Science and scientific expertise are more important than ever

My problem with Weinstein and his ilk is that I don't see them offering solutions, they just yell "distrust, distrust, distrust" and not much creative and serious thinking about solutions. Meanwhile long time economists, labour and political activists (voluntarists and america-style libertarians, statist-socialists and classical neoliberals and a bunch of other flavors), artist/sacademics across the board and others have been saying "distrust these people for these reasons and do this to fix it" for decades and no-one seems to care because it goes against their politics, while claiming to not have politics because they are too smart and cynical for that.

The "Embedded Growth Hypothesis" for example has been a thing that socialists, eco activists and even austrian economics and classical keynesians (if that's a proper term, I mean Keynesians who believe that debt is a problem and you should pay it back and not rely on MMT to pay it back via inflation) have been trying to push for a long time. But they also offer solutions which are compatible with an open society (at least the ones moderate enough to become mainstream), they don't just claim the current system is corrupt.

It's fine to just criticize without offering solutions, but if you are gonna claim "everyones distrustworthy" you should back things up more.

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Oh, and Weinstein in particular has been using his right to speak freely for decades and continues to use it about being silenced. Now he just has a billionaire backer whose politics align with what he's saying to amplify him.

> Is there any way to realistically and gradually reduce the prevalence and thickness of these filter bubbles, so that people can be encouraged to practice critical thinking in a sustainable way? Will this have to necessarily be a governmental effort, or can there be business value in such practices? Will there ever be sufficient incentives for any government to work on this?

The problem that I see is that filter bubbles keep people happy, so the effort to fix it has to be an effort that's going to make people unhappy—and what business or democratic government is going to do that? To me, it's like being a teacher (my profession); there are ample studies that show that teaching effectiveness is in many ways inversely correlated with student satisfaction (because true learning is often uncomfortable), and yet the incentives for teachers are all in the direction of encouraging student satisfaction even when everyone knows it can be at the expense of learning.

Seems a bit oversimplified because you need to lockdown for the next 1.5 years.

You need to exert the police force against peaceful protestors.

All while sacrificing the mental and physical health of the 99.5%.

Here's a question, why does the mental and physical health of the 99.5% take lower priority than the 0.5% oldest and most obese people?

Oh, Ludwig Feuerbach.

If I restrict myself to the topic at hand, then I have to say I don't see how he manages to construe the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (CEN) as intrinsically opposed to contemplation or speculative knowledge—science that seeks knowledge for its own sake and not merely to master nature—or how he construes it as essentially utilitarian. I have a suspicion that this is a corollary of his position that God is merely a projection of Man, but my understanding is that this position is a consequence of Kantian skepticism and the resulting agnosticism. If you can't know things in themselves, then all you have left is science as mastery of nature.

One difficulty with the claim that somehow CEN is intrinsically opposed to theory is the failure to explain the entire Christian intellectual tradition. Since we're talking about science specifically, it becomes impossible to explain the enormous successes of the sciences in the West and historically the relative poverty of their success in every other civilization. While the stirrings of science occurred in a number of civilizations—and we should give them their due—and while the Greeks may be argued to be the most successful of the bunch, nowhere but the West, whatever its faults, do we see the flourishing of a sustained and vibrant scientific culture. If we take a broader and classical view of science, one embraced by the Greeks, to include any systematic body of knowledge, then this period of flourishing extends far into the centuries preceding the rise of modern science and includes the intellectually vibrant Middle Ages. Indeed, without the Middle Ages, it is difficult to imagine how modern science could have emerged in the first place. Without arguing that this could only have happened in the West (that is Jaki's position, as far as I understand it), it suffices to note that it did happen in the West and it did so in a culture that embraced CEN.

The fact that neither Jewish civilization, nor Islamic civilization for that matter, ever truly had a sustained and sophisticated philosophical or scientific culture does not support Feuerbach's thesis. Again, his claim is that CEN is intrinsically opposed to theoretical endeavors (which includes philosophy). But all I need to show is one example of where CEN did not stifle science.

Here I would add that one thing that stifled science in the Islamic world is not CEN, but the belief that Allah is essentially pure will, and a pure will that can contradict itself. Accepting that kind of creator can only discourage speculative science. Here, we can appeal to Feuerbach's own words when he says that the origin of a thing tells us about that thing. A world created by a self-contradicting creator doesn't inspire much confidence in the intelligibility of what he's created.

In stark contrast, Christianity (certainly Catholic Christianity) conceives of the world as utterly intelligible. To put it somewhat poetically, the world is divine thought or divine word and therefore intelligible and knowable through and through (we have to note both the immanence and transcendence of God to avoid both pantheism and deism). When John says "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.", the original Greek uses the word "λόγος" for word. Anyone familiar with Greek knows that the English translation of λόγος is utterly inadequate to express its meaning (the Latin "verbum" does a better job). In Exodus, when Moses asks God who he should say has sent him, God responds with "I Am" (or "Ehyeh", from which we get Yahweh). God is revealing himself as Being itself and in revealing himself is making himself known. So God himself is intelligible and therefore Being is intelligible. (Aristotelian metaphysics dovetails nicely because while Aristotle managed to provide us with a rich and robust theory of being, he stops short of discovering the act or principle of existence which Gilson argues was stifled by pagan eternalism. We have to wait for Avicenna for that to happen, later refined by Averroes and finally Aquinas.

I see, that makes sense. Kind of a "eat your vegetables" type of situation.

I really hope we can learn and get to a better place from here, but I'm not holding my breath. The way I see it, there's a good chance that the world will only continue to become increasingly more authoritarian and dictatorial. Because in a world filled with more and more widespread filter bubbles and entrenched divides, authoritarianism and dictatorships logically become the optimal solution to get society to cooperate and function.

It saddens me to think about it.