The death of science

“Scientists” complain that the government is interfering in “science” by denying them regulatory authority over other people’s economic activity.

Nasa’s primary goal is to make Muslims feel good about Muslim science.In 1903 December 17, the Wright brothers flew.

In 1905 October 05, they demonstrated powered flight “of practical utility”

In 1908, they started making a profit.

In 1969 July 20, Commander Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, but the flight was not of practical utility.

So from the Wright brothers to the moon landing was 66 years, and from the moon landing to now has been forty three years – and in those forty three years, have been slowly giving up on manned presence in space, rather than developing rockets “of practical utility”.

The “dispersal of power” that Mencius Moldbug talks about is that any profitable activity requires more and more permissions.
For each permission, I need to make a payoff – I personally have paid a great deal of money for permissions, and what is worse, had to be nice to the people shaking me down.

Obviously, each person from which a permission is needed is likely to try to capture the lion’s share of the benefit of the permitted activity.  If you need ten permissions to do something, and each of the people granting permissions  attempts to capture one third of the benefit, the activity will not happen, and everyone will be worse off.

To the extent that this happens, the more powerful concentrate power in their own hands, so that you need fewer permissions, and have to make fewer, but possibly larger, payoffs.  Then the activity proceeds, and the payoffs get made.  I would expect, but do not know by direct personal experience, that those who find themselves cut out, those who suffer their power to stop economic activities taken away from them, complain that the administration is interfering with “science”.

In a theocracy, priests are bureaucrats, so science is regulation and politics.

Old fashioned science involves replication and stuff like that, which is likely to cast doubt on the holy faith, therefore old fashioned science is anti scientific.

Thus a regime that favored old fashioned science would be deemed extremely anti scientific.  If they called Bush and Reagan chimps, you can imagine what the reaction would be to a regime that funded old fashioned science and defunded postmodern science.