Prescient comments, all. But the most salient sentence, I feel,...

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    Prescient comments, all. But the most salient sentence, I feel, is this one:

    "It seems that most humans don’t like to think that we don’t know everything or that our scientific types don’t know everything (more to the point)."

    Possibly in conjunction with self-awareness of our apex predator status, our hubris extends to thinking we are the true masters of our domain. (I've seen behavioural psychoanalysts posit that this is the next step of progression on Maslow's needs hierarchy, after we are fully self-actualised, but I can't add any value.)

    But classical science is self-effacing and perpetually self-critical, acknowledging that we actually know very little [*] about what happens in, on and around this blue planet that is just one planet in one of hundreds of billion solar systems sitting in one of trillions of galaxies.

    Moreover, that when we think we have found out something new, classical science willfully holds it up high to attract maximum analysis and scrutiny. Because it is only once new knowledge has been tempered in the forge of the fair and open contest of ideas, that the new knowledge becomes immutable.

    But that's not the scientific process in place today.
    Today the contest of ideas is muzzled by memes, slurs and insults.


    [*] Heck, we only the other day detected gravitational waves for the first time, despite them being ubiquitous.

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    Last edited by madamswer: 05/02/24
 
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