Flaks Are Flak

Came across this interesting lecture by Naomi Oreskes .

Scientists have to do an enormous amount of work to stabilize claims as accepted facts.

When one does not do the work then one is less a scientist, more a propagandist.

This speaks to climate change denialism, and all the rest: vaccine effectiveness deniers, but I would say:

… and yet it goes both ways. How many so-called “scientists” deny the reality of the spiritual. The answer, I bet, is, “heaps of them.”

Science is a good way too stabilize claims as fact. But there are other methods too. Since cannot stabilize metaphysical claims, Science can only stabilize physical claims. At least i am not aware of any proper science worth the name that studies non-physical claims. Maybe cosmology comes close, but few reputable cosmologists stray beyond the bounds of physicalism. If they do, they cease “doing science” and are indulging in pure philosophy. Not that i am opposed to the effort.

The scientist who only “does science” is only half a human.

You might be guessing what this essay is all about. I think I wanted to steer towards anti-science fake-populism.

I always regard populism as a good thing, and science — good science — is still pretty darn popular, and universally so, on all sides of the political spectrum.

It is only a weird fringe crowd who are overtly anti-science. Unfortunately they often have the loudest most obnoxious voices, and the news media plays it up and amplifies. You know exactly why!

But scratch the surface and I think you find these science deniers are really only anti-corporations. And I think also only really anti corrupt corporations. We can debate whether a corporation is by mere existence, by definition, intrinsically corrupt. I tend to think not. But that is a debate for another time. A corporation is just a piece of paper. It cannot be corrupt. What people with souls do with such papers is what is corrupt.

By “Science” the anti-science crowd tend to mean “Big Science”, as in “Big Pharma” and “Big Oil”.

Or at least, that is what I try to say to myself to console my depression & never-ending anxiety.

Even Sabina Hossenfelder is a little anti-science in her protestations again “tax payer funded"🤣 large particle collider projects.

As for Oreskes, she has walked clear eyed into a few controversies . And I would say her record is pretty clean.

People advocating more nuclear power as necessary step to avoid catastrophic climate change are simply nuts. Maybe they are right. But also maybe not. My point would be, you cannot know the future. All sorts of things could happen, like politicians actually thinking MMT is the monetary system they’re already governing. Who know where that could end, huh?

It’s not like finally knowing the actual rules of the game being played does anyone playing honestly any harm?

What is for certain is that a combination of more renewable energy supplies and cutting back on energy rate (power) usage can achieve the global limits we should desire. Working within the Planetary Doughnut Boundary .

I think this case for eneergy conservation and cut-back is not even controversial. But the econoists think they need endless growth to support the creidt money economy, i.e., never-ending profits. This is a false conception based ona fasle understanding of the State currency system.

Once MMT removes those veils, we realize no one need be starved of currency just in order to limit energy output rate over time.

The energy output rate story can be decoupled from the currency austerity story, but only if one comprehends the MMT system. Governments can never run out of their own tax credit. End of that side of the story.

Then you can focus on the real side of the story which is,

do we really need all this production of total crap?

No we do not.

Peaceful, calm, prosperous, spiritually rich, materially unimpoverished, low energy use civilization ensues.

Without this education though, mindless profit seeking production of total crap will ensue, until ecological systems break.

The AI Hype

One of my GoAT candidates, Kurt Gödel, knew the P=NP? problem before it had the name. He wrote to John von Neumann that should it be possible to reduce theorem discovery to a polynomial time algorithm then human mathematicians would be become largely redundant… except for…

Well, can you guess?

Gödel’s point is that human mathematicians could get very lazy, since a modern computer can easily check theorems of enormous complexity, well beyond what we can write down on paper. The problem is, if the theorem discovery is exponential or worse in the problem size, then even the fastest computer will be unable to prove most true theorems in a time less than say the age of the present universe.

(The time it would take for most true theorems would be far longer than even this. Even if we converted the whole universe into a giant computer.)