Posted by chmaynard 1 day ago
If you love control and have control, why would you want to create fertile ground for startups?
(This was meant as devil's advocate, not my personal point of view).
You can't stop innovation across the planet, you will lose control over time as adversaries continue to innovate and subsume antiquated control structures.
I can see it as a rational strategy if you're worried successors won't be up to the job.
Hitler for example thought he was justified. And so do all the people who claim global warming isn’t real.
It looks like long term risky bet on new technology to me - exactly what you want those rich capitalist do.
Which is exactly what our system encourages. You don’t need to think beyond the next quarter / election cycle. You’re only in it to extract as much wealth in the short-term as possible and secure your chair before the music stops playing.
When a company or a society is threatened the usual response is to double down on things that accelerate decline like killing novelty and innovation.
These things worked when we were small primates fighting over limited food sources on the savannah. Our brain stems don’t know what millennium they are in and still run those programs.
> The Soviet Union’s collapse partly reflected failure to convert science into sustained innovation, during the same time that U.S. universities, startups and venture capital created Silicon Valley. Long-term military and economic advantage (nuclear weapons, GPS, AI) trace back to scientific research ecosystems.
The US has an extremely entrepreneurial culture, which is why Americans are so good at building innovative businesses. In the UK, money is seen as grubby and the class system has consistently placed barriers between those with ideas and those with money. Similarly, the Soviet Union struggled to make use of its innovators due to the strictures of central planning. Australia punches well above its weight in scientific research but is unwilling to engage in any economic activity other than digging rocks out of the ground and selling them to China.
So the idea that scientific research is a limiting factor in economic growth is not general; it's specific to the US and countries with that same entrepreneurial culture.
The anti-government sentiment is frankly anti-American. Even the ones who are naturalized don't know the basics about how ballots are validated ("If my wife vote with a provisional ballot, couldn't just anybody?"). I thought there was some testing for naturalization but it must be easy to cheat.
Anyone who convinced themselves that "economic anxiety" was actually a thing should talk to any MAGA or "centrists" about the present state of the economy.
There is an ideal of SF but SV isn't SF, definitely not non-tech SF.
So... you might think of a version of SV that existed, maybe, at some point. It might even still exist as some rebellious employees of those large corporations but in practice people with the money and power in SV I believe now are pretty much with such a stance, yes, sadly IMHO.
Wind has turned, in SV too.
I've seen similar articles about trade & the UK (and now the US). I'm sure someone has done or is working on similar analysis for science & engineering.
Bringing it to market requires money and management and luck. Many/most of the promising candidates fall out along the way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System#1956_Consent_Decre...
edit: to clarify I am arguing against putting in the effort on my own expense which benefits the company because I need to foot the bill which the company should have, so I am not arguing against such self-improvement which obviously benefits me
People's ideas about how humans should live together can be beneficial for the wealth and well-being of whole societies and its members. Was Rousseau part of basic or applied science?
We can wonder about how useful certain efforts are, of course, especially in all their extent; but I don't know how wise it is to dismiss things _wholesale_, just because their application is not immediately apparent and the rejection fits into the political current. The unnecessary snark is just sad to see here.
This one is easy - neither. The term "science" has gone through semantic dilution in a manner similar to how everyone is now an engineer - software engineer, prompt engineer, sanitation engineer.
Falsifiability is one of the key distinguishing characteristics of a proper science, as famously propounded by Karl Popper.
"Gender identities" not only can not be falsified, they should not be falsified, because that would amount to transphobia; denying the existence of someone's felt and lived gender identity is the definition of transphobia.
Since they cannot be falsified, nor even directly observed, measured, nor quantified, they are not scientific notions.
The closest most well-studied analogue to the "gender identity" is the legacy religious notion of "the soul," to which you will see you can ascribe most, if not all, of the same attributes as ascribed to the "gender identity."
[0] https://news.sky.com/story/fresh-trans-prisoner-row-as-girls...
I dunno, but how many % of research in terms of money and effort do you think is spent on that? 0,0001 % ?
It depends, this could be medicine or it could be sociology or it could be psychology, there's a few different places it pops up.
> feminist queer dance theory studies
This is very obviously performing arts or maybe something in English or Social Studies if the "dance" part is the specialization rather than the core. I doubt even the most died-in-the-wool woke-fessor or whatever would call it "science," which makes it pretty irrelevant to the current conversation, though just because something isn't STEM doesn't mean it's not important (though it might be significantly less lucrative).