The problem is whatever advances we make they just quickly become viewed as a natural given by the historically ignorant.
It wasn't that long ago that 30% of children died before age 1. Imagine having a baby and there is a 30% chance it is dead in a year? That is almost all of human history.
The complaint will remain constant no matter what. If everyone owned a BMW some people would complain there is this aristocratic class that has a 7 series while the peasants all own 3 series and that we need to make things more equal.
We are so equal that the richest man in history and a homeless person practically have the same smart phone.
Isn't it time to move on from Freudian language and stop using a word that has so many different meanings in the modern sense?
If we translated things today for the first time we would never translate these ideas to the word 'ego'. I am pretty sure this is just a relic of the times of original translation and Freud's popularity at the time.
I just remember being young and thinking the idea was to quite your personality or destroy your personality. That is such a translation error and distortion of the message. A philosophical problem caused by highly imprecise language.
I think of Mortal Kombat at the arcade before there was any version to play at home.
Nothing can ever compete with that. The finishing moves were like this occult knowledge that you would see certain kids have and think of them as some kind of martial arts masters. No internet to tell you how to do them. Would just have to try to watch the master and figure out what they were doing when they did the finishing move.
Scarcity of game play the coin created along with having to be social at the arcade. Just an awesome experience as a kid.
Credentials do matter to some extent or at least actually following the scientific method.
But overall there has been quite a big regression since SETI has pretty much failed to capture anything of even remote interest.
Loeb isn’t Sagan but the fact that you can’t even get funding for simple missions like looking for technological markers in the atmosphere of exoplanet does seem to indicate that there is a lot of stigma these days against anything related to searching for intelligent life.
Credentials can help filter out a lot of garbage. For example, some podcast bro spouts something about vaccines that goes against the prevailing wisdom, I'll mostly ignore it. If an ER doc from the University of Barbados says something, I'll probably give it some time and effort. If an immunologist from the mayo clinic says something, I'm going to really give it some serious thought and time researching it.
I wouldn't discount something purely on lack of prestige and education, but you have to be able to filter some based on credentials or you'll spend all your time fact checking things like whether the Sandy Hook school shooting was all faked or whether 9/11 was an inside job or if the government is using 5g to give us all COVID so they can use the vaccine to implant tracking chips in everyone.
Scientific credibility is a combination of the quality of your current paper as evaluated by peer review and replication, and the same for your previous work.
Notice the lack of "correct credentials" in my sentence.
Just a few decades ago it was the case the a majority of comets, asteroids, and supernovae were discovered by amateur astronomers -- and their work is taken very seriously by professionals. You can still report such discoveries no matter what credentials you have.
p.s. my hobby is dance history and I can dance the Minuet, hope that doesn't disqualify my opinion in your eyes.
Scientific credibility is called reproducibility. If it's not reproducible, it's not credible, and that's got nothing to do with individual scientists, or the quality of their previous work. Peer review, as she is practiced, is an unnecessary social affectation and an increasingly onerous barrier to progress.
Journals are rent extractors targeting the "science news" demographic. Curation is the justification for their involvement, but in practice it amounts to politicized gatekeeping for profit.
Real science communication looks like scihub - the firehose torrent in which the curation is done by individuals seeking information separate from any "proper" authority.
Seems pretty obvious to me that we are going backwards.
I always worried about this stage of my life as a non-software engineer that I would get lapped by the younger generation who had been immersed in technology since birth.
Smart phone immersion though not only seems useless but counter productive. No computer skills or attention span. At least I got a ton of computer skills while my attention span was shortened.
Is this going to change with Generation Covid? That seems like an easy bet no.
Remember many more people now use computers. That does mean that some of them aren’t as familiar with them, but a lot of that is just that everyone uses them a bit at least
It seems to me the philosophical mistake is that banking and financial system regulations came about randomly. As if these are just unintended software bugs. As if there was no reason for the regulations.
So all this complexity to get around regulations but you are going to run into the reasons this regulation came about at some scale.
I'm not convinced the government regulations around finance are a net win. Might often just be wishful thinking by politicians, just decree things have to be in some specific way, rather than tackling the root causes for issues.
I would have disagreed 2 years ago but got a new boss last year that seems to make huge business decisions based on a random number generator.