I have to say that nuclear warfare was less of a human extinction risk than some people tend to think or is directly suggested by this text. Even a straight all out war between the United States and Soviet Union using their full arsenals would not have caused human extinction nor likely have prevented some technological societies from rebuilding if they didn’t outright survive. I’ve seen out there expert analyses on raw destruction and on factors like subsequent global climate devastation showing this conclusion from any plausible military contigencies and actions. The remaining arguments in favor would have to be pretty convoluted, like by setting a sociopolitical precedent it would automatically guarantee any future or rebuilt societies would seek military conflict through further nuclear wars.
The most dangerous extinction risk that could be caused by human action in the 20th century probably would have been deliberate attempts at destruction of the ozone layer in a supervillain sense. (This could be facilitated by nuclear weaponry, of course.) No actual polity as far as anyone knows, I think, planned such a thing. Accidental destruction, timed differently in an alternate history pathway, could also have been pretty bad. To consider and compare a full range of hypotheses, biological warfare was (and still is) a threat but overall is probably less of an x-risk as well, if you understand the flat out mass extinction potential of ozone destruction.
It wouldn’t be bad to invite debate on these points as I think actually fully understanding various x-risks, near misses in the real world, and all that is rather important to getting something useful out of this parable.
I’ve seen out there expert analyses on raw destruction and on factors like subsequent global climate devastation showing this conclusion from any plausible military contigencies and actions.
The only one I’ve personally read is Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War, which oversimplifies a lot and generally tries to paint matters as optimistically as possible; as well, people from that era like Samuel Cohen in his memoirs describe Kahn as willing to fudge numbers to make their scenarios look better.
Personally, I am not optimistic. Remember the formulation of existential risk: not just extinction, but also the permanent curtailment of human potential. So if industrialized civilization collapsed permanently, that would be a serious x-risk almost up there with extinction itself. I agree that I don’t think nuclear war is likely to immediately cause human extinction, but if it destroys industrialized civilization, then it’s setting us up to actually be wiped out over the coming millennia or millions of years by a fluke pandemic or asteroid or any of the usual natural x-risks.
Coal, oil, surface metals, and many other resources are effectively impossible to extract with low-tech levels like say the 1800s. (Imagine trying to frack or deepsea mine or extract tar with 1800s metallurgy or anything.) Historically, we see that entire continents can go for millennia on end with little meaningful change economically; much of Africa might as well not be in the same world, for all the good progress has done it. Intellectual traditions and scholarship can become corrupted into meaningless repetition of sacred literature (how much genuine innovation took place in China from AD 0 to AD 1800, compared to its wealth and large intelligentsia? why do all acupuncture trials ‘succeed’ in China and Japan when it’s shown to be worthless placebo in Western trials?) We still don’t know why the Industrial & Scientific Revolutions took place in Western Europe starting around the 1500s, when there had been urbanized civilizations for millennia and China in every way looked better, so how could we be confident that if humanity were reduced to the Dark Ages we’d quickly recover? Brief reparable interruptions in globalized supply chains cause long-lasting—we still haven’t recovered to the trendline of hard drive prices from the Thai floods, and that was just flooding, nothing remotely like a countervalue nuke against Bangkok knocking out a good chunk of Thai business & financial infrastructure. Experience/learning curve effects mean that high efficiencies are locked up in the heads and hands and physical arrangement of existing capital, so plants cannot simply be replaced overnight, the expertise has to be developed from scratch. Complex civilizations can simply collapse and disperse back into the low-tech agrarian societies from whence they sprung (I’m thinking particularly of the case-studies in Tainter’s Collapse).
Of course, we can’t yet name an industrialized civilization that collapsed, but it’s not like it’s been a thing all that long—the Roman Empire lasted a lot longer than the Industrial Revolution has, but nevertheless, we know how that ended.
It feels like we have talked past each other given this and responses to other comments.
I do not think this really addressed a core misconception shaping the debate or a best a contradiction of historical expert analysis. Would you call it “industrial collapse” if, following a full scale nuclear war, present day Australia was still standing a month later with little military destruction nor human casualties?
I am not directly an expert in the field and climate science in particular has advanced a lot compared to historical research, on all topics not just nuclear winter, but I have read some different authors. Also to the point, the sheer volume of expert work characterized at best by conflicting opinions should you accept the most pessimistic nuclear warfare predictions is worth considering. Sagan and Turco and others repeatedly collaborated on several high profile works and the state of expert science I think could be accurately said to be considered to have advanced over time.
This particular paper doesn’t discuss, say, military strategy other than very broad consensus, eg. both sides would favor Northern Hemisphere targets, though see a ton of cited and other sources. Even conditionally overcoming, for the purpose of hypothetical consideration, the lower prior probability of certain full scale military conflicts, direct, targeted destruction of more than about 20% of the world population as a military and strategic outcome just wasn’t feasible, ever. This as a popular misconception might be readily dismissed by those of us here, but recognize that large amounts of past research was on fully trying to understand, admittedly we still don’t completely, subsequent climate and ecological effects. The latter are the only real x-risk concern from a technological and natural science standpoint. A few degrees Celsius of temperature change globally and other havoc is not nothing but most predictions indicated low risk of a real extinction event. Much of the world would have nominally go on without the US and USSR and losses suffered by their respective allies, and by pretty much everyone’s inspection it’s not like those who survived would be all impovershed 3rd worlders who could never recover.
It is a stretch to describe predictions and understanding at times in the past, even “1980 Australia survives intact, with some climate and ecological repercussions” as “industrial civilization completely collapses.” Those two statements are not equivalent at all. The former prediction might have been incorrect but it existed.
Clearly there are reasons to consider prior study on the matter less than ideal, experts lacking time or funding or facing political pressure. Though, saying that experts attempted to study the issue at the time and got it wrong is different from ignoring it and from others rejecting a correct conclusion by the experts. Very few expert predictions leaned in the direction of x-risk as considered here—not just immediate near extinction but also “permanent curtailment of potential,” at least when putting nuclear warfare and low if uncertain nuclear winter predictions on the same scale as other x-risks.
Would you call it “industrial collapse” if, following a full scale nuclear war, present day Australia was still standing a month later with little military destruction nor human casualties?
I assume you mean here if Australia escaped any direct attack? Sure. The lesson of I Am A Pencil—no one person (or country) knows how to make a pencil. Australia is heavily integrated into the world economy: to caricature, they mine iron for China, and in exchange they get everything else. Can Australia make an Intel chip fab using only on-island resources? Could it even maintain such a chip fab? Can Australia replace the pharmaceutical factories of the USA and Switzerland using only on-island resources? Where do the trained specialists and rare elements come from? Consider the Great Depression: did Australia escape it? If it cannot escape a simple economic slowdown because it is so highly intertwined, it is not going to escape the disruption and substantial destruction of almost the entire scientific-industrial-technological complex of the Western world. Australia would immediately be thrown into dire poverty and its advanced capabilities will begin decaying. Whether Australia becomes a new Tanzania of technology loss will depend on how badly mauled the rest of the world is, though, I would guess.
Even conditionally overcoming, for the purpose of hypothetical consideration, the lower prior probability of certain full scale military conflicts, direct, targeted destruction of more than about 20% of the world population as a military and strategic outcome just wasn’t feasible, ever.
An instantaneous loss of 10-20% of population and destruction of major urban centers is pretty much unprecedented. The few examples I can think of similar levels of population loss, like the Mongols & Iran or the Spanish & New World, are not promising.
by pretty much everyone’s inspection it’s not like those who survived would be all impovershed 3rd worlders who could never recover.
But none of those countries were responsible for the Industrial or Scientific Revolutions. Humanity would survive… much as it always has. That’s the problem.
Clearly there are reasons to consider prior study on the matter less than ideal, experts lacking time or funding or facing political pressure. Though, saying that experts attempted to study the issue at the time and got it wrong is different from ignoring it and from others rejecting a correct conclusion by the experts. Very few expert predictions leaned in the direction of x-risk as considered here—not just immediate near extinction but also “permanent curtailment of potential,” at least when putting nuclear warfare and low if uncertain nuclear winter predictions on the same scale as other x-risks.
I’ve read this paragraph 3 times and I still don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re being way too vague about what experts or what predictions you’re talking about or what you’re responding to or how it connects to your claims about Australia.
the Roman Empire lasted a lot longer than the Industrial Revolution has, but nevertheless, we know how that ended.
Well, yes… It persisted until 1453. Rome wasn’t the center of the Roman Empire since around 330.
The big idea that allows modern civilization is that you don’t worship the knowledge, you go out and test it… that’s the main thing, and that would persist easily. Knowing about germs is another biggie. That sort of stuff is spread very widely (if thinly), and could allow a rebound. But to get that rebound, it needs to have been there in the first place. Mere users of civilization who haven’t become modern themselves would not get this boost. (see: all case-studies in Collapse, if I’m not mistaken)
Also, the last I checked on acupuncture, the placement is unimportant, but getting stuck with needles does help with pain. So they’re continuing doing something that works, but they haven’t removed unimportant details.
It persisted until 1453. Rome wasn’t the center of the Roman Empire since around 330.
Either way you want to count, from the first Roman conquests to the fall of the West or from the fall of the West to the fall of the East. Both get you periods comparable to or longer than the entire history of the Industrial & Scientific Revolutions so far.
The big idea that allows modern civilization is that you don’t worship the knowledge, you go out and test it… that’s the main thing, and that would persist easily.
I don’t think ‘testing things’ is as easy or trivial as you think. It’s very easy to ‘test’ something and get exactly the result you want. Or get a result which means nothing. Cargo cult science & thinking is the default, not the aberration. When science goes bad, it doesn’t look like ‘we’ve decided we aren’t going to do Science anymore’, it looks like this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kfb/open_thread_30_june_2014_6_july_2014/b1u3 (To use an example from yesterday.) It looks like science, everyone involved thinks it’s science, it passes all the traditional rituals like peer review and statistical tests, but it means next to nothing. The same way millennia of theologians or magicians or alchemists think they’re doing something useful and acquiring knowledge.
Once the culture of real science is lost, I’m not sure it has a good chance of surviving. How well did the spirit of Greek philosophy survive the Roman Empire? Yes, eventually it came back, but there’s anthropic bias there (we probably wouldn’t be discussing science if Greek philosophy & logic hadn’t survived somehow), and consider the chancy transmission of a lot of it from Greek to Arabic back to Europe.
Knowing about germs is another biggie.
Will degenerate almost immediately into classic taboos and miasmas and evil spirits. How well does folk understanding of antibiotics accord with reality? When people routinely discontinue antibiotic treatment because they feel better, are they exhibiting an understanding of germ theory? Or consider the popularity of anti-vax among the most highly educated as we speak...
but getting stuck with needles does help with pain
RIght. But real science is widespread. There are research universities in Lesotho, and I’ve met professors from there and they know how science works. They’ve done it, and continue to do it.
I was under the impression that sham acupuncture generally performed comparable to ‘real’ acupuncture
Exactly. The sham acupuncture still involves poking people with needles! It’s just not aligned.
There are research universities in Lesotho, and I’ve met professors from there and they know how science works.
And how much of the culture of science has spread through Lesotho? Or would survive the university being shut down? Or survive a single charismatic professor leaving and being replaced by a corrupt leader who demands publishable results? The question isn’t whether Science exists in the world, but to what extent it’s a delicate flower that lives in a greenhouse and will quickly die or become a shambling parody of itself when conditions change, and whether it can survive something like the collapse of civilization.
Exactly. The sham acupuncture still involves poking people with needles! It’s just not aligned.
It does? I thought sham acupuncture involved either needle-less approaches or trick needles where it pokes the patient but retracts rather than breaks the skin.
Pt 1: I don’t know. The core of science is not so very complicated. Empiricism plus skepticism plus math. The hardest part of that is math, and of the three that is the most easily transmitted by book. Of the rest, that’s a bit of sociology I can’t judge. Lesotho isn’t what I’m holding up as ‘the most likely source of a rebound in the event of nuclear war’ - it’s an example of the spread of real science.
Pt 2: Sometimes… but even if acupuncture is a really reliable way of inducing a strong placebo effect on people even if they know it ‘does nothing’, that’s useful.
The hardest part of that is math, and of the three that is the most easily transmitted by book.
The tradition of math is the most ancient & universal of the 3 parts you mention. Most regions of the world develop math, sometimes to fairly high levels like in India or China. Is that consistent with it being ‘the hardest part’? In contrast, empiricism and skepticism are typically marginal and unpopular on the rare occasions they show up; the Greek Skeptics were one of the more minor traditions, the Carvaka of India were some heretics known from like one surviving text from the early BCs and were never a viable force, and offhand I don’t even know of any Chinese philosophical tradition which could reasonably be described as either ‘empirical’ or ‘skeptical’.
that’s useful.
It’s also not what they think they’re measuring. Still diseased.
Because it’s psychologically hard and unintuitive, not because it’s complicated. Math is complicated and difficult, but it’s not psychologically challenging like ‘do your best to destroy your own clever explanations and cheer if someone else does’.
Acupuncture makes a great example. Here we have folks who are on to something that works. Yay! Case closed. … except, not. Because they don’t have the idea of science, the hard and unintuitive thing that says you should try to find all the times that that thing you rely on doesn’t work, they can’t find those boundaries.
Because it’s psychologically hard and unintuitive, not because it’s complicated.
...and if science is psychologically hard & unintuitive, all the easier for it to be substituted for something superficially similar but ineffective.
Math is complicated and difficult, but it’s not psychologically challenging like ‘do your best to destroy your own clever explanations and cheer if someone else does’.
And how does that not make science harder than math?
Skepticism and empiricism are robust ideas, by which I mean there’s nothing particularly similar to them. They are also very compact. You can fit them on a post-card. On the other hand, math is this enormous edifice.
The ‘getting it wrong’ that you see all over modern science is a failure, yes, but most of these scientist-failures are failing due to contingent local factors like conflicts of interest and grant proposals and muddy results and competition pressures… they’re failing to fulfill the scientific ideal for sure, but it’s not because they lack the scientific ideal. They can correctly teach science. If bad scientists were all we had, then science would have bad habits and that would be bad, but it could be solved much more easily than having to redesign the thing without knowing that it was possible, like we did the first time.
This is still the case even if all the scientists are under the thumbs of warlords who make them do stupid stuff. The idea is there, the light can spread. Not right away, likely, but we won’t need to wait thousands of years for it to re-emerge.
I have to say that nuclear warfare was less of a human extinction risk than some people tend to think or is directly suggested by this text. Even a straight all out war between the United States and Soviet Union using their full arsenals would not have caused human extinction nor likely have prevented some technological societies from rebuilding if they didn’t outright survive. I’ve seen out there expert analyses on raw destruction and on factors like subsequent global climate devastation showing this conclusion from any plausible military contigencies and actions. The remaining arguments in favor would have to be pretty convoluted, like by setting a sociopolitical precedent it would automatically guarantee any future or rebuilt societies would seek military conflict through further nuclear wars.
The most dangerous extinction risk that could be caused by human action in the 20th century probably would have been deliberate attempts at destruction of the ozone layer in a supervillain sense. (This could be facilitated by nuclear weaponry, of course.) No actual polity as far as anyone knows, I think, planned such a thing. Accidental destruction, timed differently in an alternate history pathway, could also have been pretty bad. To consider and compare a full range of hypotheses, biological warfare was (and still is) a threat but overall is probably less of an x-risk as well, if you understand the flat out mass extinction potential of ozone destruction.
It wouldn’t be bad to invite debate on these points as I think actually fully understanding various x-risks, near misses in the real world, and all that is rather important to getting something useful out of this parable.
The only one I’ve personally read is Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War, which oversimplifies a lot and generally tries to paint matters as optimistically as possible; as well, people from that era like Samuel Cohen in his memoirs describe Kahn as willing to fudge numbers to make their scenarios look better.
Personally, I am not optimistic. Remember the formulation of existential risk: not just extinction, but also the permanent curtailment of human potential. So if industrialized civilization collapsed permanently, that would be a serious x-risk almost up there with extinction itself. I agree that I don’t think nuclear war is likely to immediately cause human extinction, but if it destroys industrialized civilization, then it’s setting us up to actually be wiped out over the coming millennia or millions of years by a fluke pandemic or asteroid or any of the usual natural x-risks.
Coal, oil, surface metals, and many other resources are effectively impossible to extract with low-tech levels like say the 1800s. (Imagine trying to frack or deepsea mine or extract tar with 1800s metallurgy or anything.) Historically, we see that entire continents can go for millennia on end with little meaningful change economically; much of Africa might as well not be in the same world, for all the good progress has done it. Intellectual traditions and scholarship can become corrupted into meaningless repetition of sacred literature (how much genuine innovation took place in China from AD 0 to AD 1800, compared to its wealth and large intelligentsia? why do all acupuncture trials ‘succeed’ in China and Japan when it’s shown to be worthless placebo in Western trials?) We still don’t know why the Industrial & Scientific Revolutions took place in Western Europe starting around the 1500s, when there had been urbanized civilizations for millennia and China in every way looked better, so how could we be confident that if humanity were reduced to the Dark Ages we’d quickly recover? Brief reparable interruptions in globalized supply chains cause long-lasting—we still haven’t recovered to the trendline of hard drive prices from the Thai floods, and that was just flooding, nothing remotely like a countervalue nuke against Bangkok knocking out a good chunk of Thai business & financial infrastructure. Experience/learning curve effects mean that high efficiencies are locked up in the heads and hands and physical arrangement of existing capital, so plants cannot simply be replaced overnight, the expertise has to be developed from scratch. Complex civilizations can simply collapse and disperse back into the low-tech agrarian societies from whence they sprung (I’m thinking particularly of the case-studies in Tainter’s Collapse).
Of course, we can’t yet name an industrialized civilization that collapsed, but it’s not like it’s been a thing all that long—the Roman Empire lasted a lot longer than the Industrial Revolution has, but nevertheless, we know how that ended.
It feels like we have talked past each other given this and responses to other comments.
I do not think this really addressed a core misconception shaping the debate or a best a contradiction of historical expert analysis. Would you call it “industrial collapse” if, following a full scale nuclear war, present day Australia was still standing a month later with little military destruction nor human casualties?
I am not directly an expert in the field and climate science in particular has advanced a lot compared to historical research, on all topics not just nuclear winter, but I have read some different authors. Also to the point, the sheer volume of expert work characterized at best by conflicting opinions should you accept the most pessimistic nuclear warfare predictions is worth considering. Sagan and Turco and others repeatedly collaborated on several high profile works and the state of expert science I think could be accurately said to be considered to have advanced over time.
See for example: http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~ackerman/Articles/Turco_Nuclear_Winter_90.pdf
This particular paper doesn’t discuss, say, military strategy other than very broad consensus, eg. both sides would favor Northern Hemisphere targets, though see a ton of cited and other sources. Even conditionally overcoming, for the purpose of hypothetical consideration, the lower prior probability of certain full scale military conflicts, direct, targeted destruction of more than about 20% of the world population as a military and strategic outcome just wasn’t feasible, ever. This as a popular misconception might be readily dismissed by those of us here, but recognize that large amounts of past research was on fully trying to understand, admittedly we still don’t completely, subsequent climate and ecological effects. The latter are the only real x-risk concern from a technological and natural science standpoint. A few degrees Celsius of temperature change globally and other havoc is not nothing but most predictions indicated low risk of a real extinction event. Much of the world would have nominally go on without the US and USSR and losses suffered by their respective allies, and by pretty much everyone’s inspection it’s not like those who survived would be all impovershed 3rd worlders who could never recover.
It is a stretch to describe predictions and understanding at times in the past, even “1980 Australia survives intact, with some climate and ecological repercussions” as “industrial civilization completely collapses.” Those two statements are not equivalent at all. The former prediction might have been incorrect but it existed.
Clearly there are reasons to consider prior study on the matter less than ideal, experts lacking time or funding or facing political pressure. Though, saying that experts attempted to study the issue at the time and got it wrong is different from ignoring it and from others rejecting a correct conclusion by the experts. Very few expert predictions leaned in the direction of x-risk as considered here—not just immediate near extinction but also “permanent curtailment of potential,” at least when putting nuclear warfare and low if uncertain nuclear winter predictions on the same scale as other x-risks.
I assume you mean here if Australia escaped any direct attack? Sure. The lesson of I Am A Pencil—no one person (or country) knows how to make a pencil. Australia is heavily integrated into the world economy: to caricature, they mine iron for China, and in exchange they get everything else. Can Australia make an Intel chip fab using only on-island resources? Could it even maintain such a chip fab? Can Australia replace the pharmaceutical factories of the USA and Switzerland using only on-island resources? Where do the trained specialists and rare elements come from? Consider the Great Depression: did Australia escape it? If it cannot escape a simple economic slowdown because it is so highly intertwined, it is not going to escape the disruption and substantial destruction of almost the entire scientific-industrial-technological complex of the Western world. Australia would immediately be thrown into dire poverty and its advanced capabilities will begin decaying. Whether Australia becomes a new Tanzania of technology loss will depend on how badly mauled the rest of the world is, though, I would guess.
An instantaneous loss of 10-20% of population and destruction of major urban centers is pretty much unprecedented. The few examples I can think of similar levels of population loss, like the Mongols & Iran or the Spanish & New World, are not promising.
But none of those countries were responsible for the Industrial or Scientific Revolutions. Humanity would survive… much as it always has. That’s the problem.
I’ve read this paragraph 3 times and I still don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re being way too vague about what experts or what predictions you’re talking about or what you’re responding to or how it connects to your claims about Australia.
Well, yes… It persisted until 1453. Rome wasn’t the center of the Roman Empire since around 330.
The big idea that allows modern civilization is that you don’t worship the knowledge, you go out and test it… that’s the main thing, and that would persist easily. Knowing about germs is another biggie. That sort of stuff is spread very widely (if thinly), and could allow a rebound. But to get that rebound, it needs to have been there in the first place. Mere users of civilization who haven’t become modern themselves would not get this boost. (see: all case-studies in Collapse, if I’m not mistaken)
Also, the last I checked on acupuncture, the placement is unimportant, but getting stuck with needles does help with pain. So they’re continuing doing something that works, but they haven’t removed unimportant details.
Either way you want to count, from the first Roman conquests to the fall of the West or from the fall of the West to the fall of the East. Both get you periods comparable to or longer than the entire history of the Industrial & Scientific Revolutions so far.
I don’t think ‘testing things’ is as easy or trivial as you think. It’s very easy to ‘test’ something and get exactly the result you want. Or get a result which means nothing. Cargo cult science & thinking is the default, not the aberration. When science goes bad, it doesn’t look like ‘we’ve decided we aren’t going to do Science anymore’, it looks like this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kfb/open_thread_30_june_2014_6_july_2014/b1u3 (To use an example from yesterday.) It looks like science, everyone involved thinks it’s science, it passes all the traditional rituals like peer review and statistical tests, but it means next to nothing. The same way millennia of theologians or magicians or alchemists think they’re doing something useful and acquiring knowledge.
Once the culture of real science is lost, I’m not sure it has a good chance of surviving. How well did the spirit of Greek philosophy survive the Roman Empire? Yes, eventually it came back, but there’s anthropic bias there (we probably wouldn’t be discussing science if Greek philosophy & logic hadn’t survived somehow), and consider the chancy transmission of a lot of it from Greek to Arabic back to Europe.
Will degenerate almost immediately into classic taboos and miasmas and evil spirits. How well does folk understanding of antibiotics accord with reality? When people routinely discontinue antibiotic treatment because they feel better, are they exhibiting an understanding of germ theory? Or consider the popularity of anti-vax among the most highly educated as we speak...
I was under the impression that sham acupuncture generally performed comparable to ‘real’ acupuncture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acupuncture
RIght. But real science is widespread. There are research universities in Lesotho, and I’ve met professors from there and they know how science works. They’ve done it, and continue to do it.
Exactly. The sham acupuncture still involves poking people with needles! It’s just not aligned.
And how much of the culture of science has spread through Lesotho? Or would survive the university being shut down? Or survive a single charismatic professor leaving and being replaced by a corrupt leader who demands publishable results? The question isn’t whether Science exists in the world, but to what extent it’s a delicate flower that lives in a greenhouse and will quickly die or become a shambling parody of itself when conditions change, and whether it can survive something like the collapse of civilization.
It does? I thought sham acupuncture involved either needle-less approaches or trick needles where it pokes the patient but retracts rather than breaks the skin.
Pt 1: I don’t know. The core of science is not so very complicated. Empiricism plus skepticism plus math. The hardest part of that is math, and of the three that is the most easily transmitted by book. Of the rest, that’s a bit of sociology I can’t judge. Lesotho isn’t what I’m holding up as ‘the most likely source of a rebound in the event of nuclear war’ - it’s an example of the spread of real science.
Pt 2: Sometimes… but even if acupuncture is a really reliable way of inducing a strong placebo effect on people even if they know it ‘does nothing’, that’s useful.
Then why did it take so long?
The tradition of math is the most ancient & universal of the 3 parts you mention. Most regions of the world develop math, sometimes to fairly high levels like in India or China. Is that consistent with it being ‘the hardest part’? In contrast, empiricism and skepticism are typically marginal and unpopular on the rare occasions they show up; the Greek Skeptics were one of the more minor traditions, the Carvaka of India were some heretics known from like one surviving text from the early BCs and were never a viable force, and offhand I don’t even know of any Chinese philosophical tradition which could reasonably be described as either ‘empirical’ or ‘skeptical’.
It’s also not what they think they’re measuring. Still diseased.
Because it’s psychologically hard and unintuitive, not because it’s complicated. Math is complicated and difficult, but it’s not psychologically challenging like ‘do your best to destroy your own clever explanations and cheer if someone else does’.
Acupuncture makes a great example. Here we have folks who are on to something that works. Yay! Case closed. … except, not. Because they don’t have the idea of science, the hard and unintuitive thing that says you should try to find all the times that that thing you rely on doesn’t work, they can’t find those boundaries.
...and if science is psychologically hard & unintuitive, all the easier for it to be substituted for something superficially similar but ineffective.
And how does that not make science harder than math?
Skepticism and empiricism are robust ideas, by which I mean there’s nothing particularly similar to them. They are also very compact. You can fit them on a post-card. On the other hand, math is this enormous edifice.
The ‘getting it wrong’ that you see all over modern science is a failure, yes, but most of these scientist-failures are failing due to contingent local factors like conflicts of interest and grant proposals and muddy results and competition pressures… they’re failing to fulfill the scientific ideal for sure, but it’s not because they lack the scientific ideal. They can correctly teach science. If bad scientists were all we had, then science would have bad habits and that would be bad, but it could be solved much more easily than having to redesign the thing without knowing that it was possible, like we did the first time.
This is still the case even if all the scientists are under the thumbs of warlords who make them do stupid stuff. The idea is there, the light can spread. Not right away, likely, but we won’t need to wait thousands of years for it to re-emerge.