Essentially what is being said here is that “the scientific establishment in the West (mostly the USA) is becoming dysfunctional. If the current trend continues, enough science will be wrong or fraudulent that no forward progress is made at all.”
However, science isn’t just an abstract idea with intangible moral rules. If scientists fake results on a large scale, they will cease discovering useful new ideas or create anything that is objectively better than what Western society currently has. This will have consequences as governed by the one entity that can’t be befuddled—the actual universe. Western machinery and medicine will become relatively less efficient compared to competitors because it does not keep getting improved. Over enough of a period of time, this will be deleterious to the entire civilization.
As long as their are competing civilizations (you can divide the world up into other sub-groups, although of course there are many inter-relationships) such as Eastern Europe, Asia, the South Americas, etc then over the long term (centuries) this will simply give these competing civilizations an opportunity to surge ahead. Overall global progress does not stop.
A broader theme here : I’m saying that from the very dawn of rational thought and the scientific method, combined with a method to record the progress made and prevent information loss (the printing press), the overall trajectory is unstoppable. Various human groups competing among each other will continue to increase their control over environment, ultimately resulting in the development of tools that allow true mastery. (AIs, nano-machinery that can self replicate and quickly pattern everything, etc)
It’s sort of a popular idea to talk about ways that this could somehow not happen, but short of a large scale erasure of existing information (aka nuclear weapons or very large meteors erasing the current “state” of the global information environment) it’s hard to see how anything else could ultimately happen.
Won’t reality eventually sort this out?
Essentially what is being said here is that “the scientific establishment in the West (mostly the USA) is becoming dysfunctional. If the current trend continues, enough science will be wrong or fraudulent that no forward progress is made at all.”
However, science isn’t just an abstract idea with intangible moral rules. If scientists fake results on a large scale, they will cease discovering useful new ideas or create anything that is objectively better than what Western society currently has. This will have consequences as governed by the one entity that can’t be befuddled—the actual universe. Western machinery and medicine will become relatively less efficient compared to competitors because it does not keep getting improved. Over enough of a period of time, this will be deleterious to the entire civilization.
As long as their are competing civilizations (you can divide the world up into other sub-groups, although of course there are many inter-relationships) such as Eastern Europe, Asia, the South Americas, etc then over the long term (centuries) this will simply give these competing civilizations an opportunity to surge ahead. Overall global progress does not stop.
A broader theme here : I’m saying that from the very dawn of rational thought and the scientific method, combined with a method to record the progress made and prevent information loss (the printing press), the overall trajectory is unstoppable. Various human groups competing among each other will continue to increase their control over environment, ultimately resulting in the development of tools that allow true mastery. (AIs, nano-machinery that can self replicate and quickly pattern everything, etc)
It’s sort of a popular idea to talk about ways that this could somehow not happen, but short of a large scale erasure of existing information (aka nuclear weapons or very large meteors erasing the current “state” of the global information environment) it’s hard to see how anything else could ultimately happen.