Whatsoever the government sponsors, tends to turn bad. Since government funds are ill defended, grantsmanship based government funded memetic diseases will always outcompete truth based science, and similarly grantsmanship funded memetic diseases will always outcompete art based on beauty. Government funded art will rapidly become ugly and stupid. Government funded science will rapidly become untruthful and stupid, string theory as much as global warming theory.
China developed gunpowder, cannon, ocean going ships, the magnetic compass, paper, printing, and so on and so forth long before the west did, and then all these things went into decline. They were not government suppressed, rather they were government sponsored, which had very much the same effect as government suppression. The objective of things like the encyclopedia of all knowledge was to promote and preserve knowledge, though the actual effect was to suppress and forbid knowledge. Only what higher bureaucrats thought they knew got into the encyclopedia, and if you knew more than higher bureaucrat, obviously you were defying authority and promoting ignorance and misinformation – the mechanism was very similar to today’s global warming consensus. Scientists that do not go along with the consensus are apt to lose their jobs and cannot be published through regular channels.
Academia is under strong selection to show cleverness, but weak selection to show contact with reality. However they are only under strong selection to show cleverness so long as the top ranks are filled with clever people so that you have to show cleverness to fit in. Global warming theory, white studies, and so forth require extreme stupidity to fit in, as illustrated by Rahmstorf’s triangular filtering, just as modern art requires the complete lack of good taste or any artistic talent in order to fit in, and as a result the top ranks of academia are increasingly filled with people as dumb as posts, for example Henry Louis Gates – thus soon, to fit into the highest ranks of academia, you will need to be thick as a brick.
The practical consequence of government support, if government support is sufficiently substantial and vigorous, is that only those things that governments are capable of doing get done – and government cannot do much.
Henry Louis Gates is dumb as a post? I’d be happy to bet that his IQ is over 100. Similarly for academics in general, climate scientists, even English professors. String theorists have very high intelligence. Something else is going on.
Dreaming up reasonably convincing arguments for false statements is hard work. Poking holes in such arguments is less hard work. This partly explains the emotional reaction to dissenters. It’s easy to do what Steve Sailer does since there is all this, you know, evidence and stuff. And when the evidence gets brought up persistently, the elaborate rationalizations start to look dicey. It’s not that hard to do what Steve McIntyre does. The modeling, data, and procedures popular with climate scientists really are crap, and this fact is not that hard to grasp. Academics hate these guys in significant part because they see them as vandals — spraypainting and setting on fire the carefully built intellectual houses of the academics. Spraypainting and burning are easy. Building is hard. Thus the hatred.
Your mental model is a bit off. The guys you are calling the Cathedral are not like Party officials in a Stalinist state (at least for the most part). It really was helpful to be not-too-bright in that job. They are more like courtiers, mandarins, official apologists. Their job is to put up creative, clever, convincing arguments which conclude “therefore, the policies favored by the great and the good are the right policies.” This takes smarts, especially if you want consistency — to be able to argue that both today’s and yesterday’s (different) policies were good and that *each* of today’s policies is good, even though many of them seem to be contradictory . . .
Over time if the great and the good get powerful enough, they can move to the easier cue-the-thugs Stalinist model, but as long as they are constrained by the need to appear to be democratic liberals, their apologists are going to be smart.
Bill
The hockey stick was an impressive carefully built rationalization for what the powerful wanted to believe, indicating that Mann was pretty smart and that he believes that those he intended to flatter are pretty smart also. Rahmstorf’s triangular filtering was a shoddily constructed piece of glib pretentiousness, indicating that the Rahmstorf was pretty stupid and the fact that he got away with it indicates that those he intended to flatter are pretty stupid also.
Yes. That is what Larry Summers does, and he is very, very smart, and he needs to be very, very smart. On the other hand, the defense of affirmative action is more along the lines of the easier cue-the-thugs Stalinist model, and the defense of Global Warming, initially the work of the best and brightest, is heading off towards simpler methods.