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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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all future advances in science and math that aren't directly useful for technological advancement will stop. In exchange, the supposed squalor of the modern, western physical environment will be fixed---think replacing all of suburbia with stuff that looks as nice as your favorite ones of these. Would you take the trade?

What? Where's the dilemma? If the offer was that all advances in math an science stopped, including the ones that are useful for technological advancement, I might need to think for a minute before I pressed the button, but what is supposed to give me pause here?

My political views are hard for me to put a label on. Ex-libertarian, some sort of traditionalist, I guess?

In the other thread, some people claimed that they found aesthetic satisfaction in purely impractical advances in understanding. An example might be, the search for exoolanets. The knowledge gained has no practical benefit to the advancement of material progress on Earth, but many people appear to find out profoundly enlightening.