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Notes -
It’s fine to be skeptical of the results of scientific research being used improperly. Most of which are policy issues anyway. Science can tell us how a disease spreads, but it cannot tell us to lock the population up in their homes and weld the doors shut. Science can tell us how to create nuclear fission, but not tell us to cram it into a bomb and drop in on a major city.
And to be honest, if anything we are actually much too skeptical of science and math. These tools of reason are the best methods available to understanding the universe. If we didn’t have the tools of science and mathematics, you’d be wearing a toga and writing this post on sheepskins as was tradition. You’d live in a world full of angels and demons and superstition where getting sick was punishment from God and the cure was bloodletting.
The problem is that we’ve done such a piss poor job of explaining what rigorous, scientific exploration of the universe has actually done for us that most people come away afraid of people they see as practical wizards reworking the world and conjuring new ideas from the ether. This was why COVID responses were so bad. It wasn’t science people were follow, it was lab-coated priests bringing down The Word from the mountain. Thus Saith the Experts is not remotely how real science works. Real science is about asking questions and looking for physical evidence of the answers.
Humanities could have been a good counterpoint and balance against excessive technophilia where everything you do with tech is good forever and we should never question it. But since it’s become unserious, ideologically corrupted, and lacks any sort of academic rigor, it’s mostly lost. A discipline that can regularly get obvious jokes printed in their academic journals isn’t going to save anyone. A discipline that argues mostly about words cannot save anyone.
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