The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

Go further into the past and you'll see plenty. The Opium War was from the terrible twos of mercantilism and metallic standards - the British Empire feared the effects of trading silver for tea and had found a substitute agricultural good - opium. Many empires before then engaged in conquest for precious metals only to either hyperinflate themselves or lose the war. There were accounts of terrible attempts to tame inflation with price controls after the Roman empire seized too much treasure.

The 'fairness' in distribution of money based upon holding is also missing the point on several levels. Not only would that be de-facto regressive it would encourage /not/ investing resources but speculative hoarding which isn't a good thing for the economy. It brings to mind a fundamental misunderstanding that is very common. Money isn't wealth. Money is a medium of exchange for the goods and services which are actual wealth.

It is part of why Bitcoin did so terrible as an actual workable currency - everyone just grabbed onto their Beanie Baby 3.0's and didn't use it for actual exchange and it was very unstable.

Fiat currency is essentially 'superficially crazy/stupid but it works' (it isn't so crazy if one understands the role of money is to be a medium of exchange and is thus arbitrary but can serve the systems for good or ill) and a lot of people get hung-up on it.

If you're talking about wars, you really think a hypothetical civilization with a technological development level of ca.1819 would have even a sliver of a chance against modern weapons?? I think history shows that not to be the case.

But I think that misses the point. The real issue is that the world doesn't care what your belief system is. You may have the most solid shared belief system ever, but if you ruin your environment, a la "Collapse", you won't stand a chance.

No, they're not. They just don't allow you to make predictions without a model. But you don't need to agree on a theoretical model to agree that, for example, Michelson and Morley had a particular experimental setup and procedure and recorded particular numbers when they ran the experiment.

> You always have to have a theory in order to predict the future based on facts and then have experiments to verify the predictions.

A "theory" in this sense can be just about anything, from a simple guess to a detailed mathematical model with lots of ramifications. So I don't see that much is gained by making this observation.

You would know if it's happened to you.

Suppose you have two theories, and you run an experiment whose results produce two assertions, each couched in the language of their respective theories, (I'd call these assertions facts). You say that reality is the authority on whether the two assertions represent the same underlying fact or different underlying facts, but it's not like there's some oracle that I can consult in the matter. So how does using reality as an authority help me individuate these facts?

And if it doesn't, then of what use is the idea that facts don't change when theories change, (except perhaps as a political too towards the discrediting of new ideas).

> The facts are the particular experimental apparatus Michelson and Morley used and the particular numbers they recorded when they made their measurements.

So you've got a bunch of mirrors and a pattern of light, and then later in the day you have the same pattern of light. That's not facts, that's just phenomena. Facts are supposed to convince me of something, and they work because they take advantage of my having already accepted the theory that supports them.

I have to suspect that anybody who presents me "facts" that don't have this quality has something to gain by distracting from their unwillingness to argue for the superiority of the their theory.

(Debate antics aside, thanks for the conversation. I've been having fun.)

Also, I think you missed my point about the trains. The statement that nobody bothered relativize until Einstein was equivalent to this:

> A train moves at 10 mph and a bullet fired from a window in the direction of the train's motion moves at 10000 mph. The speed of the bullet as measured by an observer standing beside the track is 10010 mph.

It was initially poor style to relativize this fact because its supporting theory had no competitors. It was only when Einstein proposed that simple addition was insufficient that relativizing it made sense.

As for models, I've done a bit of model theory in geometry, and I've also studied models in physics (such as the Schrodinger model of the atom), but these don't resemble a pile of mirrors and a pattern of light--they're just the sort of thing theories are made of. If I'm missing some other sort of model, please let me know.

As near as I can tell, a fact is some correspondence between a model (which lives in a theory) and some phenomenon (which lives in reality). As such, facts without corresponding theories are nonsensical.