Science Is Evolving, But People: Not So Much

Human nature resists change, despite the best efforts of social engineers and would-be utopians. All the soaring rhetoric in the world will not raise the average IQ or EF of the vast herds of short-lived human grazers. Very few humans are directly involved in magnificent scientific and technological efforts such as this or this. The Earth-shaking consequences of nanotechnology and convergence owe nothing to the 99% of humans whose lives will eventually be transformed by the advances.

Modern education and child-raising creates lazy human minds. This laziness is reflected in politics, the media, popular amusements, and general attitudes. Even within academia, laziness occupies center stage. No other area of academia is lazier than the "social sciences."

One effect of the impressive progress in the physical sciences is that it conferred credibility to the “social sciences” as well. Knowing that a person is a scientist has become meaningless. The first question one needs to ask is what this person studies and how. The philosopher David Hume said it best when he said:

“When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school of metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” David Hume ‑ An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding,1748, Section XII, Part I
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As lazily fraudulent as the social sciences frequently are, you see the same type of laziness creeping into more mainstream sciences via politicisation--particularly in climate science, and in gender-driven "reforms" to science education, hiring, funding, and publication. It is human nature for zealots within an organisation to attempt to strengthen their faction. It is also human nature for non-zealots to eventually become too weary to continually fight them off.

Parasitical politics is ubiquitous in human organisations. It is simply a manifestation of human nature within a particular niche. The masses are lazy. Politically oriented people tend to greediness and power-hunger. They make a perfect match, since laziness and greed/power hunger are basic human traits that are present in the proper ratio for a hungry few to control the complacent many.

And so the liberal experiment tentatively begun in ancient times, smoldering undetected throughout the dark ages, flaming up in the renaissance - reformation - industrial revolution - American Constitution and Experiment, can easily collapse under the weight of the brain dead and top-heavy mass of the political tumour that ultimately starves the body politic to death. It is simple human nature.

Revolutionary science is done by a vanishingly small number of people. In order for the good work being done in labs to provide good results for humans in general, the natural human parasitic politics threatening to smother human transformative initiative must itself be smothered in its feathered bed. But gently, as in a dream.