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
“OK”, I hear you say, “but Global Warming is political. How about the real hard sciences, like high energy physics?”
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.
