As everyone knows, modern art is crap, and modern poetry is crap. Unfortunately, modern science is rapidly becoming crap. As Climate Audit shows, global warming “science†has abandoned that inconvenient stuff about replicable results. When global warmers supposedly prove something, they don’t reveal the underlying observations, the method of calculation, or any “corrections†they made to the raw data and refuse to reveal them when asked by incredulous scientists. Engineering and technology is still going strong, but the steadily falling status of engineers and technologists indicates doom on its way, much as science and art died in Rome when its status became contemptible
“OKâ€, I hear you say, “but Global Warming is political. How about the real hard sciences, like high energy physics?â€
Well, I have been reading Not even wrong, which tells us a disturbingly large amount of modern high energy physics is not even wrong. They are not as far gone as global warming, but they are in a pretty bad way.
Terence Kealey in “The Economic Laws of Scientific Research†observes that government funding of science reduces, rather than increases, the amount of real science produced, but does not provide any theoretical explanation for this counter intuitive result.
Moldius Moldbug does provide a theoretical explanation: Government funding leads to unfavorable memetic selection. Under government patronage memes that correspond to effective grantsmanship outcompete memes that correspond to truth or beauty. Private patrons, armored against manipulation by wealth, power and arrogance, and the fact that they do not have to consult with anyone, and often experts or connoisseurs in the area they are funding, are not so manipulable, thus provide an environment where beautiful art and true science can outcompete grantsmanship.
Thanks for this truthful post. However, maybe when you in future write some post that is as depressing as this, you could think about the readers who are already in terminal depression about the groupthink hot-air which has replaced rationality in the world, and include something cheerful in your post? I’ve not yet been able to do this myself on my blog, but there must be something to be cheerful about in the world, mustn’t there? It can’t all be that hopelessly deluded and stupid. Or maybe it can…
modern art…
You are welcome into the world of abstract wall art or modern art, relax and let youreye leisurely wander over the collection of verities of art forms and styles….
I find this impossible to believe.
The highest technology the Romans had was a stone arch.
Technology and science may decline a little in the west, but there are other countries in the world, and the distance to fall to the bottom is much greater than the Romans. The prisoner’s dilemma dictates that anyone who does science right will out-compete, thus someone will do it right.
The Romans made thousands of miles of roads, still usable where not paved over, concrete superior to what we use today, and somehow managed to do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naumachia. Sure, they didn’t have science or infotech; then, neither did we until very recently. It would be difficult to convincingly place the Europeans ahead of the Romans until at least the 16th century, which represents a yawning millennium-long chasm of living in the long shadow of a great civilization of the past, pinnacle of the world. And note: it’s 2018, and still no naval battle theatre.