For those of philosophical mindset

[Ohsky]

Yeees all cultures are technological, i develop myself spiritual technology everyday, mental tools to avoid being stupid to myself, not joking. But the problem is transhumanism, for me, the problem i show concern of.

 

If you care about being left behind by the rest of the community don´t lose the wagon. In the end, It´s only a train ride.

[Mosquito---Slayer]

Not really. Investing in Madoff had nothing to do with ethics; bad people surely suffered alongside good people and just okay people. Being good can leave you more at risk since you're never the one taking advantage, but I don't think it's a big difference.

Yeah, persons with bad ethics are likely to harm all kinds of people, also someone with good ethics often enjoys the goodwill of other people with good or average ethics, so the whole thing probably balances itself in the end.

[Student of Trinity]

There are positive developments in philosophy ... we've gone from a kind of "divine right of kings" conception to some sort of valuing of each individual over the past few hundred years. That represents progress, and it sometimes has real ramifications in life (the spread of democracy and human rights).

Yeah, I'll buy that as progress. It may just be philosophy belatedly recognizing progress made by other approaches than philosophizing, though: footnoting the guillotine. As a defense of philosophy, it does show that at least philosophy can follow along, and that's something. Maybe it's even quite a lot.

 

Well, except for the part where culture was behind the invention of the steam engine (for instance, really good black dye wasn't invented in medieval Europe until after black clothing became fashionable among the wealthy), or the steam engine was invented but nobody did anything with it until culture changed (like Mendel's laws of inheritance being ignored for 40-odd years because nobody thought they were important).

Science certainly doesn't happen in a vacuum, but emphasizing this too much is like saying gunpowder's nothing special, because explosions need to be touched off by sparks.

 

[T]he real changes in culture come from technology, that byproduct of science. A steam engine can change a culture immensely. A cannon will do so as well. Having to accommodate disruptive technology is a big force for cultural change. Another, of course, is having to accommodate changes in philosophy and social science, but it's hard for them to generate changes without doing PR work to generate a groundswell of support. Arguing that all men are created equal, then expanding it to women and insisting that all humans count, really is argument. You don't have to argue when you have the Maxim gun and they have not. Your technology makes your point for you.

Yeah. And I guess the flip side of the disenchantment with philosophy that I reported in my earlier post is a disenchantment with science that has no practical applications. The Big Bang is a cool idea, but it's debatable. The laser is not.

 

For me the mistake of western civilizations is to think technology and science are the only measure of success for all humankind.

Technology isn't everything, but it might be the only thing that's really objective. That's all; but that's quite something.

[Sudanna]

As Ohsky has show, the value of technology can be entirely subjective as well.

[Dikiyoba]

Science certainly doesn't happen in a vacuum, but emphasizing this too much is like saying gunpowder's nothing special, because explosions need to be touched off by sparks.

Well, but you shouldn't overemphasize the importance of gunpowder either. Lots of things besides gunpowder explode when touched off by sparks, and gunpowder without sparks is basically useless. So if you want to understand and control explosions, understanding gunpowder is only a tiny component. Understanding sparks is a much larger and more important component. Gunpowder is cool and special, but so are sparks, and TNT, and natural gas, and sawdust, and just about everything else.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Kelandon]

More vague is your assertion here. Point out the problem, to the person, and the question you want to be answered, all of that with mathematical precision. If you are "lucky", you will get what you wanted, but don´t expect much that as most FACTS can´t be given through word of a forum. You got to get out and search for them personally. Seeing them with your own eyes, later having to deal with the FACT others won´t believe those FACTS you had seen yourself as FACTS. It´s complicated. I hope you get more or less what i mean. No offense.

Did anyone else, while reading this, really want FACTS to be a Spidweb acronym like GIFTS? Because that's all I was able to think while I was reading this, and it made it really hard to concentrate on whatever it was saying.

 

Friendly And Conversational Tarantula Spiders? No, that's not quite right. Farfetched Annoying Canny Toneless Spiders? No, that's not it either.

[Lilith]

Science certainly doesn't happen in a vacuum

 

astronomy does

[Alorael at Large]

Relatively little of it. There are far more terrestrial telescope arrays than floating Hubbles. And any science is mostly writing grants and writing papers, both of which are done better in atmosphere.

 

—Alorael, who believes the aranea count as Ferocious, Arcane, Cavern/Tunnel Spiders. The C/T needs work though.

[Student of Trinity]

They're Ferocious Arcane Casting Talking Spiders. They just don't talk much to you.

[Student of Trinity]

Well, but you shouldn't overemphasize the importance of gunpowder either. Lots of things besides gunpowder explode when touched off by sparks, and gunpowder without sparks is basically useless.

That's true; but:

So if you want to understand and control explosions, understanding gunpowder is only a tiny component. Understanding sparks is a much larger and more important component. Gunpowder is cool and special, but so are sparks, and TNT, and natural gas, and sawdust, and just about everything else.

This is only justifiable if you really emphasize the "understand" task. In some senses, gunpowder is simpler than sparking. But you can make sparks by banging rocks together; developmentally, sparks are not the bottleneck. And in its own way, everything is special. But gunpowder isn't just something that can explode. It's an explosive. It's got high energy density, and it's self-oxidizing; yet it's portable and stable, and convenient for all your exploding needs. Dynamite is even better that way, but it was a direct development of gunpowder, deliberately researched; as far as the analogy with science is concerned, I claim TNT as part of gunpowder. 'Natural gas and sawdust and just about everything else' are enormously less useful. Sawdust cannon ain't gonna conquer the world.

 

Happily, this is not just a digression. The analogy holds up, I believe. Lots of other things are just as special and interesting and difficult to understand as natural science, and science interacts with them. I think the point remains that science delivers practical technology whose effectiveness is objectively beyond intelligent debate. Objectivity isn't everything, but it's quite something, and few if any other lines of endeavor apart from natural science seem to deliver it. There's a story here that can't legitimately be spun in too many different ways: the right headline is, Science changes society. The rest of the story comes much further down the column.

[Alorael at Large]

With credit to Jared Diamond and Guns, Germs, and Steel I think there's an important broader point too. There are many things that change society. Many have to do with the environment we live in and, sometimes, the catastrophes nature thrusts upon us. Very few are in the control of humans, and those are science/technology.

 

—Alorael, who thinks the subheading might point out that science still doesn't mean you can control or direct society, really. Technology tends to have unforeseen ramifications, and it springs unpredictably from basic research (or, more broadly, coalescing piles of ideas that have built up). You can invent a better gun for an advantage, but inventing the gun is a huge deal and very hard to even predict much less perform on cue.

[Ohsky]

What is changing more the minds of the society is the banking crisis right now. Technology at it´s side is dwarfed with so much tech supression and vested interests. Boring documentaries about the posibilities of quantum physics means nothing compared with the wipe out of the middle-class in some countries like mine.

[Dikiyoba]

Sawdust cannon ain't gonna conquer the world. [...] Science changes society

Oh, good. As long as we have our priorities. Give everyone guns and dynamite! Cover the land in DDT and Agent Orange! When we invent giant killer robots, let's throw those out into society without thinking or caring too. At least death counts are objective!

 

Explosions are easy. Not exploding things and controlled explosions that don't result in a rain of body parts are hard, but far more useful.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Alorael at Large]

What is changing more the minds of the society is the banking crisis right now. Technology at it´s side is dwarfed with so much tech supression and vested interests. Boring documentaries about the posibilities of quantum physics means nothing compared with the wipe out of the middle-class in some countries like mine.

There's a good point there. I don't think finance is really a technology, but it too has shaped cultures and the entire world. Colonialism was an outgrowth of cultures, but one major driver was the popular economic model of the times. And with everyone wrapped up in the financial markets those markets have a lot of power now. But I'm hesitant to say there's really been a cultural change. Opinions and practices have change a bit, but I still don't think it adds up to the kind of paradigm shift of, say, the promulgation of the internet.

 

—Alorael, who also doesn't think documentaries about QM mean much. Promise is nothing. Delivery is everything. Quantum has applications, but few are widespread and publicly visible enough for anyone to care all that much. It's not tech suppression, though; it's simply the fact that the technology hasn't been developed yet, or when it has it's limited. MRI is amazing but it's not in your living room.

[Randomizer]

Technology only makes things easier and faster. The stock market speculation leading to the 1929 crash can now happen in minutes instead of days because the market orders now take fractions of a second to transact instead of minutes.

 

But here technology isn't at fault, but the people using it.

 

The banking system collapse over housing was just the latest in a series of bank loans to groups that couldn't repay their debt. In the 1970s they did it to South American countries, the 1980s were to US companies, and the 1990s had had the tech bubble. As long as the government would bail them out there wasn't a downside to risking money.

[Ohsky]

The banking crisis has awaken many about how the world works. This sided with the internet helping spread some valuable information about it. But that enters on the terrain of conspiracies, so i leave it at that.

[Student of Trinity]

Oh, good. As long as we have our priorities. Give everyone guns and dynamite!

An entirely fair point, and very important. Science does not necessarily change society purely for the better. It's just that it's a force to be reckoned with, in a way that not much else is.

 

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.

[Alorael at Large]

"Whatever happens we have got

The Maxim Gun, and they have not."

 

The most disruptive technology has tended to be military. Sawdust cannons don't change the world because they're not useful. Cannons do because suddenly all fortifications must change or die, and if you have them and your enemies don't you've won. There are other technologies that do the same, but rarely as spectacularly and with as much density until perhaps the late 19th or early 20th century. Yes, the invention of agriculture, the mill, irrigation, crop rotation, various farm implements, and all that have incrementally changed the way of the world, but they still don't disrupt as quickly and as impressively as the fall of cavalry to the pike and shot formation.

 

—Alorael, who still doesn't think Oppenheimer covered it. Science happens because it can, but funding is a big deal and the military has gobs of money. More importantly, technology doesn't happen because it can. Not to the same extent. Technology happens because someone will buy it, and again, the military has, and really always has had, gobs of money.

[Student of Trinity]

One reason that military technology is disruptive is that a lot of the things that armies need to do are things that anybody might want to do — travel, communicate, keep records, keep warm, eat. So 'military technology' doesn't necessarily just mean weapons; often it's just civilian technology with the stakes raised a lot.

 

I'm not sure funding seemed like such a big deal in Oppenheimer's day. I don't think that he meant the Manhattan Project itself when he talked about "deep things in science", but rather about the possibility of nuclear chain reactions. Making the bomb took a lot of funding, but discovering that the bomb could be made was something that happened just because it was possible. I think Oppenheimer was saying that you can't arrange to make only good and useful discoveries, and avoid all dangerous ones. You certainly aren't forced to develop them into practical technologies, however. He of all people knew that dangerous discoveries don't just turn into dangerous technologies all by themselves. I quoted him, though, because once science discovers something, society has to react, one way or another.

[Zeviz]

"Whatever happens we have got

The Maxim Gun, and they have not."

 

The most disruptive technology has tended to be military. Sawdust cannons don't change the world because they're not useful. Cannons do because suddenly all fortifications must change or die, and if you have them and your enemies don't you've won. There are other technologies that do the same, but rarely as spectacularly and with as much density until perhaps the late 19th or early 20th century. Yes, the invention of agriculture, the mill, irrigation, crop rotation, various farm implements, and all that have incrementally changed the way of the world, but they still don't disrupt as quickly and as impressively as the fall of cavalry to the pike and shot formation.

 

Steam Power, Communication Satellites, and The Internet, are just the first examples of disruptive civilian technologies that I could think of. However, at least the last 2 of them were initially developed using military funding, so I guess it also proves the point that military usually has the budget to research things that civilian companies and agencies couldn't afford.

[Randomizer]

The Gatling gun is considered the precursor to machine guns:

 

The Gatling gun was designed by the American inventor Dr. Richard J. Gatling in 1861 and patented November 4, 1862. Gatling wrote that he created it to reduce the size of armies and so reduce the number of deaths by combat and disease, and to show how futile war is.

[Alorael at Large]

Which goes to show that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

 

—Alorael, who thinks Zeviz brings up a good point in steam. It's really the industrial revolution in the 19th century that really introduced rapid, non-military disruption. He was thinking of automobiles and electricity and the telephone (and later radio and TV) later, but it really begins with steam, trains, and factories. He doesn't count the internet or satellites as military; they had military backing and do have military applications, but their real impact has been felt in civilian life—but at the end of the 20th century, when warfare has really been generally on the wane and civilian technology on the rise.

[Student of Trinity]

Steam engines were civilian at first, of course, but it was the fact that steam-driven locomotives could haul huge amounts of supplies, and carry huge numbers of people, that multiplied the size of field armies by about a factor of 10 between the Napoleonic wars and the US Civil war, and put the total into total war. Steam-powered factories must also have been used to mass produce weapons, ammunition, and equipment for those enormous modern armies.