They taught us that the renaissance/enlightenment was when we woke up and started caring about facts and now we were just in the process of refining the process, and that now all that willful ignorance is behind us.
I think Feyerabend had it right: Science is fundamentally anarchical. It will perennially offend those who are drunk with power.
We should've been learning to carry science forward despite powerful adversaries trying to shut us down--to take it underground like it was a criminal endeavor. Instead we focused on publication and on groveling after funding and no nobody knows what to do because the funding faucet has been shut off. And just when AI was starting to look like it might become a decent lab assistant. How sad.
That all sounds romantic, but molecular biology labs, spinning confocal microscopes, clean rooms, super computers, particle accelerators, etc are all hard to come by "underground".
Yeah, there are limits to what you can do in your garage. I'm just saying that we should push them.
For instance, it seems likely that certain powerful parties will attempt to censor evidence of a pathogen outbreak if it makes them look negligent. I'd like to be prepared to derive consensus about the nature of the threat despite their efforts.
The low hanging fruit has been picked. You can no longer "do science" by mixing random household chemicals. Now you need pure sources, you need machines that cost tens of thousands of dollars, you need significant sample sizes and big data, you need computer clusters.
I think Feyerabend had it right: Science is fundamentally anarchical. It will perennially offend those who are drunk with power.
We should've been learning to carry science forward despite powerful adversaries trying to shut us down--to take it underground like it was a criminal endeavor. Instead we focused on publication and on groveling after funding and no nobody knows what to do because the funding faucet has been shut off. And just when AI was starting to look like it might become a decent lab assistant. How sad.