> Have I noticed all these things? You can cherrypick examples to fit whatever narrative you want. And you can also be deliberately avoidant of the things you

> Have I noticed all these things? You can cherrypick examples to fit whatever narrative you want. And you can also be deliberately avoidant of the things you don't want to think about. Yes, the space programs are doing okay, but the city streets are decaying and filled with crime. Yes, we know about the Higgs Boson, but we also have no savings, and an opioid epidemic. > If every decision is made to maximize self interest - what about the near eradication of polio and Guinea worm disease by the gates and Carter foundations? Good things can come from self-interested acts, nobody denies that, but you're thinking about this from within the paradigm of liberalism and so you're missing the critique, like someone who can't see the forest for the trees. In fact, that adage has never been more apt, because the issue with liberalism and with self-interest in general is that it boils down to a cult of the individual. Within the decaying liberal system, the individual is above all else. Only the experiences of individuals matter. "Communities" don't exist, except as categories; and the categories themselves only exist as ways of aggregating individuals for marketing purposes. We are all atomized, all recluses even when we are being social. > In the past few years we got CRISPR, an explosion in AI, the Higgs boson, gravitational waves, etc etc etc. All from academics. Each of those academics is motivated by many factors, some of them selfless, some of them pure curiosity, but ultimately in the case of every successful participant there is the selfish interest in being the person to publish the paper, getting that credit, getting a bit of career advancement, maybe even a bit of fame. Individuals. The result here is that the academics who do get some notoriety are those who are working on sexy projects, like the ones you named. CRISPR, very cool; funded with a lot of tax money; never likely to do a goddamned thing for 99.999% of the population who fronted the money for it, nor for their children, but hey, maybe 100 years from now we live in some gene-edited hellscape. Yay.