unusual about this: In the premodern era, doctors were routinely mocked as worthless charlatans, and all areas of scientific inquiry were larded with total lunacy well through the eighteenth century.
It perhaps _is_ unusual that our scientific (really, scientistic) institutions now combine the charlatanism of the 18th century with the prestige of the 20th.
exactly this.
It is unusual, but it can't last. The gap between performance and hype can only be papered over with PR for so long before it gets eaten by cynicism and sheer disinterest.
maybe not; the movement towards equity (equal outcomes) in all institutions, means that the growth at the bottom of the stack will accelerate until there is zero movement in any direction. And since "This confirms my general suspicion, that postwar expansions to science (and academia more broadly) have happened via increases to the number of less prestigious schools, less talented professors and less intelligent students. The whole enterprise has been inflated at the bottom, in other words, and not at the top, such that we’re wasting huge amounts of money for very little added advantage." We keep admitting less than the best and brightest to the elite institutions as well. Student loan relief would be the worst move at this point, allowing more marginal students to aspire to the U, and accrue such debt.
This is such a good quote I'll just paste it again: "increases to the number of less prestigious schools, less talented professors and less intelligent students".
This is what happens when every biological product is expected to go to college, and many of those want to play the publishing beauty pageant game.
Meanwhile nobody's building a decent rock fireplace or landscaping the sides of the highways or sewing in proper linings in dresses anymore.
almost like there should be different publications for truly new ideas, and the second string for elaborations on previous work
It would be great, but who would be the gatekeepers to decide what is truly new? I fear it would be just like the peer review process which plays no small part in the mediocrity of contemporary science.
Since the Covid scam, I have thought that there should be both peer review and some kind of non-peer review, by intelligent people capable of critically looking at research and pointing out flaws with it, as peer review often appear to be one big club - gender studies and the likes are evidence of this. There has been plenty of decent data analysis done with the covid / vaccine data often seen here on substack that comes to vastly different conclusions from what the peer reviewed papers tell us.
One major problem seems that prestigious journals seem to have been bought off by vested interests. The Lancet and Nature to name two.
College in America is Debt Slavery, white collar organized crime
The first "big" step (for most). Because they own EVERYTHING. They already truly "own" most people. "Debt Slavery" is about the nicest thing one can say...
MONOPOLY: Who Owns the Word?
This might better explain it. https://www.bitchute.com/video/qQc2K92poC6w/
Invest an hour to really wake yourself up.
it is, the costs have gone up beyond all reason
Isn't that a creation of most particularly the US government and their hands in most universities now? the government provides big money and the Universities build huge fancy cafes, climbing walls, luxurious living conditions and use the rest to subsidize the fair amount of students that should not be going to college anyway, just for fairness and it looks good.
Yup. This only gets worse as merit is officially killed. But I think this cycle has to happen for real change. That Yale kid that only complains is actually the long term solution.
That prestige is clearly now running on fumes and I really wonder how long it will last. The shorter the better, IMO.
With the way of the world as it is, and approaching a precipice of sorts, I imagine a lot of the BS may we'll be challenged .
It’s money, not prestige
The loss is of the diversity (in its traditional, not its contemporary sense) of that "total lunacy". The ideas of a Darwin or an Einstein were lunatic to most of their peers. We have lost the top and bottom of the distribution curve. The demands of a careerist twenty-first century scientist made by employers, funders, peer-reviewers are for bland conformity.
"our democracy" knows how to recruit and to organize its thirsty servants in the natural fourth class. Sometimes these servants are dull manual laborers; sometimes they have degrees in maths, fysiks, chem, cs, accounting, finanance, mrktng, PR-journalism, and so forth. Alas, we have neither a good first class nor a good second class to bring members of the third class under control and to keep them that way perdaily. (Yep, just making up my words as I go.) This explains much of our derangement and the ongoing menace of "Western" civ and its copycats to the whole biosphere. A badbiosis is our religion.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/-biosis
...and the corporate capitalism of the 21st.
Probably the corpcap of our times differs not so much from the corpcap of the early 17th and late 16th. Maybe there are irreversible solutions for this problem, too?
well stated Ryan!
Joe: For the last time, I'm pretty sure what's killing the crops is this Brawndo stuff.
Secretary of State: But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.
Attorney General: So wait a minute. What you're saying is that you want us to put water on the crops.
Joe: Yes.
Attorney General: Water. Like out the toilet?
Joe: Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be out of the toilet, but, yeah, that's the idea.
Secretary of State: But Brawndo's got what plants crave.
Attorney General: It's got electrolytes.
Joe: Okay, look. The plants aren't growing, so I'm pretty sure that the Brawndo's not working. Now, I'm no botanist, but I do know that if you put water on plants, they grow.
Secretary of Energy: Well, I've never seen no plants grow out of no toilet.
Secretary of State: Hey, that's good. You sure you ain't the smartest guy in the world?
Joe: Okay, look. You wanna solve this problem. I wanna get my pardon. So why don't we just try it, okay, and not worry about what plants crave?
Attorney General: Brawndo's got what plants crave.
Secretary of Energy: Yeah, it's got electrolytes.
Joe: What are electrolytes? Do you even know?
Secretary of State: It's what they use to make Brawndo.
Joe: Yeah, but why do they use them to make Brawndo?
Secretary of Defense: 'Cause Brawndo's got electrolytes.
I proudly wear my brawndo shirt at the supermarket :) I’ve made so many friends watch this incredible classic.
future generations may well consider mike judge the nostradamus of this century.
I used to sell Brawndo out of a store I owned. They are worth quite a bit, had I saved a case! $75 for a can on ebay!
This movie should be a futurist documentary.
80% of our population lined up for a rushed, untested, novel injection. The future is now.
Save the inconsistency of what people get jabbed with, the self-selection here may be even better than John Campbell's proposed abolition of prescription laws for reducing overpopulation and increasing average intelligence. Where's cGMP when we need it?
80%, eh?
Pareto would be proud.
You mean it isn't?
It IS a futurist documentary..
Future?
The funny thing is ; some people don't get the movie .
They're the ones who are running the country.
Next you'll start talking about how water, which is in toilets, is better for plants.
It's also where fish fuck. Nasty stuff.
And shit and piss and regurgitate (*just like University “education” from the elitists who only seek to protect and justify “their” sacred domain and cast out all heathens who deign to espouse new ideas. Heretics, of which I am proud to be one!!!
This certainly matches my own experience, in which the 'revolutionary' work tends to be 'someone did a computer simulation and confirmed an idea that was first put forward in the 50s'. Time and again I'd come across old papers and think, wow, we're still debating exactly the same shit we were discussing two generations ago, using exactly the same paradigms, with the main differences being prettier graphics and huge computational resources invested into really nailing down those uncertainties.
I'm a little more sanguine about the future, though. As the academy pushes out the talented in favor of midwits with fashionable perversions, it will lose its ability to impose intellectual conformity on the geniuses, whose time will furthermore no longer be sucked up by precisely the unrewarding minutiae you opened the piece (justifiably) complaining about. Instead, they're going to start having much more interesting conversations in the ad hoc ersatz academy of Internet U. That intellectual ferment is likely to be productive.
Of course in the short term we'll see even stronger divergence between the hyperrealities of offialdom and the renaissancists. Attitudes towards all things corona are an obvious example of this. The wholesale, reflexive rejection of the ideas put forth by Hancock et al. within the legacy institutions, as compared to the interest and widespread acceptance of these concepts within alternative spheres, is another (not that Hancock is necessarily correct, just that the split in how the ideas are received is reflective of the pattern).
Society is going through a full schizoidal schism but in the long run I think the midwit Marxcissists are just gonna make themselves irrelevant due to how boring they are.
"Time and again I'd come across old papers and think, wow, we're still debating exactly the same shit we were discussing two generations ago, using exactly the same paradigms..."
In the social sciences and the humanities, we're 99.9% still debating the exact same points as 2 500 years ago.
Take philosophy. The only new thought since pre-christian times is Nietzsche's works. The entirety of french philosophy (excepting Descartes) is the old greek classics re-packged in french.
The social sciences and the humanities of today are what the catholic church was pre-Luther: dogmatic, utterly corrupt, and a faithless vulgar racket.
"The more things change, the more they stay the same".
I think we see that in terms of interesting conversations, already today Internet U has eclipsed official Academia by miles (this very substack is proof of that). However, I think in terms of the Sciences, Engineering and Medicine it will be much more difficult, primarily for financial reasons, to create any sort of ersatz structure.
Yes, philosophy etc. are relatively easy, which is why that's what has migrated first. Funding infrastructure is required for physical sciences, engineering, etc.
OTOH most of the sciences exist now just to keep the grants flowing, not to actually do anything useful or interesting. If scientists have to crowdfund their research, they're likely to work on things that matter a bit more. Maybe. I'm still not 100% sure about that.
But, worth pointing out that powered flight was achieved by two brothers working out of they garage on a budget scraped together from spare change, whereas a lavishly funded government funded research program that had proceeded for many years achieved nothing but failure.
actually, the back room of their Wright Brothers bicycle shop in Dayton. They used the same bicycle tools to construct parts for the planes. Their interest was spurred by a childhood gift of a toy called the Flying Bat that was designed by a French engineer. They broke the toy, and fashioned copies of it themselves.
I knew a man who was an airframe engineer for Boeing, and he had all his childhood airplanes he had built. Moral of the story, kids can carry inspirations into adulthood, so encourage them.
Well said. Most "lavishly funded government funded research programs" produce nothing but MORE lavishly funded government funded research programs. They become, or are designed to be, institutional black holes. Money flows in - and NOTHING comes out.
I bet those 2 garage brothers could have stopped a blimp
The balsa wood gliders I played with as a ten-year old (around 1960) were infinitely modifiable in terms of position, angle and profile of the wings and tail. Today toy planes are rigid plastic, able to be put together in only one configuration, and the penknife is too dangerous to be put in the hands of children.
Astute observation Richard! Virtually all of the chemistry sets, model kits, real boats, and real guns that I played with in the fifties have long since been banned. In the interest of safety, of course.
We also eliminated dangerous things like creativity and self confidence. Pity.
ooohh, fancy Christmas present toys. We were too poor most of the time and made do with sticks, rocks, chalk and bikes. And old blanket tents and forts. Board games, scouts, movies at night with popcorn. Book reading contests. If the grid goes down, we will have to dust off those memories and amuse little kids.
Yes, and they'll be oh so much the better for it. Reminds me of hoping for occasional power outages as I raised my kids, to force the whole family to go back to more healthy and productive activities. (The fight and struggle to do so otherwise was/is exhausting, as we all know; and gets worse over time.)
The modern world of electronics is rife with foolish temptations.
And pickup baseball, hide and seek, tag, making dams in the gutter, etc. Now it’s just buying a kid some piece of plastic junk...or, an electronic thingy with a screen (even worse).
Anyone remember Erector Sets and Tinkertoys?
and Lincoln logs?
And the greatest one of all - Meccano?
In the EU children are not allowed to climb trees on school grounds.
Because trees are not EU-bureaucracy approved pedagogical-didactic playing equipment for the edification of young minds.
In PE, setting the bar for a passing grade the same for everyone is discriminatory and BadWrongEvil, even if said bar is something like "must run 5km under 45 minutes at least once per semester".
Education has spent 50 years making children into helpless obedient little automatons. This development correlates 100% with women becoming the dominant majority among faculties, staff and school politicians.
Make of that what you will.
perhaps it has as much or more to do with the Marxists at Dept of Ed and the teachers union
Not a topic I spend time on, and we don't live in a single-cause world even if we pretend to, but one thing is certain:
Femininity can be just as toxic as masculinity.
My father was an aeronautical engineer, designing both commercial and military aircraft. Spent his entire career at Douglas Aircraft/McDonnell Douglas. When we were kids, he designed and built our kites from balsa wood and tissue paper...the ‘regular’ triangular as well as box kites, and other designs. He was constantly building balsa wood gliders and model airplanes in the garage.
I remember buying the kits, of wooden sticks and precut paper, and spending an hour with glue putting them together. Lucky if they lasted all afternoon.
I bet that was fun! My dad made them ‘from scratch’, and created several different designs.
Fusion may turn out to be a good example. The billions poured into tokamaks like ITER seem to have resulted mainly in more billions poured into tokamaks. It's all about making sure the researchers stay employed endlessly researching the one thing they know how to research, rather than actually solving the problem.
Broken incentive structure, basically.
You can already build a Farnsworth Fuser in your garage, and achieve fusion using deuterium. Just don't stand too close.
A whole slew of statutes, starting with the RICO act, and regulations in the '70s criminalized home chemistry. Note Linus Pauling, who won 2 Nobel prizes, 1 for chemistry (Electronegativity), was the pyrotechnic terror of Condon, Oregon. No more. Chemophobia won.
Old NASA engineers are fun too, what with their homemade fireworks, miniature rockets and fire sculptures. I don't know where they find everything, I think most of them are using up their stashes before they pass on.
They'd better beware BATFE and Feral persecutors wielding the RICO act. Many of these displays likely utilize dynamite fuse it defines as functioning by way of explosion, even though it doesn't. Use electrical ignition instead?
How ironic, Gates the Maverick is now an ardent elitist protector of status quo, slurping at the trough of our public funds (our tax dollars. Pisses me off, he, gropin’ joe and bootygigger probably also giving each other hand jobs while lecturing us on humanity and ethics.
"Gates the maverick" 's mother was on a nonprofit board with the chairman of IBM, who she asked to help her son. https://archive.is/qUcxP
If you study the history of say, the Wright brothers for example, you'll consistently find that the best-funded teams typically got beat by the bootstrappers chasing the same or similar breakthroughs.
It would be weird if it didn't happen in someone's "garage."
And it will likely be more practical, and more accessible, because the methodology didn't require the kinds of inputs they're currently throwing around in the fusion space.
There´s also this aspect that technological progress is subject to political redefinitions. For example, if one accepts that reduction of CO2 emissions (or emissions for any allegedly climate-destroying chemical) for every particular technology is what now constitutes progress, then a lot of resources may be poured into the pursuit of such goals, with the results also leading to any number of papers and patents.
However, this kind of progress, with all the trappings historically associated with technological advances, would not result in the kind of improvement that the general public is used to from "progress". By defining essentially arbitrary goals, you can keep the technological progress circus continuing for a while.
This is definitely a thing. A lot of the 'progress' of recent years amounts to replacing a perfectly good technology with a much more expensive, less functional equivalent.
Much like the latest teaching methodologies they've developed
You don't use "full-strength" tobacco. That would be Mexican/Rustic tobacco (up to 9% nicotine by weight). The reason you can't get it is you only need a tiny bit to get your fix, and that's harder to monetize.
Vaping and heated tobacco are genuinely good innovations imo.
I know so many who switched in the past decade and feel better for it. More pleasant to inhale second-hand than smoke too.
RETVRN
Those are asinine. Gum and pouches are far more functional. Or something orally active, like Tabex.
better to give it up completely. Ever watch someone die of lung cancer or oral cancer?
Take nicotine or cytisinicline with vitamin C to reduce the hazard of nitrosamines. You claim these things target lungs and mouth with those alkylating agents? Do you stringently avoid secondary amines and easily demethylated tertiary amines?
Nicotine in isolation isn't carcinogenic. Neither is tobacco unless it's heated to the point of combustion (steam-cured is fine).
Non smokers die too.
Thought:
If jogging prolongs your life, does it do so more than the time spent jogging?
Decline and fraud. Lack of original thought and innovation. Not just here. Look at the entertainment vertical. How much is recycled rebooted sequelled formulaic garbage?
It's so true. Just look at the mainstream personalities in the US now; little dictator Fauci, junkfood eating facist Dr. Hotez, senile China Joe, General Milley, Darth Vader costumed Lloyd Austin. All these people and so many others who have ascended to significant leadership roles now look like and behave like villains in a comic book. It's positively unreal!
Milley and Austin are going to get us all killed - these dudes are incompetent and therefore scary given their position and power...Milley should have been court-martialed for contacting the Chinese on Jan 6 - the guy is a power hungry doofus...Austin clearly botched Afghanistan
Hollywood hasn’t had an original idea since the 90s
Everything going forward is going to be a recycled version of something that went before, but with a "diverse" cast. Diversity being limited to skin tone and sexual preference of course.
Well, we can't be advocating for diversity of thought, can we?
You had me at "There are assistants who should in theory do this work for me, but I have learned that their involvement is to be minimised, as they’re just as likely to introduce more problems as they are to solve them". Yep, if it has to be done right these days, you're often stuck doing it yourself. I fully relate!
Many colleges & universities have shifted the work formerly done by professors onto graduate students who work for a meager stipend and an advanced degree.
THEN the academic market is flooded with newly minted credentialed academics who cannot find a tenure-track job, which is the reason they enrolled in graduate school in the first place.
My advice to anyone contemplating graduate school--especially in the humanities: enroll in a trade school! Become an electrician or plumber!
much better paid, and more useful skills when shtf
I have worked as a software developer in a few academic institutions. The quality of PhDs these doesn't seem up to much. During covid, very few of the seasoned scientists I know questioned anything and didn't seem distinguish science from pseudo-science.
Decline and fraud. Lack of original thought and innovation. Not just here. Look at the entertainment vertical. How much is recycled rebooted sequelled formulaic garbage?
I can't help but wonder if part of this problem is the ever growing government grant system that has established guidelines for universities and corporations to meet in order to qualify for funding. This approach has created competition by new research students to meet the guidelines with something, anything that will qualify for funding. Grad students are pressed to come up with something, anything that will qualify for funding or they won't move forward. Overly narrow research gives less significant advances but it's a safe move and on the career path to success in the academic/corporate world I suspect. And each year the ball can be slowly moved down the field with follow on small advances. It's all about the career perhaps.
Welcome to the fine World of Cancel Culture where everyone just falls into line voluntarily.
I've heard reports that academic papers are now routinely encouraged (read: commanded) to cite purported academic authors who are "Persons of Color" or some other purportedly "marginalized" people, regardless of the value of that "research." I believe this is called "decolonizing" academia.
Add to that outright laziness and the result is as you report.
A few years ago when this nonsense started, I had assumed that science would be too objective and would push back. Seems I was wrong. It's sad to see.
AH! James Lindsay & Helen Pluckrose!
I'm a BIG FOLLOWER of Dr. Lindsay, and highly recommend his "New Discourses" podcasts!
In one sense, this is to be expected. The universe always trends towards equilibrium. Disruptive research presumes disequilibrium.
In another sense, equilibrium, viewed from the perspective of the laws of thermodynamics, is "heat death"--change ends, and the system becomes static.
What the sciences need are the new agents of disequilibrium, the Einsteins, the Max Plancks, the Michaelson and Morley types, or the Watson and Crick types, in order to shake things up a bit.
Let's please recognize them and give them funding. Because anyone of that intellectual caliber is going to get bored pretty quickly spending months on end writing proposals for a single idea, while 80 other ideas pile up.
What we need is a way to make research funding more "open source", if you will. Free up the money and maybe we can free up the minds.
A recent commentator (I can't remember who) said "we were promised flying cars and we got 80 characters". Thanks for this timely and important post - I've been worried about it in Physics as the last real breakthrough was a century ago and that was quantum theory. Lee Smolin (I think) said that string theory has cost tens of thousands of man-years and hasn't produced a single testable prediction. This is because you can get grants to do String Theory but not anything else.
If one good comes out of the Covid mess then it might be that it has awakened us to the failure of our scientific institutions: mainly biomedicine but more and more the other 'hard' sciences. The reasons for these failures are many and varied: but boil down to commercial, political and ideological interference combined with, as someone commented below, a culture of risk-aversion. We all need to man up.
Even in the hard sciences, innovative ideas have a little to no chance without a credential. Lee Smolin might deplore the lack of innovation, but even he wrote to someone I know that he wouldn't even look at your work unless you had a PhD.
Understandable, as people like Smolin are inundated with ideas written in crayon. But a sad state of affairs for the few geniuses laboring in isolation out there.
When science was really making progress back before the first half of the 20th century, much of it was done by gentlemen of leisure or men of the cloth as these were people who had the money to live and the time to spare thinking great thoughts. In those days a teenage James Clerk Maxwell could have a paper read (by a grown-up) at the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
More recently with the commercialisation of education and research a new breed of scientist has arisen - someone who is as much marketeer as scientist; someone who can extricate big bucks from governments to build huge projects (and an empire).
I wouldn't worry about the few(?) geniuses out there. Ideas with merit always come through - just not as soon as they might.
Professional philosophy seems to be in the same boat, from my experience. I witnessed an acceleration in careerism just in my short (less than a decade) career as a philosopher. The overspecialization is also plague, and the two always seemed obviously connected to me. People make whole careers out of raising miniscule and useless objections to older, established views, and then supplying the solution to that useless objection. This is the general pattern to publication and it leads exactly nowhere. Attempting to publish anything that might actually sunder one of these established, dead-end views is either ignored or ridiculed (mostly the former).
Even worse is the proliferation of waman philosophers, who need their hands held through grad school but, brimming with conscientiousness and ass kissing, they make perfect early career professors. I taught in a dept that was 90% female and it was like living in some kind of bizarro world philosophy nut house where only affirmations were welcomed and where legitimate criticism got the silent treatment. I felt like I had been sucked through a wormhole and into some kind of Sunday school in hell.
Ooh, this inspires me to rush out and read all of these fascinating contributions.
It sounds from your description that this department maybe filled the same psychological niche as having a cooking blog?
Phony people with phony personalities and phony credentials. Its like someone somewhere decided colleges were places for adults to have play time dress up and every is supposed to pretend to not notice.
Pass the popcorn please!
The smartest people are undoubtedly leaving the field as soon as they graduate. I imagine the diversification of philosophy will be complete in a decade or so.
There is so much fertile comment that may be made here. The politicisation of science, the policy based 'evidence', the extensive invalid modelling, all products and 'tools' of this conformist moment. If it is possible to generalise here, or perhaps at least capture a portion of the observed phenomenon with a generalised statement, perhaps one looks at "performance based research funding" (PBRF) as the means by which a careers are advanced and "output" (almost anything that sounds impressive of acquires through sleight of pen, an impressive metric) both individual and institutional becomes a metric for funding. Then there is the torture of grant application, the reams of nonsense to satisfy the exigencies of political correctness, neo-Marxist DIE ideology, rainbows, institutional and community unicorns. A further point, is that the methodologies of yore often left much to be desired, and the application of new methods to old processes of investigation frequently lead to new and valuable insights.
A while back I read a hypothesis that suggested we would enter a period of apparent stagnation, following the scintillating period of progress to which you allude. It was conjectured it would be a 'pause' a consolidation, prior to the next accelerando of insight and discovery.
Glass half full or half empty?
What's worse; is now the SYSTEM doesn't even require humans to select for these morons.
The system self selects.
The focus on footnotes is simply a way to create noise and distract, in order for conclusions to match the desired outcome.