There is definitely no point in saving any particular department which claims to be "science," any university which pleads that it's "private," any "newspaper" or "public school," etc. The entire system of official "education" has to be completely wiped. . .
It's not clear to me that Digg, Wikipedia, arxiv.org, and other modern systems which solve, or at least purport to solve, the critical problem of separating content from nonsense, are quite ready for their new roles. But perhaps we'll be surprised. Certainly, industry will not suffer from the impact of a large population of extremely intelligent and potentially productive individuals, who until now have been devoting their nervous systems to what might as well be Neoplatonist astrology. As for "science," most of the advances in Western scientific history, contrary to popular belief, occurred when scientists were not servants of the State. . .
The problem with CS - and I suspect in other sciences, such as physics, although I am certainly not qualified to fire so much as a BB gun in the great Woit-Motl war - is that science today is, contrary to popular belief, a business.
And it is a very special kind of business. In this business, there is exactly one customer, and his name is Uncle Sam. And there are no companies in this business - apart from your "mafia," you're on your own. You can get students to do your programming, true, but you have to do your own research and, more importantly, your own sales.
Selling to Uncle Sam is a fascinating problem. Uncle Sam wants his serfs to know that their tax dollars are being spent on top-notch research which will make America #1. If the dollars are being spent in the constituency of a Congressman with the right seniority, this is even better. Otherwise, Uncle Sam does not give a tinker's damn what he funds, as long as the result does not actually make him look like an idiot. Fortunately, Sen. Proxmire has departed this earth and all of your big-league journalists are pro-science pretty much the way Pat Robertson is pro-God, not to mention that if they have a BA in anything besides basketweaving it's a surprise, so Uncle Sam is unlikely to see any trouble from this front.
In any event, Mencius has some very interesting things to say about how government funding of projects actually works.
2 comments:
It's interesting but not nuanced enough. Read Professor David F. Noble's book on the social history of automation. Power something. Power of Production. Whatever. That dude was fired from M.I.T. because he documents science is controlled by Freemasonry. Read his "The Religion of Technology" (1996) for a list of the Freemason elite who directed the modern engineering institutions and the other secret societies who created U.S. science are detailed in "America By Design."
But my specific point is, as per Noble, M.I.T. seeks and destroys independent inventor patents -- despite the fact that it goes against any efficiency in production. It's all about patent control for the power of profit. So "selling to Uncle Scam" is kinda a misnomer since the military-controlled M.I.T. actually suppresses and does aggressive take-over of technology even though it will cost the system money.
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I agree with you Michael the general public distrusts science obviously because of the massive amount of evidence for survival of bodily death and of psi phenomena. Materialism have been so surpassed like you said before Michael by quantum theory it's like scientists are ignoring the revolution.
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