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According to our dear friends over at Wired, we are losing the war on science. This interview with Shawn Otto, author of The War on Science [no-script hostile] ranges from the American presidential election to Albert Einstein:
His new book The War on Science explores ways that citizens can fight back against a creeping tide of anti-science nonsense promulgated by everyone from postmodern academics to greedy oil companies to nature-loving hippies. An important step is to make journalists understand that science and opinion should not be given equal weight.
"The purpose of a free press in a democracy is to hold the powerful accountable to the evidence," Otto says. "Journalists have really lost sight of that purpose, of their entire reason for being."
Fair enough. But things have gotten worse?
He fears that the war on science will only intensify once Donald Trump takes office in January. "I'm very concerned, as is the rest of the global scientific community," Otto says.
As a personal aside, I find it unlikely that the public, those who executed Socrates, burned the Library of Alexandria, and imprisoned Antoinio Gramsci, could fall for such a diaphanous fraud as the Republican attack on science! People back then were truly and profoundly stupid. But people today have the internet, and facebook, and a total misunderstanding of science, politics, ethics, and math. So, this will not end well? Help me, Soylentils, give me hope.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by quintessence on Friday December 09 2016, @09:16AM
Even in an age of 3D printing and the like, there is still a demand for handmade items, several of which command a better price than the best of the best from automation. Those jobs, although limited, are never going away.
In fact (or at least as the theory goes), those very same people should have a life of relative luxury when the price of items drops below the floor due to efficiencies, and as long as the have some reasonable subsistence like BI, they should be able to supplement their incomes with even greater ease. I mean fuck, making Youtube videos is a career choice now. You can't tell me they are all hyperintelligent.
You can't address psychosocial needs at the expense of physiological needs (well, you can, but we call those people addicts). Especially now, there are more opportunities to be needed than ever before, and with the ease of not wondering where your next meal will come from.
If people can't take that as a starting point towards a freedom most have only dreamed about; there's no helping them. Self-actualization requires effort, not just waiting around for enlightenment in-between rounds of Call of Duty.