which to make matters depressing, I’m not even sure we have any more [w.r.t “societies [sic] truth seeking mechanism”]
If society no longer had a mechanism for finding truth would you still expect there to be regular technological and scientific discoveries like there are today?
That is an excellent point. I clearly overstated, since obviously society as a whole still finds new bits of truth, or rather decent enough new models of reality (~science) together with ways to change reality to make it do what we want (~technology).
When I spoke of truth finding process I was thinking about the a designed optimized process for finding truth, the scientific revolution is supposedly a case when such a process was established and began complimenting the truth seeking mechanisms available in most previous societies to great effect.
Society obviously dosen’t need say to know the scientific method, or have good institutions to advance technologically since people will some times adopt improvements others have stumbled upon no matter what and eccentric individuals would do their own research even without any backing. Also currently we arguably have information technology feeding on itself, since it makes thinking about itself easier. You can make progress that way.
So how much is the modern slow down in some fields due to there being less low hanging fruit and how much due to the quality of the truth seeking processes that are supposed to be going on there, breaking down?
which to make matters depressing, I’m not even sure we have one any more
What I should have said is that I suspect that there is much more slow down due to the processes breaking down that we would like to believe.
If society no longer had a mechanism for finding truth would you still expect there to be regular technological and scientific discoveries like there are today?
That is an excellent point. I clearly overstated, since obviously society as a whole still finds new bits of truth, or rather decent enough new models of reality (~science) together with ways to change reality to make it do what we want (~technology).
When I spoke of truth finding process I was thinking about the a designed optimized process for finding truth, the scientific revolution is supposedly a case when such a process was established and began complimenting the truth seeking mechanisms available in most previous societies to great effect.
Society obviously dosen’t need say to know the scientific method, or have good institutions to advance technologically since people will some times adopt improvements others have stumbled upon no matter what and eccentric individuals would do their own research even without any backing. Also currently we arguably have information technology feeding on itself, since it makes thinking about itself easier. You can make progress that way.
So how much is the modern slow down in some fields due to there being less low hanging fruit and how much due to the quality of the truth seeking processes that are supposed to be going on there, breaking down?
What I should have said is that I suspect that there is much more slow down due to the processes breaking down that we would like to believe.
Do most Less Wrongers actually believe there is such thing as a single scientific method?