Of course not. We tolerate mass injustice and violence (even state perpetuated, both at home and abroad), and racism, and misogyny. We think vengeance is justice. We savor "redemptive violence". We routinely believe that mercy is weakness. We harbor numerous misunderstandings and superstitions on vitally important subjects ranging from relationships to economics to science to mental illnesses to sexual orientation and gender to recreational drug use.
Modern? We're practically medieval. But at least there is some glimmering of hope that we understand our problems and are working to fix them.
>Of course not. We tolerate mass injustice and violence [...] We harbor numerous misunderstandings [...] on vitally important subjects ranging from relationships to economics to science to mental illnesses [...]
I get your point but the author in the article is talking about "modern" not in terms of "morals" but in the (meta) philosophy of existence.
In his particular definition of "modernity", the world would meet that criteria when most of the inhabitants could look at themselves with philosophical detachment: e.g. Most of us would realize we have no special centrality in the universe (we're not the only higher life forms in the vastness of space). Our timeslice of humanity is but a microscopic blip in the 14 billion years of its existence. Most of us would seriously think it's possible that _we_ are digital avatars in "the matrix", etc.
Furthermore, the author feels that assessing "modernity" by looking at the technological progress around us is deceptive and therefore it's a bad measurement. Instead, he thinks humans reach a threshold of "modernity" when a large percentage internalize deep philosophical questions like the way Descartes and Hume did.
"Modernity" is a term of art that refers to the physical conditions and philosophical preoccupations of the modern world (ca. 1600 CE Europe, and after). [0] Through this lens, it's kind of a circular question: of course we are moderns because we're engaged with the philosophical preoccupations of the modern period (humanistic and scientific philosophy rather than Christian theology). When you look at the philosophical questions of medieval Europe, they just have fundamentally different premises and methods; Thomas Aquinas just has very different concerns and methods than Francis Bacon.
I'd think it was just a dud headline, were it not for the closing line.
My point is, it's a bit much to ask for people to adopt philosophical modernity without having a "modern" values system first. (And on the flip side, having a "modern" philosophical perspective is often a ready conduit for bootstrapping a "modern" (e.g. humanist) values system.) The conceit of modernity is that we are so much superior to the "brutes" of the past. Because our values and our thoughts are so much more sophisticated, so much more true and fundamental. But actually our values are not our values (or, to be more precise, our claimed values are not our values as practiced) and our philosophy is not sophisticated, it's crude. My point is complementary. Our technological advancement, and our "values on paper" blinds us to the reality. In truth we are but brutes, we compare ourselves favorably against the past only because we fail at contextualizing the present in a way that strips away the illusion of modernity caused by technological progress.
>My point is, it's a bit much to ask for people to adopt philosophical modernity without having a "modern" values system first. [...] My point is complementary.
I'm not convinced that "morals modernity" is a prerequisite for "philosophical introspection modernity". To me, it seems like those 2 are orthogonal. In other words, we could have both of these outcomes:
- I believe we humans are the center of the universe and with Zeus by my side, I'm also going to kill a million people to purify my race.
- I believe we might be in The Matrix but can't prove it and I'm also going to kill a million people to purify my race.
It looks like both types of "modernity" can coexist.
Perhaps the New Yorker shouldn't have put "modern?" in the title. At the bottom of the article, they disclosed that they used a different title (which emphasizes philosophy instead of morals) in other editions:
>This article appears in other versions of the September 5, 2016, issue, with the headline “What Makes You So Sure?.”
I think they go hand in hand. When you step outside your, let's call it a solipsistic bubble, then you take a stance of questioning things, evaluating things, and investigating things. Most importantly that includes your own behaviors and responses. And that almost invariably naturally leads to a re-evaluation of one's "primitive" instincts such as vengeance and lust for violence. Now, certainly that's not always the case (as you point out), but I'd say it's more often the case than not. You claim those things are orthogonal, but to me it looks like they are highly (though not completely) correlated.
One of the things that makes philosophy hard isn't just that questions are hard, but how blindingly simple the answers to hard questions can appear. There is a better quote about this phenomenon, but I can't find it.
I think you're making the mistake that "progress" = "adopting my values."
I (at least from the surface level conversation so far) don't disagree with your moral values, but part of this kind of conversation is the tricky bit of everyone finding a way to distance themselves from things they believe in.
What makes the values you're referring to more modern or true than other values? How can you be so sure they're better than other sets of values? Better by whose scales?
Morals are not something that improve or decline, they just change with society.
Just have a look at Europe. Discussions about migration here go from "complaining about genuine policy problems" to "blatant racism" in the span it takes people to get slightly drunk, and that's just the start. If I had a nickel for every time I hear random people insulting others as "fucking Jews"…
Misogyny is definitely not as bad as it used to be, but it's still everywhere. And in many cases the victims don't report it for whatever reasons.
I've had the opposite experience: Saying one cross word against open borders or multiculturalism will have you branded as a racist, Nazi, etc.
The vast majority of people I've met who challenge these "virtues" aren't frothing hate-mongerers, but their rhetoric naturally becomes more extreme when their questions are immediately dismissed with these ad hominem attacks.
Interesting that you were downvoted for making a genuine observation about your environment which relevant to the topic. I agree with you by the way. I see much racism in public debate about immigration problems. It's mostly about culture and religion issues and those are very different than racism.
It's disappointing but unsurprising. Stifling people you disagree with in such a way serves to create the extremism the original comment alludes to, but it feels a lot better than having an open discussion.
> Interesting that you were downvoted for making a genuine observation
Equalling "migration" with "open borders" is dishonest and already spinning the discussion before it even starts. I don't blame people for pre-emptively downvoting that.
But yes, dehumanization goes both ways. Branding everyone you disagree with as Nazi isn't helping anyone either.
I didn't downvote, but the second sentence wasn't an observation, it was an excuse.
The way I read the comment, it's saying that when people say things against open borders or multiculturalism, they are accused of being racists. Then they say worse, obviously racist things, but they're just saying them because they were called racists, not because they are racists (who froth.) Therefore, if people wouldn't accuse people of being racists for saying things against open borders and multiculturalism, people wouldn't say racist things.
> Then they say worse, obviously racist things, but they're just saying them because they were called racists, not because they are racists
Or, perhaps, because it is very easy to become angry when one feels oneself unjustly maligned, and anger often betrays one into saying things which are ill considered and do not accurately depict one's genuine opinions or beliefs.
Of course, there is a contrary position which holds that such things more accurately characterize those who say them than do the things they say when calm. I can only surmise that people who adhere to this position have never themselves experienced anger.
I take a center position that people generally mean what they say, and that other people can't make you say racist things. I also judge people badly (let's be honest, as cowards) who choose to attack the weak when they get frustrated or angry.
This seems like a very extreme example. I had the impression we were talking more about personal conversations, rather than exceedingly foolish, probably inaccurate, and certainly impolitic public comments on the part of public figures. Perhaps I misgathered.
That's an issue vastly more complicated than "racism". No matter what "migration" you mean (intra-European or non-European), that's mostly Xenophobia, not racism. Furthermore, often times people have legitimate concerns, such as job losses and incompatible cultural norms, if anything I'd say that these legitimate concerns often get unfairly branded as "racism" just to silence them.
Finally, you're probably right that insults and intolerance of religions is common, although I don't see why that should be discouraged - after all, religion is a choice, and disliking it is just as valid as disliking e.g. neo-Nazis and white suprematists.
> No matter what "migration" you mean (intra-European or non-European)
A little bit of everything. Here in Austria I see people raging against German immigrants (they're stealing our white-collar jobs!), against Hungarian immigrants (they're stealing our blue-collar jobs!), against Romanians (they're stealing our bicycles!); and everyone with the wrong skin colour is treated as second-class citizens (at best) just for the heck of it.
> Furthermore, often times people have legitimate concerns, such as job losses and incompatible cultural norms
That's what I meant with genuine policy problems. Sometimes it stays at that. But get some people drunk and they start raging about how "those fucking sand-niggers" are genetically inferior and "deserve" getting killed in wars "because the middle east is their fault anyway".
> after all, religion is a choice, and disliking it
Calling a random person a "fucking hook-nosed jew" because they don't want to lend you money is not criticizing the Jewish religion. It's racism.
In many parts of the world it really isn't. If your parents where catholic then you are catholic, if your parents where jews then you are a jew, if you parents where muslim then you are a muslim etc. What you (or your parents) actually believe and don't believe in is rarely factors into it.
It is here, though. In Germany and Austria, a quarter to a third of the population are not part of a registered religion; and many more aren't practising their stated religion.
My point is that many cases what you believe in doesn't matter. If you're from a muslim country with muslim parents them you are a muslim in the eyes of far too many people no matter how atheist or buddist or whatever your actual personal belief system might be.
Well, they could start by e.g. proclaiming that they're atheist, not wearing religious symbols/clothing and stopping the religious traditions (e.g. prayer, dietary prohibitions, etc.). At least, that's what many European catholics did in the past century.
In certain countries religious dissent is considered grounds for extermination. Up to about 18th century this was practiced in Europe. The converse is still being practiced, even as recently as 20th century.
No, we aren't that much more modern when tribalism is still rampant.
Maybe because I'm from Europe (and the native population here is predominantly white)? Although even in the US, I don't see racism as being "tolerated", at most "present and being exterminated".
Well, here's where things get tricky, because it's difficult to get someone to understand something they don't notice.
This is typically what is meant by the term "white privilege". What is actually meant is that someone has a different set of experiences, so they are comparatively blind to experiences that are common to people of other races. This is a very common phenomenon. Most people when they are growing up think that their experiences are universal. That the way their family works is the way everyone else's works, and so on. It's only when they get older that they realize that maybe their experiences have been abnormal, and also that experiences different from one's own are possible, perhaps even commonplace (such as growing up with divorced parents, growing up poor vs. rich, etc.) This is extremely true when it comes to race, because until recently the experiences of people of color have often not been very well publicized. But they absolutely do. If you're black, or brown, or a muslim, your experiences in the developed world are going to be different from those of a white non-muslim. You're going to get stopped for "random" searches when flying more often. You're going to be stopped by the police while driving more often. Your interactions with police will be more tense and less cordial. And so on and so on.
These are just facts. In the US whites actually use illegal drugs at a slightly higher rate than blacks. But blacks are stopped more often on suspicion of drug activity, they are prosecuted more often, and they receive much harsher sentences. That's why despite the lower rate of drug use and the lower population, the number of blacks in prison for drug offenses is vastly higher than for whites. If you're white, drugs might as well be legal, as long as you're not transporting kilos of them around. If you're black, you are more than ten times as likely to be incarcerated for drug use than if you're white, much more. That's systemic racism and injustice, and that's just one tiny example.
There was a study where job applicants sent in resumes. The names on the resumes were changed, some had "black sounding" names, some had "white sounding" names. The resumes with the white names had a much higher rate of callbacks than those with the black names.
There are many, many more examples. To pull one from the headlines. Consider the examples of two different athletes: Ryan Lochte and Colin Kaepernick. Ryan Lochte committed a crime, and the general sentiment among many is "boys will be boys" (despite him being over 30). Kaepernick exercised his 1st amendment rights to make a statement against police brutality, and he has received a torrent of death threats and insults, including many using the n-word. If that doesn't tell you that racism is alive and well in the western world, then I don't know what to tell you.
Yes, we've made progress on racism. Yes, being an open, avowed racist often results in swift negative consequences. But that does not define the boundaries of the problem of racism, there is still a lot of very difficult work to be done, our world is far, far removed from one where racism is no longer an issue.
We have strong norms against overt bigotry now, but actual racism is very common. Go but two generations back, and white supremacism was still a governing ideology in most industrialized democracies.
The modern world is not immune to racism; rather, the invention of "races" is an artifact of the development of nationalism in the 17th through 19th centuries, and so racism is a feature distinctive of the modern era.
Ah, so many downvotes. And I see people are so mad that they've gone out of their way to downvote other, unrelated posts of mine. Oh well, I guess it's not surprising that HN has become infected with the same virulent "anti-SJW" folks that have been running rampant everywhere else. To be honest I'm somewhat looking forward to proof that HN has sunk into an irredeemable slide into the abyss, it would probably increase my productivity if I avoided this place.
Not at all. You know a place is in the sweet spot when people say "I really value the discussion here, it's often very enlightening and interesting." Being left/right/center or whatever is an oversimplification of "political" discussions, and claiming that having a "balance" is healthy is the same silliness that leads to things like "Crossfire" on CNN. What matters more is ensuring that productive debates on potentially thorny topics can occur.
And in my experience at least, I have seen and participated in many, many valuable, interesting and enlightening discussions here on HN, and see little evidence that it is going away from that. True, badly made arguments are treated rather harshly, but that is more of an advantage than a disadvantage for a discussion forum.
Interesting. The guidelines say nothing about commenting about commenting about being downvoted.
According to my current working theory of comedy, you have to go all the way to commenting about commenting about commenting about commenting about being downvoted before the meta-introspection hyperbole counteracts the boredom and raises the humor potentials back to positive values.
So please carefully read any response to this comment, and take detailed notes as to how humorous you found it to be, measured to the nearest milliguffaw. Please be honest; this is for science.
And if you choose to respond to this, please avoid commenting about downvoting, commenting about commenting about downvoting, or commenting about commenting about commenting about downvoting. It is critically important that your comment be exactly three steps removed from the thing already declared to be boring. Also, try to preferentially use words with more 'p's and 'k's in them, whenever possible--using "pants" rather than "trousers", for instance.
And lest you start to believe that this post is itself off-topic, only a deconstructed modern comedic calculus such as mine is even capable of explaining why those New Yorker single-panel cartoons are only funny to readers of the New Yorker, and only when published in the New Yorker! From there, the fully automated joke-writing machine is only just over the horizon.
Everything's not gamergate/alt-right; it's just a function of the demographics of the people in programming. It's good to remember that the internet points on a comment are a sum, and (especially if you see your points jumping up and down), you're also getting upvoted a lot, too.
Among other things, I would judge how modern a community is by what their solid waste disposal facilities look like. All those plastic toys, furniture, building material, packaging, etc, being pressed into a mound! Or, head down to the cancer treatment facility, and imagine what Dr. McCoy would have to say.
Imagine what people who grew up watching Dr. McCoy would say. This isn't the future we were expecting. If you were born 100 years ago, you might think the world has changed dramatically. However, if you were born 50 years ago, the future has been slow to arrive.
Technology seems to follow either a sigmoid or a bell curve.
And invariably during the climb to the plateau, the humans living at the time envision the climb to go on forever.
So when people looked at the rapid growth of computing power as transistors and ICs replaced radio valves, they envisioned the computing power hitting the point where it would rival neurons.
But now we are reaching the plateau, and it has come far short of the early visions.
50 years ago was 1966. Judging by many SF novels from that time, people were actually rather pessimistic about computing power we would have right now. Almost universally, authors predicted some progress, but still thought computers would be expensive, large and not as powerful as what we have now. On the other hand, they were very optimistic about space travel, AI algorithms, robotics, energy prodution/storage tech, personal transportation and the state of industrial engineering.
Interestingly, I think technological progress really has been faster over the last 50 years than the 50 before that (although it's decidedly close.) But the progress of the first half of the 20th century so spurred our hopes for rapidly accelerating futurism that even the fast pace of computing, transportation, and communication tech development seems dull if it doesn't get us to space.
I was born nearly 50 years ago. The only reason it may seem "slow to arrive" is that the dramatic visuals are absent, and that some of the expected technology proved a lot more boring/problematic than expected. Instead of rockets taking the staggeringly long time to reach staggeringly boring destinations (Moon & Mars are dead rocks), we've brought most of human knowledge & communications from racked hidden ink-on-paper to instant access anywhere on the planet via a pocket wireless supercomputer - something so amazing that most people spend much of their time staring at it (mostly for porn & cat videos...ARGH!). 5-minute food is the norm. Electric cars are on track for massive market penetration. Nearly-free worldwide-coverage videophones are available (just nobody actually wants to be seen). A lifetime of cinema, much in 3D, is available in your living room for an hour's pay per month. A couple days' wage can fly you to the other side of the planet in a few hours. 72F indoor temperature is so ubiquitous it's practically illegal to not have it. Thousands of books are trivially stored on a $35 e-reader weighing ounces.
Heck, as an middle-class kid growing up back then, we had wood-fired heat (no A/C), well water, grew half our own food, walked miles to town, and 4-digit phone numbers. Home computers didn't exist early on, the closest being hobby kids with maybe* hundreds of bytes of storage; when "personal computers" finally appeared (Apple II and IBM PC) they were, well, paltry. I don't remember a milkman delivering, but do recall returnable glass bottles.
We could have rockets and Moon bases etc as the norm, but when we got to the Moon early on we realized it really wasn't that interesting. Infinite cat videos in your pocket - that's what people really wanted.
well water, grew half our own food, walked miles to town
This is simply due to growing up in the country side though, isn't it? Nobody living in any at least semi-major western city in the late 60s would have had these experiences.
We could have rockets and Moon bases etc as the norm, but when we got to the Moon early on we realized it really wasn't that interesting. Infinite cat videos in your pocket - that's what people really wanted.
It's not that moon isn't interesting, it's that we decided that the moon isn't interesting.
Now, we are on the verge of commercial reusable rocket and launch cadence is going to dramatically speed up in the next decade or so.
I was born a little over 30 years ago and I remember milkmen delivering milk to our door. In fact, in the Chicagoland area there's Oberweis, which still offers milk delivery to your door.
In bigger cities it is possible to order other groceries as well. Though since people are less trusting of having their groceries not stolen, you might have to receive in person.
My mother is active and healthy and doing the grandma things after her heart operation instead of being a tombstone, and after the laser operation my MiL is not blind. I'm mystified how you'd even visually express that, but it is a pretty big change over the last 50 years.
Modern cars are horrifically ugly and character-less compared to my grandpa's cars, but they last roughly 10x as many miles and require far less than 1/10th the maintenance and get about twice the MPG and I'm almost certain to survive most car crashes (whereas in my grandpas day, a car crash was only about as survivable as an airplane crash). Its easy to express the bland ugliness of modern commuter cars visually, but how do you express that the hood may as well be welded down compared to the bad old days?
Sounds like slow and steady progress. Seat belts weren't even mandatory until the late 1960's; more common sense than technology. Cars could go 100k miles 50 years ago. They aren't going 10x the distance today.
Progress to be excited about: Wright Brothers flew in 1903, Yeager went supersonic in 1947, and we were on the moon in 1969. Commercial flights were crossing the Atlantic at 2x the speed of sound in the 1970's.
I was referring to decades-past "artist's rendition" pictures depicting the future. Scenes of dramatic rocket launches and moon hotels, exotic-looking personal vehicles, surreal attire, and sporadic inclusion of alien life forms.
You're making my point. Your mother is simply alive. Your MiL sees like anyone else might. Cars are kinda ugly, but in a character-less way instead of "OMG that's butt-ugly", and simply travel farther and kill fewer people.
The reality of being in the "future" is that it's not visually a dramatic difference ... yet it is dramatically "futuristic" precisely because percentage-wise more people are leading normal lives, living on the Moon isn't interesting to most, and instant access to the near-sum-total of human knowledge just means more porn & cat pictures to amuse oneself with.
I find this a really odd statement. No, it's not the future we were expecting (when is it ever?). But slow? I was born 40 years ago and am constantly bombarded with the fact that we live in the future.
50 years ago, the first super computer was built that could do 3 MegaFLOPs. No one had a home computer. People used land-line rotary phones to make audio calls to their friends. Sputnik had been launched and men had been to space.
Today, we all walk around with GigaFLOPs computers in our pockets that can make video calls and talk to billions of other computers around the world, all over the air—and we think nothing of it. There are people living in space semi-permanantly, we've sent probes to every major body in the solar system (and some minor ones) and there is so much stuff in orbit that it's become a potential hazard.
That seems like a ton in 50 years, and that's just in two areas.
I was also born 40 years ago. People were routinely walking on the moon before we were born. Nobody has done so since. 50 years ago, NASA's baseline plan called for a permanent settlement on the moon by 1978, and a permanent settlement on Mars by 1986. That was the working assumption -- not of a few wild-eyed futurists, but of tens of thousands of ordinary bureaucrats -- during the ramp-up of the Apollo program.
So yes, that future has been very, very slow to arrive.
And yes, we're all carrying gigaflops computers around, which is massively cool but also, 40 years ago, somewhat expected.[1]
My feeling is that in the last 10 years -- and particularly in the last 5, as the AI winter has decisively ended and the private spaceflight reusability efforts have ramped up -- things have genuinely been accelerating. But prior to that, the 70s, 80s, and 90s were relatively stalled decades, compared to the much more fundamental breakthroughs of the three decades before.
Before that was NASA's plan, it was Dr. von Braun's. He was a brilliant man and a very persuasive one, but he never would've had a chance to send even a few manned capsules to the moon if not for the fact that his adoptive country required a rocket capable of serving as an intercontinental weapon, and a conclusive demonstration of superiority over a geopolitical rival. Once those goals were achieved, and in the absence of Dr. von Braun's influence, no one with the power or money to advance his true goals remained any longer interested in doing so.
That's not true at all. The Saturn V was an order of magnitude larger than needed to deliver the largest nuclear weapons to Moscow, and would have been utterly impractical as a weapon. The Soyuz may have started out as an ICBM but the Saturn V was purpose built to go to the moon.
Of course it was. The point I'm making is that the project would not have been funded at all absent the coincidence of a requirement for rockets capable of serving as weapons on one hand, and the US having a geopolitical point to make on the other.
Interesting that you refer to him as "Dr" Von Braun. Von Braun never acquired a doctorate. That was a title that was bestowed on him by Hitler. My understanding is he almost never used it once he reached America and people started investigating his Nazi involvement.
Your understanding may be in error. From NASA's historical files [1]:
"Wanting to learn more about physics, chemistry, and astronomy, I entered the University of Berlin for graduate study. I was graduated with a Ph. D. in Physics in 1934."
Ok, thanks for pointing this out. It seems that I'm remembering this wrong. The actual title, Hitler bestowed on him was that of "Professor" which he allowed to be used by his underlings frequently up until he got Operation Paperclip'ed to America and people started asking questions.
He earned a Ph.D. in Physics as a result of his post-graduate studies at Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin in 1934.
There's certainly a regime connection, in that there was both a public portion of his thesis and a classified portion that was not published at the time, and that his research was military. But the idea that he didn't "acquire" (or, more specifically, earn through research) a Ph.D. but somehow had one bestowed as a gift by Hitler seems to be without basis.
> Ph.D. but somehow had one bestowed as a gift by Hitler seems to be without basis.
Alright, thanks for researching this. The actual title that I was thinking of is "Professor". Hitler always called him "Prof Von Braun" even though he was never a tenured professor.
Hitler called a lot of people a lot of things. Hitler is also dead, as is everyone else named in this branch of the conversation. I'm having a hard time figuring out where you want to take this; perhaps you'd like to cut to the chase.
- Hitler bestowed a honorific on Von Braun (Professor)
- Everyone in his team started calling him 'Professor' as a term of respect
- The war ended, Hitler died, Americans got a hold of Von Braun and his team and literally transported them whole sale to Huntsville Alabama where they continued their rocket research
- His team members still referred to him as 'Professor'
- Americans working in team: "Why do they call you Professor?"
- Everyone: awkward silence
Von Braun was extremely embarrased of the honorific due to its origins. You must remember that just after the war, any association whatsoever to the Nazi party was a kiss of death and both Von Braun and the American government tried very hard to gloss over his involvement in Hitler's machinations. It wasn't until much, much later that people found what really went on - that to perform his research in Hitler's Reich, Von Braun was a party to some of the worst atrocities committed during the war.
> Hitler always called him "Prof Von Braun" even though he was never a tenured professor.
Don't know about German practice, but in places I have been that honorific isn't restricted to those holding tenure.
But, in any case, even if that is true that he got referred to as "Professor", basically, because Hitler, that's no longer germane to the upthread poster's reference to him as Dr. Von Braun.
> But, in any case, even if that is true that he got referred to as "Professor", basically, because Hitler, that's no longer germane to the upthread poster's reference to him as Dr. Von Braun.
Well clearly it isn't. I made a post in this subtree that goes further into why I thought it a useful fact to point out. I'm getting my info from the Von Braun biography that Michael Neufeld wrote, which I read recently. If you don't want to push further into an irrelevant discussion we can stop here.
> Washington-savvy Webb stepped down in 1969. Tom Paine, an entirely different kind of NASA chief, replaced him. Pain, a Washington neophyte with little grasp of politics, let vision be his guide as he set out to define NASA's post-Apollo goals. He liked the audacity of a plan that Mueller's office had outlined for NASA. Evolved from JAG work, Mueller's Integrated Program Plan saw a space base in Earth orbit, a moon base, and humans on Mars—all by 1982. [...]
> In September 1969, President Nixon's Space Task Group endorsed the NASA plan, but with reservations. NASA formed an agency-wide team to begin implementation. But Nixon ignored the task group's recommendations, opting instead to funnel NASA's budget toward building the space shuttle.
My reading of the relevant history is that it became NASA's plan primarily as a result of Dr. von Braun's advocacy. But you're right about the inaccuracy of my earlier comment, which I have now updated. Thanks for catching that!
The things I want still don't exist. The only thing I can do is wait and I've been waiting my entire life until I started accepting that I will never get the things I want. I no longer want anything.
Yeah, was any of that unexpected? I've been communicating over the Internet since the 1980's. By the time you were 10, the PC revolution was well under way. The Macintosh was already released, and so was the first version of Windows.
When I was born 50 years ago, supersonic commercial flight was being built. We thought we'd be talking to computers that had artificial intelligence. We thought we'd be living on Mars by now.
> However, if you were born 50 years ago, the future has been slow to arrive.
I'm guess you've never lived in a world where almost all the information contained therein was in the form of paper documents, and have had to search for information in those documents?
Considering that I'm 50 years old, it's safe to assume that I have. A lot of people are assuming that because we have made progress that means it has been fast. Yes, Moore's Law was great but most technology doesn't follow that curve.
While I generally don't comment on the appearance of sites, the font The New Yorker uses makes the text very hard to read, at least on my screen. Simply using Times New Roman or something similar would already be an improvement.
I kind of wish your response mimicked the article. "Are comments really so irrelevant?". "Rather, relevance is a subjective condition, a feeling or an intuition that comments are in some profound sense the same as the content that came before them. "
People like trusting their intuitions. In many cases, they trust them so much they even deny that there's an argument to be made about their content - especially if people surrounding them share them.
This leads to people being ignorant of and confused about philosophical issues, but more importantly, it leads to them dismissing them without looking at them. Which doesn't make a worldview void of philosophy, instead it makes one with an unquestioned amateur philosophy.
It's a lot like many in politics assuming that our time is different, and historical examples are irrelevant, even when there is no good reason to believe that. Our modernity is a lot like that.
The issue generally comes down to the source of trust. You're trusting your intuition or you're trusting a source saying something else is also trustworthy.
It pays to keep this in the context of the events in our recent history which some argue have lead to a certain stripe of ideological stagnation in America, not just in the way we perceive modernity but in also their debilitating influence on how we perceive actual technological progress itself.
Peter Thiel has been steadfastly vocal on this :
I think one of the … you know, the counter-cultural in the '60s
was the hippies. You know, we landed on the moon in July of 1969.
Woodstock started three weeks later, and with the benefit of
hindsight, that’s when progress ended, and the hippies took over
the country.
Today the counterculture is to believe in science and technology.
You know, our society, the dominant culture doesn’t like science.
It doesn’t like technology. You just look at the science-fiction
movies that come out of Hollywood — Terminator, Matrix, Avatar,
Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. It’s like you
would never want to go into outer space. You would just want to be
back on some muddy island. And so I think we’re in a world where
actually believing that a better future is possible that you can
have agency and work towards a better future, that is actually
radically counter-cultural.[1]
[1]
Peter Thiel and Glenn Beck discuss what the counterculture looks like.
IMHO, the space example is bad. I have no interest in space travel. Not because I don't believe in technology, but because I don't think there's anything appealing about going to space. Yeah, I think living on some cool Star Trek planet would be fun, but we're talking about the moon or Mars. They are, well, rocks. For a lot of people, like Thiel, space is like Plan B, where we go to after we blow up the earth. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. And should it happen, the earth during a nuclear winter will still be infinitely more hospitable than some plastic pod on Mars.
Space-stuff is a cerebral pleasure. As an astronaut you can feel in awe as you experience the sum total of human technological prowess. But space is a horrible sensual pleasure. Mindnumbingly dull, ugly, and most of all, shackled. No personal freedom, fully a slave to the overlords in Houston.
Let space to the robots. They can go mine ores, take pictures, and putz around in the dust. But that sounds like a terrible way to spend time as a human.
"Mindnumbingly dull, ugly, and most of all, shackled. No personal freedom, fully a slave to the overlords"
So the experience of 99% of humanity ... on Mars. The "on Mars" part sounds better enough to sign up for.
I suppose there's an aspect of personal taste. I think Mars and the Moon are very beautiful. Imagine what a landscape photographer like Ansel Adams could have done if unleashed on the surface of the Moon...
Someday we'll have a colony up there and I think its important that before we start bulldozing and building a human settlement up there, we should have a real artistic landscape photographer run around for awhile.
Given what we know about the asteroid probabilities, space, preferably very far space, should be a quite big priority. Or at least a sensible asteroid defense system, but colonies are potentially more resilient if self sufficient.
The odds of a medium sized impact in the next few thousand years are very small. Still, an advanced asteroid defense capability should be prepared, since even the small-ish bolides that we expect to hit with greater frequency should be eliminated. This should reduce the risk from catastrophic impactors even further.
Settlement of e.g. Mars will never be needed in the time frames we should be thinking about. If asteroid defense is developed, then for thousands of years that will not be a concern at all. And if in 2,000 years they need a settlement on Mars, the people in 1,800 years can prioritize doing it.
In other words I don't see it as a priority. Material conditions on Earth are not great, and we are threatened by catastrophes in the atmosphere, oceans, and tectonic plates. Earth and its cities are infinitely more responsive to our efforts and investment than Mars or elsewhere. There is so much that we can do here in this century, while settling another planetary body in this century seems basically impossible.
People would not go to Mars because they need to. They will go because they want to. We always were an exploring types.
I may not happen within this century, maybe even not this millennium. But I believe it will happen. And for the time being it would be great adventure just to try and make the Mars more friendly.
I like the base rate fallacy committed there.
In recent history, there have been at least 5 sizable asteroid impacts, each of which would evaporate a big city. Just lucky those didn't hit any. In longer term, two of those triggered mass extinctions.
If a "evaporate a big city" or "kill all humans on Earth" asteroid strikes, the existence of a Mars colony doesn't help my personal survival or well-being in any way whatsoever unless I'm there.
And if I'm there, odds are that it made my personal survival chances worse, since they're mostly determined by the many "normal" causes of death and being a pioneer in a world not really suited for humans is likely to be worse than Earth.
You could make an argument that it's not wise to put all your eggs in one basket, and it has some merit in this discussion, but when all I have is one egg, the only thing I can do is to pick the safest basket I have - and for now it's Earth.
Can you elaborate? I do say that we should develop the asteroid defense capability, to eliminate those smaller more frequent impacts and others. My terminology was not standard or precise and I apologize for that. I mean by "small" those which are akin to an atom bomb or a hydrogen bomb explosion, and "medium" those which would cause catastrophe over a large region but not global annihilation.
As for movies, I think it's about what makes a good plot rather than what expresses the common ideology. A benevolent AI-god won't exactly make for an exciting movie, nor will just basic progress. One could argue the same point about why crime is so popular in film - it's not an expression of ideology, it's a tool for plot.
I'm not sure I generally agree that technological progress helping people is deeply counter-cultural. People like to wallow in cynicism, but young people are super hopeful about the progress of science. I guess that's partially bias of whom I meet online, but it is well established.
Not that most are deeply interested in science or tech, but they sure do like professing love to it, scrolling through cute image macros about it online, and they're not afraid of using it when it's easy enough. Now they might not be the majority if we count old people in the US, I don't know, but if this is a counterculture then it's one that's huge, and growing.
However where I think our points tie together is how people think about politics. People sure love professing cynicism about politics as a way to relieve responsibility. We can make as much tech progress as we want, but no, we won't get better political institutions or more freedom. Impossible.
Unfortunately, tech people are just as guilty of this one.
This is what I completely fail to understand about Thiel: he says stuff like that, and then goes and says that democracy was a mistake, monopolies are the proper way to do business, and we need something more like a monopolist-monarch to run the place[1].
That seems like a very selective view on modernity which tries to embrace "science and technology" for the profits they can bring, while deliberately discounting what the many human sciences tell us about how humans can work and work together. Can you actually believe in, say, "human collective intelligence as distributed Bayesian inference"[2], while also wanting a world dominated by monopolists and dictators? I mean, for that matter, how can you claim to stand by science and technology while also being, quite publicly, an evangelical Christian, who thus rejects naturalism, the broadest worldview-level fruit of the sciences, in its entirety?
It's a strange idea that progress was arrested by anti-war, civil rights, feminist, and environmental activist movements, while epitomized by men walking on the moon. The counter-cultural movement of the 60s was not anti-science it was anti-exploitation and anti-hegemony.
Human spaceflight only coincides with "progress" in as much as it improves material conditions on Earth. That is what we think of as progress. Technological progress must be recognized as distinct from technological advance.
Scary that its recursive, in that "historical examples are irrelevant is modernity" is in itself modernity. Ignorance of history leading to disaster is old as dirt. Err, its as old as written history anyway LOL. Soon as some dude wrote a good story about a tactical maneuver some other dude promptly ignored the story and gets killed, every time. Don't matter if its sarissa carrying heavy infantry or knights or tanks or air craft carriers or spaceships someday.
I think the belief lives in the modern mind because when a modern does something that would have resulted in Alexander the Great spanking him severely, the modern feels better when claiming "not my fault that my culture doesn't respect the past" etc etc.
For example the Vikings used to F over the British locals centuries after Alexander the Great via the good ole feigned retreat. Trick a tough defensive shield wall into thinking you're running for it and they should chase you, because booty, then once they break their wall at a predetermined practiced point reform your own shield wall, flank the freshly unorganized soldiers and slaughter them. Oldest trick in the book. The book that no military readers read, I mean. Yeah yeah I realize the general population didn't sip tea while reading Plutarch in that era, anymore than British do today, but you wouldn't expect a King of England to fall for that even in the late dark ages.
Hume actually says why this kind of thing happens. Any one person or entity can be shown to not have complete knowledge of the world with a simple example. Proving you actually know something completely is instead a hard inductive proof likely to fail.
Most modern physics fails this proof as it cannot show convincingly that it is the only true version of physics. And that is quite rigid, well tested and proven knowledge about the world...
With regards to science, it seems like at least young people respect it, so we're going to have progress in that sense.
Unfortunately, philosophy doesn't produce life-changing tech or neat gadgets, so reading philosophy that would change one's outlook on politics, ethics or epistemology is ignored.
Just my general experience with it when talking to young people and seeing their expression online etc. At least when it comes to the hard sciences, they may not have the patience to do them, but they sure profess to liking it. Probably different with the softer sciences. That's not rigorous evidence, I'll admit.
Wonderful exploration of many similar / related / intellectual / belief / explanation systems regarding human existence! Coming across a lot of those names and concepts what feels like a decade ago (probably was, during graduate school and supplementing my Education track with hybrid Philosophy & Anthropology snippets) but they're very nicely presented here in my opinion. The sticking point is treating each as a belief structure, and looking to the human condition and our primal tendencies (e.g. "reasoning") as to why they have appeal.
In a world were there are so few answers to genuinely big questions, seeking explanations or making them up seems reasonable and, as history seems to show, kind of inevitable. Interesting to keep in touch with, diversity I think helps understanding and/or appreciation (and also the ability to discuss in polity, heady company where there may be disagreement to chat about).
This is the same argument made by Bruno Latour in "We were never Modern", that modernity is marked by the insistence on split between science, politics and philosophy - but this split cannot hold up, and we get "hybrids". Science is not a separate domain, but treads in politics and so on.
My wife is fond of "The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosopher", which argues the Enlightenment wasn't new, either, it was just pouring religion (the thirst for god) into new cups.
Modernity, to me, is a more complex attempt at the same, to find a new source of unambiguous authority, a method by which the world makes sense. Again a futile gesture, but still it takes hold.
This is the opposite of what I was saying; you're asserting the existence of an empirical reality that is removed from (superior to) political consideration, I'm insisting this is impossible.
Scientists make guns, rockets, energy technologies, robots, all of which have political and social consequence. Scientists produce models of human identity and behavior which have the same. See the other thread about machine learning and inequality, e.g.
I see this point, but I thought you meant that aspects of science mix with political thought. I can definitely see that science has consequences and influences on all kinds of things, including politics. In that case, every field is connected or related to another in some form or fashion.
I also mean that, science is deeply fucked by the political prejudices of its practitioners, and not in some trivial "all scientists are Democrats" sort of way. Science, no different than any other form of human knowledge, involves construction of narrative, and is subject to all of the same constraints that narrative prejudice yields. What you study and the methods you use are an obvious place we might find this problem.
I wouldn't say it's as messed up as that. You make it sound as thought scientific institutions suffer from systemic corruption. Yes, narrative is involved, but humans are storytellers. I don't think science is limited or hindered by the way people process information.
There is a distinction between "science: the game as she is played" and "science: the epistemic method." The former certainly has two-way interactions with politics, but the latter does not.
For another take on the "split" of modernism, read Francis Schaeffer - either "The God Who Is There" or "Escape From Reason".
Schaeffer is a Christian, and his philosophy is explicitly Christian. If that isn't your perspective, you still might benefit from his analysis of why modern thought ended up where it did.
As an aside, I found Neal Stephenson's historical fiction the Baroque Cycle, to be a wonderful exposition of the invention of the modern in the 17th and 18th century.
Apart from the swashbuckling, romance and intrigue what makes the books so compelling is the idea that so much of what we take for granted with respect to our worldview and our mindset was created at this time.
How so? I'm kinda going through the lead up and fall-out of the Peace of Westphalia right now and would love to know your opinion of Stephenson's work.
As an undergraduate history minor I took electives all over the place, including 'The Glorious Revolution', 'The Scientific Revolution' and 'The Rise of Financial Capitalism'. Even though I kind of knew it, reading the Baroque Cycle it really hit home that all of these things were happening at the same time, and over the course of a generation or two, the world, and in the West the worldview, was really, fundamentally changed
(WRT, the Peace of Westphalia - not sure where you're writing from -- but if you're ever in the neighborhood visit Muenster and check out the room where it was signed, as well as the cages for the Anabaptist leaders still hanging from the cathedral steeple.)
Lately I looked into writing history (and desire more) and was surprised one "fact" - many more people read than people who wrote (as centuries went on). I suspect the total number of studied writers is quite small wrt the articles mentioned sources.
To compare to today, the keyboard and vocal cords afford many more authors. History is not taking the "average" of philosophical thought but if it was I wish there were more writers centuries ago.
That will certainly offer cultural insight, which is valuable, but I think you'd find essentially the medieval equivalent of the YouTube comments section.
> was surprised one "fact" - many more people read than people who wrote
Why would that be surprising? Far more people are interested in learning than are capable of teaching and even more just want to be entertained. It seems that most people just do not have anything to say. When it costs money to print something, many thoughts without merit will not be printed.
For example, if this post cost me money to make, or quite frankly anything I post online cost money, it would not be made. I have no compelling reason to spend money on any of this. That's before taking into account if anyone wants to publish it.
The article isn't bad but this part made me shake my head:
> Gottlieb writes, “physical bodies are . . . not quite what they seem, but are only appearances somehow thrown up by monads” seems less extravagant in the light of contemporary string theory, which holds that everything that exists is the product of vibrating one-dimensional objects
Poor string theory used to justify such nonsense..
Mostly not nonsense, since it fits most or all experimental physics, just the mathematic description is quite extravagant and interpretation is even more alien than quantum physics or general relativity, which are already highly mind-boggling.
I'm not sure I see the value in this article's protracted digression into a bestiary of philosophers. There is, though, much truth in the statement that to conceive of ourselves as detached from history is to conceive of ourselves inaccurately.
Yeah. If it told me it would be that in the title, I would be fine, but it didn't, so now I'm left yearning for thoughts on how or why we think of ourselves as being so modern, or how we aren't all that different at all. :(
I think actually one of the most thoughtful points preceded the (unnecessarily long, IMO) discussion of the various philosophers.
"[...]the loss of contact with the past. Depending on your point of view, this can be seen as either a disinheritance or an emancipation; much of modern politics is determined by which side you take on this question"
I suppose that's true. For most of my life I was, however unconsciously, on a side which considers ignorance of history to be emancipation; without speculating on whether or not that's accurate, I will say that, in discovering and gaining what knowledge and understanding of history I have, I found also that with greater knowledge of the past comes greater understanding of the present. But perhaps that's not true for everyone.
We are entering an era of destructive regression. As we celebrate our "modernity" and "disruption" with the glee of fools as Silicon Valley (as a term for the tech world in general) commences to deconstruct society in a process on the scale of Robber Barons of yesteryear, but which will not be named until the damage is fully identified and realized once they have fully extracted value and wealth from society for pennies on the dollar that they pocketed for themselves. We cheer as technology removed the need for human inputs to economy in the manner that the industrial revolution demanded, yet we do so without consequence or even consideration as we put the new age Robber Barons in Silicon Valley on pedestals.
What becomes of the retail workers that will be put out of work by the likes of Amazon?
What becomes of the truck drivers that will be put out of work by autonomous trucks?
What becomes of the taxi drivers that are put out of work by autonomous taxis?
What becomes of service workers as processes and systems are improved to where you don't need people's assistance?
They will find new jobs ... is the cry. They will all be artists when we give them UBI ... is the cry. Yet no one wants to face the reality that there are no other jobs to be had in the numbers necessary to replace them or that there is no need for everyone to be artists and musicians with no incentives to regulate their lives.
We are heading towards calamity and the only answer that is given is "we'll figure something out" without realizing that this time, this situation is different. We can't take out another payday loan, we don't have anymore jewelry to pawn ... the consequences that were piled up are teetering. But look on the bright side, the new iPhone is coming out. That will solve our problems as we import more people with incompatible views just at a time when humanity is shifting toward needing and, really, valuing human inputs to economy on a negative exponential curve.
I think people greatly mix up how advanced "objects" are, and how advanced people are. The true test is if you take away objects from a person, and then test their reason. Key word being reason, as the tests which are called iq tests do not test reason. What they do test, is how well a person is able to perform in a relatively small aspect, of a subset of American culture. Again what I just described are two separate things.
With the idea that knowledge is an act of remembering, consciousness is a matter of matter, and gods/natures role in creating, seems to me that humans creating concious AI would potentially create that third era of modernity.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadModern? We're practically medieval. But at least there is some glimmering of hope that we understand our problems and are working to fix them.
I get your point but the author in the article is talking about "modern" not in terms of "morals" but in the (meta) philosophy of existence.
In his particular definition of "modernity", the world would meet that criteria when most of the inhabitants could look at themselves with philosophical detachment: e.g. Most of us would realize we have no special centrality in the universe (we're not the only higher life forms in the vastness of space). Our timeslice of humanity is but a microscopic blip in the 14 billion years of its existence. Most of us would seriously think it's possible that _we_ are digital avatars in "the matrix", etc.
Furthermore, the author feels that assessing "modernity" by looking at the technological progress around us is deceptive and therefore it's a bad measurement. Instead, he thinks humans reach a threshold of "modernity" when a large percentage internalize deep philosophical questions like the way Descartes and Hume did.
I'd think it was just a dud headline, were it not for the closing line.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity
I'm not convinced that "morals modernity" is a prerequisite for "philosophical introspection modernity". To me, it seems like those 2 are orthogonal. In other words, we could have both of these outcomes:
- I believe we humans are the center of the universe and with Zeus by my side, I'm also going to kill a million people to purify my race.
- I believe we might be in The Matrix but can't prove it and I'm also going to kill a million people to purify my race.
It looks like both types of "modernity" can coexist.
Perhaps the New Yorker shouldn't have put "modern?" in the title. At the bottom of the article, they disclosed that they used a different title (which emphasizes philosophy instead of morals) in other editions:
>This article appears in other versions of the September 5, 2016, issue, with the headline “What Makes You So Sure?.”
(Btw, I didn't downvote any of your posts.)
I think you're making the mistake that "progress" = "adopting my values."
I (at least from the surface level conversation so far) don't disagree with your moral values, but part of this kind of conversation is the tricky bit of everyone finding a way to distance themselves from things they believe in.
Morals are not something that improve or decline, they just change with society.
Misogyny is definitely not as bad as it used to be, but it's still everywhere. And in many cases the victims don't report it for whatever reasons.
The vast majority of people I've met who challenge these "virtues" aren't frothing hate-mongerers, but their rhetoric naturally becomes more extreme when their questions are immediately dismissed with these ad hominem attacks.
Equalling "migration" with "open borders" is dishonest and already spinning the discussion before it even starts. I don't blame people for pre-emptively downvoting that.
But yes, dehumanization goes both ways. Branding everyone you disagree with as Nazi isn't helping anyone either.
The way I read the comment, it's saying that when people say things against open borders or multiculturalism, they are accused of being racists. Then they say worse, obviously racist things, but they're just saying them because they were called racists, not because they are racists (who froth.) Therefore, if people wouldn't accuse people of being racists for saying things against open borders and multiculturalism, people wouldn't say racist things.
Or, perhaps, because it is very easy to become angry when one feels oneself unjustly maligned, and anger often betrays one into saying things which are ill considered and do not accurately depict one's genuine opinions or beliefs.
Of course, there is a contrary position which holds that such things more accurately characterize those who say them than do the things they say when calm. I can only surmise that people who adhere to this position have never themselves experienced anger.
Maine's Governor Insists the Problem Isn't His Racism—It's Being Called a Racist
Finally, you're probably right that insults and intolerance of religions is common, although I don't see why that should be discouraged - after all, religion is a choice, and disliking it is just as valid as disliking e.g. neo-Nazis and white suprematists.
A little bit of everything. Here in Austria I see people raging against German immigrants (they're stealing our white-collar jobs!), against Hungarian immigrants (they're stealing our blue-collar jobs!), against Romanians (they're stealing our bicycles!); and everyone with the wrong skin colour is treated as second-class citizens (at best) just for the heck of it.
> Furthermore, often times people have legitimate concerns, such as job losses and incompatible cultural norms
That's what I meant with genuine policy problems. Sometimes it stays at that. But get some people drunk and they start raging about how "those fucking sand-niggers" are genetically inferior and "deserve" getting killed in wars "because the middle east is their fault anyway".
> after all, religion is a choice, and disliking it
Calling a random person a "fucking hook-nosed jew" because they don't want to lend you money is not criticizing the Jewish religion. It's racism.
In many parts of the world it really isn't. If your parents where catholic then you are catholic, if your parents where jews then you are a jew, if you parents where muslim then you are a muslim etc. What you (or your parents) actually believe and don't believe in is rarely factors into it.
It is here, though. In Germany and Austria, a quarter to a third of the population are not part of a registered religion; and many more aren't practising their stated religion.
No, we aren't that much more modern when tribalism is still rampant.
Where do you live?
Sure, racism is a solved problem. Pull my other leg.
This is typically what is meant by the term "white privilege". What is actually meant is that someone has a different set of experiences, so they are comparatively blind to experiences that are common to people of other races. This is a very common phenomenon. Most people when they are growing up think that their experiences are universal. That the way their family works is the way everyone else's works, and so on. It's only when they get older that they realize that maybe their experiences have been abnormal, and also that experiences different from one's own are possible, perhaps even commonplace (such as growing up with divorced parents, growing up poor vs. rich, etc.) This is extremely true when it comes to race, because until recently the experiences of people of color have often not been very well publicized. But they absolutely do. If you're black, or brown, or a muslim, your experiences in the developed world are going to be different from those of a white non-muslim. You're going to get stopped for "random" searches when flying more often. You're going to be stopped by the police while driving more often. Your interactions with police will be more tense and less cordial. And so on and so on.
These are just facts. In the US whites actually use illegal drugs at a slightly higher rate than blacks. But blacks are stopped more often on suspicion of drug activity, they are prosecuted more often, and they receive much harsher sentences. That's why despite the lower rate of drug use and the lower population, the number of blacks in prison for drug offenses is vastly higher than for whites. If you're white, drugs might as well be legal, as long as you're not transporting kilos of them around. If you're black, you are more than ten times as likely to be incarcerated for drug use than if you're white, much more. That's systemic racism and injustice, and that's just one tiny example.
There was a study where job applicants sent in resumes. The names on the resumes were changed, some had "black sounding" names, some had "white sounding" names. The resumes with the white names had a much higher rate of callbacks than those with the black names.
There are many, many more examples. To pull one from the headlines. Consider the examples of two different athletes: Ryan Lochte and Colin Kaepernick. Ryan Lochte committed a crime, and the general sentiment among many is "boys will be boys" (despite him being over 30). Kaepernick exercised his 1st amendment rights to make a statement against police brutality, and he has received a torrent of death threats and insults, including many using the n-word. If that doesn't tell you that racism is alive and well in the western world, then I don't know what to tell you.
Yes, we've made progress on racism. Yes, being an open, avowed racist often results in swift negative consequences. But that does not define the boundaries of the problem of racism, there is still a lot of very difficult work to be done, our world is far, far removed from one where racism is no longer an issue.
The modern world is not immune to racism; rather, the invention of "races" is an artifact of the development of nationalism in the 17th through 19th centuries, and so racism is a feature distinctive of the modern era.
"Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
According to my current working theory of comedy, you have to go all the way to commenting about commenting about commenting about commenting about being downvoted before the meta-introspection hyperbole counteracts the boredom and raises the humor potentials back to positive values.
So please carefully read any response to this comment, and take detailed notes as to how humorous you found it to be, measured to the nearest milliguffaw. Please be honest; this is for science.
And if you choose to respond to this, please avoid commenting about downvoting, commenting about commenting about downvoting, or commenting about commenting about commenting about downvoting. It is critically important that your comment be exactly three steps removed from the thing already declared to be boring. Also, try to preferentially use words with more 'p's and 'k's in them, whenever possible--using "pants" rather than "trousers", for instance.
And lest you start to believe that this post is itself off-topic, only a deconstructed modern comedic calculus such as mine is even capable of explaining why those New Yorker single-panel cartoons are only funny to readers of the New Yorker, and only when published in the New Yorker! From there, the fully automated joke-writing machine is only just over the horizon.
And invariably during the climb to the plateau, the humans living at the time envision the climb to go on forever.
So when people looked at the rapid growth of computing power as transistors and ICs replaced radio valves, they envisioned the computing power hitting the point where it would rival neurons.
But now we are reaching the plateau, and it has come far short of the early visions.
Heck, as an middle-class kid growing up back then, we had wood-fired heat (no A/C), well water, grew half our own food, walked miles to town, and 4-digit phone numbers. Home computers didn't exist early on, the closest being hobby kids with maybe* hundreds of bytes of storage; when "personal computers" finally appeared (Apple II and IBM PC) they were, well, paltry. I don't remember a milkman delivering, but do recall returnable glass bottles.
We could have rockets and Moon bases etc as the norm, but when we got to the Moon early on we realized it really wasn't that interesting. Infinite cat videos in your pocket - that's what people really wanted.
It's not that moon isn't interesting, it's that we decided that the moon isn't interesting.
Now, we are on the verge of commercial reusable rocket and launch cadence is going to dramatically speed up in the next decade or so.
Some examples:
My mother is active and healthy and doing the grandma things after her heart operation instead of being a tombstone, and after the laser operation my MiL is not blind. I'm mystified how you'd even visually express that, but it is a pretty big change over the last 50 years.
Modern cars are horrifically ugly and character-less compared to my grandpa's cars, but they last roughly 10x as many miles and require far less than 1/10th the maintenance and get about twice the MPG and I'm almost certain to survive most car crashes (whereas in my grandpas day, a car crash was only about as survivable as an airplane crash). Its easy to express the bland ugliness of modern commuter cars visually, but how do you express that the hood may as well be welded down compared to the bad old days?
Progress to be excited about: Wright Brothers flew in 1903, Yeager went supersonic in 1947, and we were on the moon in 1969. Commercial flights were crossing the Atlantic at 2x the speed of sound in the 1970's.
You're making my point. Your mother is simply alive. Your MiL sees like anyone else might. Cars are kinda ugly, but in a character-less way instead of "OMG that's butt-ugly", and simply travel farther and kill fewer people.
The reality of being in the "future" is that it's not visually a dramatic difference ... yet it is dramatically "futuristic" precisely because percentage-wise more people are leading normal lives, living on the Moon isn't interesting to most, and instant access to the near-sum-total of human knowledge just means more porn & cat pictures to amuse oneself with.
50 years ago, the first super computer was built that could do 3 MegaFLOPs. No one had a home computer. People used land-line rotary phones to make audio calls to their friends. Sputnik had been launched and men had been to space.
Today, we all walk around with GigaFLOPs computers in our pockets that can make video calls and talk to billions of other computers around the world, all over the air—and we think nothing of it. There are people living in space semi-permanantly, we've sent probes to every major body in the solar system (and some minor ones) and there is so much stuff in orbit that it's become a potential hazard.
That seems like a ton in 50 years, and that's just in two areas.
So yes, that future has been very, very slow to arrive.
And yes, we're all carrying gigaflops computers around, which is massively cool but also, 40 years ago, somewhat expected.[1]
My feeling is that in the last 10 years -- and particularly in the last 5, as the AI winter has decisively ended and the private spaceflight reusability efforts have ramped up -- things have genuinely been accelerating. But prior to that, the 70s, 80s, and 90s were relatively stalled decades, compared to the much more fundamental breakthroughs of the three decades before.
1: http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/samsung-says-2001-a-space-odysse...
"Wanting to learn more about physics, chemistry, and astronomy, I entered the University of Berlin for graduate study. I was graduated with a Ph. D. in Physics in 1934."
[1] http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/recollect-childhood.ht...
He earned a Ph.D. in Physics as a result of his post-graduate studies at Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin in 1934.
There's certainly a regime connection, in that there was both a public portion of his thesis and a classified portion that was not published at the time, and that his research was military. But the idea that he didn't "acquire" (or, more specifically, earn through research) a Ph.D. but somehow had one bestowed as a gift by Hitler seems to be without basis.
Alright, thanks for researching this. The actual title that I was thinking of is "Professor". Hitler always called him "Prof Von Braun" even though he was never a tenured professor.
- Everyone in his team started calling him 'Professor' as a term of respect
- The war ended, Hitler died, Americans got a hold of Von Braun and his team and literally transported them whole sale to Huntsville Alabama where they continued their rocket research
- His team members still referred to him as 'Professor'
- Americans working in team: "Why do they call you Professor?"
- Everyone: awkward silence
Von Braun was extremely embarrased of the honorific due to its origins. You must remember that just after the war, any association whatsoever to the Nazi party was a kiss of death and both Von Braun and the American government tried very hard to gloss over his involvement in Hitler's machinations. It wasn't until much, much later that people found what really went on - that to perform his research in Hitler's Reich, Von Braun was a party to some of the worst atrocities committed during the war.
Don't know about German practice, but in places I have been that honorific isn't restricted to those holding tenure.
But, in any case, even if that is true that he got referred to as "Professor", basically, because Hitler, that's no longer germane to the upthread poster's reference to him as Dr. Von Braun.
Well clearly it isn't. I made a post in this subtree that goes further into why I thought it a useful fact to point out. I'm getting my info from the Von Braun biography that Michael Neufeld wrote, which I read recently. If you don't want to push further into an irrelevant discussion we can stop here.
http://www.airspacemag.com/space/the-road-to-mars-961235/?al...
> Washington-savvy Webb stepped down in 1969. Tom Paine, an entirely different kind of NASA chief, replaced him. Pain, a Washington neophyte with little grasp of politics, let vision be his guide as he set out to define NASA's post-Apollo goals. He liked the audacity of a plan that Mueller's office had outlined for NASA. Evolved from JAG work, Mueller's Integrated Program Plan saw a space base in Earth orbit, a moon base, and humans on Mars—all by 1982. [...]
> In September 1969, President Nixon's Space Task Group endorsed the NASA plan, but with reservations. NASA formed an agency-wide team to begin implementation. But Nixon ignored the task group's recommendations, opting instead to funnel NASA's budget toward building the space shuttle.
When I was born 50 years ago, supersonic commercial flight was being built. We thought we'd be talking to computers that had artificial intelligence. We thought we'd be living on Mars by now.
I'm guess you've never lived in a world where almost all the information contained therein was in the form of paper documents, and have had to search for information in those documents?
The edges of the serif font on the New Yorker's site just look blurry to me.
This leads to people being ignorant of and confused about philosophical issues, but more importantly, it leads to them dismissing them without looking at them. Which doesn't make a worldview void of philosophy, instead it makes one with an unquestioned amateur philosophy.
It's a lot like many in politics assuming that our time is different, and historical examples are irrelevant, even when there is no good reason to believe that. Our modernity is a lot like that.
Back in Enlightenment days, people also consulted empirical reality.
Peter Thiel has been steadfastly vocal on this :
[1]Peter Thiel and Glenn Beck discuss what the counterculture looks like.
http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/10/21/could-this-be-the-new-co...
(or if your political persuasion forbids you against patronizing Beck)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IER50pX-FuM
Space-stuff is a cerebral pleasure. As an astronaut you can feel in awe as you experience the sum total of human technological prowess. But space is a horrible sensual pleasure. Mindnumbingly dull, ugly, and most of all, shackled. No personal freedom, fully a slave to the overlords in Houston.
Let space to the robots. They can go mine ores, take pictures, and putz around in the dust. But that sounds like a terrible way to spend time as a human.
So the experience of 99% of humanity ... on Mars. The "on Mars" part sounds better enough to sign up for.
I suppose there's an aspect of personal taste. I think Mars and the Moon are very beautiful. Imagine what a landscape photographer like Ansel Adams could have done if unleashed on the surface of the Moon...
Someday we'll have a colony up there and I think its important that before we start bulldozing and building a human settlement up there, we should have a real artistic landscape photographer run around for awhile.
Settlement of e.g. Mars will never be needed in the time frames we should be thinking about. If asteroid defense is developed, then for thousands of years that will not be a concern at all. And if in 2,000 years they need a settlement on Mars, the people in 1,800 years can prioritize doing it.
In other words I don't see it as a priority. Material conditions on Earth are not great, and we are threatened by catastrophes in the atmosphere, oceans, and tectonic plates. Earth and its cities are infinitely more responsive to our efforts and investment than Mars or elsewhere. There is so much that we can do here in this century, while settling another planetary body in this century seems basically impossible.
I may not happen within this century, maybe even not this millennium. But I believe it will happen. And for the time being it would be great adventure just to try and make the Mars more friendly.
And if I'm there, odds are that it made my personal survival chances worse, since they're mostly determined by the many "normal" causes of death and being a pioneer in a world not really suited for humans is likely to be worse than Earth.
You could make an argument that it's not wise to put all your eggs in one basket, and it has some merit in this discussion, but when all I have is one egg, the only thing I can do is to pick the safest basket I have - and for now it's Earth.
I'm not sure I generally agree that technological progress helping people is deeply counter-cultural. People like to wallow in cynicism, but young people are super hopeful about the progress of science. I guess that's partially bias of whom I meet online, but it is well established.
Not that most are deeply interested in science or tech, but they sure do like professing love to it, scrolling through cute image macros about it online, and they're not afraid of using it when it's easy enough. Now they might not be the majority if we count old people in the US, I don't know, but if this is a counterculture then it's one that's huge, and growing.
However where I think our points tie together is how people think about politics. People sure love professing cynicism about politics as a way to relieve responsibility. We can make as much tech progress as we want, but no, we won't get better political institutions or more freedom. Impossible.
Unfortunately, tech people are just as guilty of this one.
That seems like a very selective view on modernity which tries to embrace "science and technology" for the profits they can bring, while deliberately discounting what the many human sciences tell us about how humans can work and work together. Can you actually believe in, say, "human collective intelligence as distributed Bayesian inference"[2], while also wanting a world dominated by monopolists and dictators? I mean, for that matter, how can you claim to stand by science and technology while also being, quite publicly, an evangelical Christian, who thus rejects naturalism, the broadest worldview-level fruit of the sciences, in its entirety?
[1] -- https://medium.com/soapbox-dc/peter-thiels-plan-to-become-ce...
[2] -- http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.01987
Human spaceflight only coincides with "progress" in as much as it improves material conditions on Earth. That is what we think of as progress. Technological progress must be recognized as distinct from technological advance.
I think the belief lives in the modern mind because when a modern does something that would have resulted in Alexander the Great spanking him severely, the modern feels better when claiming "not my fault that my culture doesn't respect the past" etc etc.
For example the Vikings used to F over the British locals centuries after Alexander the Great via the good ole feigned retreat. Trick a tough defensive shield wall into thinking you're running for it and they should chase you, because booty, then once they break their wall at a predetermined practiced point reform your own shield wall, flank the freshly unorganized soldiers and slaughter them. Oldest trick in the book. The book that no military readers read, I mean. Yeah yeah I realize the general population didn't sip tea while reading Plutarch in that era, anymore than British do today, but you wouldn't expect a King of England to fall for that even in the late dark ages.
Most modern physics fails this proof as it cannot show convincingly that it is the only true version of physics. And that is quite rigid, well tested and proven knowledge about the world...
With regards to science, it seems like at least young people respect it, so we're going to have progress in that sense.
Unfortunately, philosophy doesn't produce life-changing tech or neat gadgets, so reading philosophy that would change one's outlook on politics, ethics or epistemology is ignored.
What basis do you have for saying this?
I'm curious as to what you think.
In a world were there are so few answers to genuinely big questions, seeking explanations or making them up seems reasonable and, as history seems to show, kind of inevitable. Interesting to keep in touch with, diversity I think helps understanding and/or appreciation (and also the ability to discuss in polity, heady company where there may be disagreement to chat about).
My wife is fond of "The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosopher", which argues the Enlightenment wasn't new, either, it was just pouring religion (the thirst for god) into new cups.
Modernity, to me, is a more complex attempt at the same, to find a new source of unambiguous authority, a method by which the world makes sense. Again a futile gesture, but still it takes hold.
How does science tread in politics? I'm actually honestly wondering.
I do enjoy seeing VLSI microprocessors, optical networks, and sophisticated software being used for discussions on whether or not science works.
I think that is one of a very few universals out there, and yet I think very many people are willing to admit it to themselves.
Schaeffer is a Christian, and his philosophy is explicitly Christian. If that isn't your perspective, you still might benefit from his analysis of why modern thought ended up where it did.
Apart from the swashbuckling, romance and intrigue what makes the books so compelling is the idea that so much of what we take for granted with respect to our worldview and our mindset was created at this time.
As an undergraduate history minor I took electives all over the place, including 'The Glorious Revolution', 'The Scientific Revolution' and 'The Rise of Financial Capitalism'. Even though I kind of knew it, reading the Baroque Cycle it really hit home that all of these things were happening at the same time, and over the course of a generation or two, the world, and in the West the worldview, was really, fundamentally changed
(WRT, the Peace of Westphalia - not sure where you're writing from -- but if you're ever in the neighborhood visit Muenster and check out the room where it was signed, as well as the cages for the Anabaptist leaders still hanging from the cathedral steeple.)
To compare to today, the keyboard and vocal cords afford many more authors. History is not taking the "average" of philosophical thought but if it was I wish there were more writers centuries ago.
Why would that be surprising? Far more people are interested in learning than are capable of teaching and even more just want to be entertained. It seems that most people just do not have anything to say. When it costs money to print something, many thoughts without merit will not be printed.
For example, if this post cost me money to make, or quite frankly anything I post online cost money, it would not be made. I have no compelling reason to spend money on any of this. That's before taking into account if anyone wants to publish it.
> Gottlieb writes, “physical bodies are . . . not quite what they seem, but are only appearances somehow thrown up by monads” seems less extravagant in the light of contemporary string theory, which holds that everything that exists is the product of vibrating one-dimensional objects
Poor string theory used to justify such nonsense..
"[...]the loss of contact with the past. Depending on your point of view, this can be seen as either a disinheritance or an emancipation; much of modern politics is determined by which side you take on this question"
What becomes of the retail workers that will be put out of work by the likes of Amazon?
What becomes of the truck drivers that will be put out of work by autonomous trucks?
What becomes of the taxi drivers that are put out of work by autonomous taxis?
What becomes of service workers as processes and systems are improved to where you don't need people's assistance?
They will find new jobs ... is the cry. They will all be artists when we give them UBI ... is the cry. Yet no one wants to face the reality that there are no other jobs to be had in the numbers necessary to replace them or that there is no need for everyone to be artists and musicians with no incentives to regulate their lives.
We are heading towards calamity and the only answer that is given is "we'll figure something out" without realizing that this time, this situation is different. We can't take out another payday loan, we don't have anymore jewelry to pawn ... the consequences that were piled up are teetering. But look on the bright side, the new iPhone is coming out. That will solve our problems as we import more people with incompatible views just at a time when humanity is shifting toward needing and, really, valuing human inputs to economy on a negative exponential curve.