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A hugely influential 'experimental reference' throughout history were wars. Don't believe oxygen exists? Think explosions are magical voodoo? Think you get s
by foobarian 7y ago
A hugely influential 'experimental reference' throughout history were wars. Don't believe oxygen exists? Think explosions are magical voodoo? Think you get sick from bad air? Good luck when the musketeers come knocking bearing blankets. Executed your best mathematicians for proposing heretical models of the universe? Will have a hard time getting your artillery to be as accurate as your foe's.
I think this kind of natural selection on a societal scale begrudgingly kept people believing in science and engineering, but now that progress has kind of leveled off and/or migrated into realms which don't have direct consequences the rest of society is sadly unbound.
- mellow2020 7y ago> Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible. George Orwell