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I know the people behind statments like these are coming to it with extremly unintelligent and bad faith definitions and intentions, but the actual words are ac

I know the people behind statments like these are coming to it with extremly unintelligent and bad faith definitions and intentions, but the actual words are actually correct. If you had the option to delay humanity's discovery of atomic bombs to late 20th century or after, and therefore delay any substantial deep understanding of the atomic physics beneath, you would probably do it. If you had the atomic bomb, you probably wouldn't have shared it with Stalin's USSR or Hitler's Germany and, for that matter, Roosevelt's USA. If you had known in 1990 that the WWW would be used to spread propaganda and track dissidents, you would have probably liked to delay it till more security and decentralization is built in from the outset. This is a very well-discussed topic in philosophy of science and technology and good sci-fi. Fermi was probably talking about inevitable things, e.g. if climate is already worsening beyond human limits it's always good to know even if it's too late to do anything. But if knowledge (or our pursuit of it) would lead to new dangers, its perfecly reasonable to (try) to limit knowledge and its spread or pursuit. The dishonesty of the -ve IQ people behind attitudes like the criticized is that they see danger in everything and use moral panic to enforce views. If the actual "dangers" they are freaking out about are legitimate, they would have been justified to supress (non-violently) science and technology)

indymike 4y ago
> If you had the option to delay humanity's discovery of atomic bombs to late 20th century or after, and therefore delay any substantial deep understanding of the atomic physics beneath, you would probably do it. The alternative was 20-30 million more dead people via conventional means. There were many teams around the world working to build the bomb. One always wonders about the German team and why they were not first - and I"m glad they were not. > philosophy of science Not sure what that is, but do not want.
- bsagdiyev 4y ago
  > One always wonders about the German team and why they were not first - and I"m glad they were not. In regards to this, I believe they were on the right path but they were split in to three groups across Germany. They shared the radioactive material and because of this weren't able to achieve fission (?) due to not having enough material in one spot. Thank $diety for that. More info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_weapons_program https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_weapons_progr...
- EntropyIsAHoax 4y ago
  If you don't want philosophy of science, don't comment on an article about the philosophy of science? This isn't some fringe topic for "woke" people, philosophy is fundamental to science and has been from the beginning. It's questions from everything like "what even counts as science" to scientific ethics, to "what is the purpose of science". It's not always about ethics, in fact the 20th century philosophy of science debates were dominated by more practical topics like realism vs instrumentalism. You cannot just dismiss something you've never heard of and have no idea about
- FabHK 4y ago
  Agreed on the first half of your comment. Philosophy of science, however, is a well established, important, and fascinating field. Keywords: Positivists/Viennese circle, Karl Popper and falsification, Feyerabend and Against Method, Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, W. V. Quine and the Two Dogmas of Empiricism, the Science Wars.
  - kbrkbr 4y ago
    To add to that: the new experimentalists, Mayo‘s Error statistics and the rise of Bayesianism
    - FabHK 4y ago
      Thanks for the Mayo recommendation. I am currently going through her Statistical Inference as Severe Testing, and find it very tiring. So far very little is about actual statistics and the meat of disputes, but rather about meta questions and the he-said, she-said of those disputes. Maybe the prior book Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge is a better exposition of the ideas?
      - kbrkbr 4y ago
        I got mich out of it, but only on the meta level also. Afair she never goes into technical detail of e.g. Neyman Pearson, but covers things like how to overcome the Quine-Duhem-problem with statistics, or how to stengthen Popper’s theory. But on that level I learned a lot, and it trickles down to what is important in actual experimental design and why.
  - Nasrudith 4y ago
    I don't blame them for not wanting what appears to be a mix of philosophy into science though - in the same way it is understandable that people who never knew what suffrage was would oppose women's suffrage because they think it involves torment. Ignorant but understandable. Unfortunately, philosophy has a long history of actively defining itself as willfully not referencing reality for validation. Not wanting that mixed with science is understandable even if rooted in ignorance.
dh2022 4y ago
Knowledge itself is inevitable. You cannot control every single person's desire to know more and advance knowledge. I lived in 1980's Romania and the state tried everything it could to suppress knowledge about the outside world. People still found out things they were not supposed to know about. (An ironic example - the Romanian religion scholar Mircea Eliade died in exile during the 1980s. The Romanian state did not mention anything... and the next morning everyone was talking in the bus and at my high school. We were not even supposed to know this person existed...) I don't know if you realize, but you are cherry picking the subjects which we can talk about (climate change) versus the subject which we cannot talk about (nuclear power, WWW).
scythe 4y ago
>If you had the option to delay humanity's discovery of atomic bombs Humanity's discovery of atomic bombs wasn't published, though. It was demonstrated in terrifying fashion when they were first used. Worse, the first atomic bomb project was actually carried out by Nazi Germany, not the United States, and might have succeeded if not for sabotage campaigns and the collapse of the German economy. And weapons research is a well-known risk since the invention of the arquebus around 1400, when early gun manufacturers jealously guarded their secrets with state encouragement. It's true that we avoid research into novel biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, with a possible fourth "computational" coming into focus, but we do this by avoiding the research itself, wherein the ends are obvious from the beginning, not refusing to publish a finding because you don't like what it said.
midoridensha 4y ago
>Fermi was probably talking about inevitable things, e.g. if climate is already worsening beyond human limits it's always good to know even if it's too late to do anything. But if knowledge (or our pursuit of it) would lead to new dangers, its perfecly reasonable to (try) to limit knowledge and its spread or pursuit. Yes, it's like teaching small children how to make poisons and bombs. It's really much better that children be kept ignorant of such things: this knowledge isn't going to help them, or the world, it's only going to cause problems. Adult humans really aren't any better; they're just bigger children.
- josefx 4y ago
  Why would I need to make bombs when I could just collect the remains of the new years celebration from the road every first January? My parents made sure we had oversight and knew what we were dealing with even if it was only the fun small stuff (that could still burn your face off). > It's really much better that children be kept ignorant of such things: this knowledge isn't going to help them, or the world, it's only going to cause problems. Adult humans really aren't any better; they're just bigger children. Yeah, because accidentally mixing cleaning supplies in a way that creates a toxic gas cloud is really better than knowing that common household items can kill you if you aren't careful. Or getting monoxide poisoning because no one told you that using gas grills inside can kill. Yeah, keep the kids ignorant of dangerous aspects of the world. If they are lucky they will die well before they have to navigate the world on their own.
Beltalowda 4y ago
On the other hand, nuclear physics is also used for things like treating cancer. In that sense it's the perfect analogy: you don't really know where your research will end up. Did Rutherford split the atom to cure cancer? No, of course not. Most (or all?) people working on particle physics in the early 20th century would have been quite surprised to learn it would be used as such down the line. > If you had the atomic bomb, you probably wouldn't have shared it with Stalin's USSR or Hitler's Germany and, for that matter, Roosevelt's USA If I felt that it was plausible that the genocidal regimes of the USSR or Nazi Germany could have developed such a bomb (which was the case): yes, I absolutely would have shared it with the US.
- dekhn 4y ago
  As a counterexample, physicists did use particle physics for medical purposes very early on- E.O. Lawrence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Lawrence#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Lawrence#Reception was using it for cancer treatments of various kinds in the 30s.
mongol 4y ago
> If you had known in 1990 that the WWW would be used to spread propaganda and track dissidents, you would have probably liked to delay it till more security and decentralization is built in from the outset The premise is interesting, but at least decentralization was really there at the outset. It is just that market forces shrinked it. I honestly don't know what would have been the best medicine to prevent this. During the 90s I felt there was a larger emphasis on protocols, that almost disappeared during the 00's.
paganel 4y ago
> e.g. if climate is already worsening beyond human limits it's always good to know even Climate wouldn't have been worsened as much as it did without the technological advances provided by science. It's really, really difficult to cut the Amazonian forrest down using just axes and horse-drawn carts, but once you got mechanised stuff (with the help of science) then it becomes exponentially easier to do it (think just how much science went into the fabrication of bitumen/asphalt, once you have bitumen roads going into and out of the Amazon things get exponentially easier for those who are in the business of cutting trees in there). Which is to say that I fail to understand how come some of us still believe science and technology can get us out of this mess when it was science and technology that brought us here. To be clear, I also fully acknowledge that without science and technology our lives would have been way harder, for most of us life wouldn't have been possible at all: without science we would have had no green revolution, which means we still would have had famines around the world, never mind that the green revolution caused a lot of environment-related nasty things, so it's not always black and white.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nomel 4y ago
  > how come some of us still believe science and technology can get us out of this mess when it was science and technology that brought us here. I can't understand the logic here. The progress of science isn't somehow dead. The problem is our priorities. For an example, the US just sent $50 billion to Ukraine. Imagine what 50, $1,000,000,000 science grants could accomplish.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    > For an example, the US just sent $50 billion to Ukraine. Imagine what 50, $1,000,000,000 science grants could accomplish. Not sure your example is clearly bad priorities. (Though generally I think the US wastes too much on the military.) What's the worst case scenario when the money is defending Ukraine instead of science? Science funding won't as help much if there's an unchecked bully marching across Europe.
colordrops 4y ago
The only reason we know that atomic physics leads to mass destruction is because we followed through with the R&D. We only know that the web is used to spread propaganda and track dissidents because we developed it so far for these problems to develop. You can't block technology based on understandings of consequences that you dont gain until the technology matures. We can't see the future.
dariosalvi78 4y ago
there is a difference between science, as in "understanding nature" and technology, which is about exploiting that knowledge for building something useful. Knowing everything about the atom is harmless, using that knowledge to build an horrendous weapon is evil. Also, knowing everything about the atom does not affect our behavior, except through technology. Social sciences are more problematic though because they are about us, as part of nature sure, but in the social context we live, which can be affected by what we know about it. So proper considerations must be made when designing the research questions and methods, and when discussing the results.
edgyquant 4y ago
The only bad faith actor reaching unintelligent definitions here is the one projecting them unto others. Hiding this knowledge from the world doesn’t make it not exist. It just makes people less prepared for when malicious actors use it against them. You promote ignorance as a solution to technical problems. I don’t.
- Banana699 4y ago
  Read what I wrote again, slowly this time, spelling each word.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    See what I mean
    - Banana699 4y ago
      You don't have a meaningful point to see.

indymike 4y ago

> If you had the option to delay humanity's discovery of atomic bombs to late 20th century or after, and therefore delay any substantial deep understanding of the atomic physics beneath, you would probably do it. The alternative was 20-30 million more dead people via conventional means. There were many teams around the world working to build the bomb. One always wonders about the German team and why they were not first - and I"m glad they were not. > philosophy of science Not sure what that is, but do not want.

bsagdiyev 4y ago
> One always wonders about the German team and why they were not first - and I"m glad they were not. In regards to this, I believe they were on the right path but they were split in to three groups across Germany. They shared the radioactive material and because of this weren't able to achieve fission (?) due to not having enough material in one spot. Thank $diety for that. More info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_weapons_program https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_weapons_progr...
EntropyIsAHoax 4y ago
If you don't want philosophy of science, don't comment on an article about the philosophy of science? This isn't some fringe topic for "woke" people, philosophy is fundamental to science and has been from the beginning. It's questions from everything like "what even counts as science" to scientific ethics, to "what is the purpose of science". It's not always about ethics, in fact the 20th century philosophy of science debates were dominated by more practical topics like realism vs instrumentalism. You cannot just dismiss something you've never heard of and have no idea about
FabHK 4y ago
Agreed on the first half of your comment. Philosophy of science, however, is a well established, important, and fascinating field. Keywords: Positivists/Viennese circle, Karl Popper and falsification, Feyerabend and Against Method, Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, W. V. Quine and the Two Dogmas of Empiricism, the Science Wars.
- kbrkbr 4y ago
  To add to that: the new experimentalists, Mayo‘s Error statistics and the rise of Bayesianism
  - FabHK 4y ago
    Thanks for the Mayo recommendation. I am currently going through her Statistical Inference as Severe Testing, and find it very tiring. So far very little is about actual statistics and the meat of disputes, but rather about meta questions and the he-said, she-said of those disputes. Maybe the prior book Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge is a better exposition of the ideas?
    - kbrkbr 4y ago
      I got mich out of it, but only on the meta level also. Afair she never goes into technical detail of e.g. Neyman Pearson, but covers things like how to overcome the Quine-Duhem-problem with statistics, or how to stengthen Popper’s theory. But on that level I learned a lot, and it trickles down to what is important in actual experimental design and why.
- Nasrudith 4y ago
  I don't blame them for not wanting what appears to be a mix of philosophy into science though - in the same way it is understandable that people who never knew what suffrage was would oppose women's suffrage because they think it involves torment. Ignorant but understandable. Unfortunately, philosophy has a long history of actively defining itself as willfully not referencing reality for validation. Not wanting that mixed with science is understandable even if rooted in ignorance.

dh2022 4y ago

Knowledge itself is inevitable. You cannot control every single person's desire to know more and advance knowledge. I lived in 1980's Romania and the state tried everything it could to suppress knowledge about the outside world. People still found out things they were not supposed to know about. (An ironic example - the Romanian religion scholar Mircea Eliade died in exile during the 1980s. The Romanian state did not mention anything... and the next morning everyone was talking in the bus and at my high school. We were not even supposed to know this person existed...) I don't know if you realize, but you are cherry picking the subjects which we can talk about (climate change) versus the subject which we cannot talk about (nuclear power, WWW).

scythe 4y ago

>If you had the option to delay humanity's discovery of atomic bombs Humanity's discovery of atomic bombs wasn't published, though. It was demonstrated in terrifying fashion when they were first used. Worse, the first atomic bomb project was actually carried out by Nazi Germany, not the United States, and might have succeeded if not for sabotage campaigns and the collapse of the German economy. And weapons research is a well-known risk since the invention of the arquebus around 1400, when early gun manufacturers jealously guarded their secrets with state encouragement. It's true that we avoid research into novel biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, with a possible fourth "computational" coming into focus, but we do this by avoiding the research itself, wherein the ends are obvious from the beginning, not refusing to publish a finding because you don't like what it said.

midoridensha 4y ago

>Fermi was probably talking about inevitable things, e.g. if climate is already worsening beyond human limits it's always good to know even if it's too late to do anything. But if knowledge (or our pursuit of it) would lead to new dangers, its perfecly reasonable to (try) to limit knowledge and its spread or pursuit. Yes, it's like teaching small children how to make poisons and bombs. It's really much better that children be kept ignorant of such things: this knowledge isn't going to help them, or the world, it's only going to cause problems. Adult humans really aren't any better; they're just bigger children.

josefx 4y ago
Why would I need to make bombs when I could just collect the remains of the new years celebration from the road every first January? My parents made sure we had oversight and knew what we were dealing with even if it was only the fun small stuff (that could still burn your face off). > It's really much better that children be kept ignorant of such things: this knowledge isn't going to help them, or the world, it's only going to cause problems. Adult humans really aren't any better; they're just bigger children. Yeah, because accidentally mixing cleaning supplies in a way that creates a toxic gas cloud is really better than knowing that common household items can kill you if you aren't careful. Or getting monoxide poisoning because no one told you that using gas grills inside can kill. Yeah, keep the kids ignorant of dangerous aspects of the world. If they are lucky they will die well before they have to navigate the world on their own.

Beltalowda 4y ago

On the other hand, nuclear physics is also used for things like treating cancer. In that sense it's the perfect analogy: you don't really know where your research will end up. Did Rutherford split the atom to cure cancer? No, of course not. Most (or all?) people working on particle physics in the early 20th century would have been quite surprised to learn it would be used as such down the line. > If you had the atomic bomb, you probably wouldn't have shared it with Stalin's USSR or Hitler's Germany and, for that matter, Roosevelt's USA If I felt that it was plausible that the genocidal regimes of the USSR or Nazi Germany could have developed such a bomb (which was the case): yes, I absolutely would have shared it with the US.

dekhn 4y ago
As a counterexample, physicists did use particle physics for medical purposes very early on- E.O. Lawrence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Lawrence#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Lawrence#Reception was using it for cancer treatments of various kinds in the 30s.

mongol 4y ago

> If you had known in 1990 that the WWW would be used to spread propaganda and track dissidents, you would have probably liked to delay it till more security and decentralization is built in from the outset The premise is interesting, but at least decentralization was really there at the outset. It is just that market forces shrinked it. I honestly don't know what would have been the best medicine to prevent this. During the 90s I felt there was a larger emphasis on protocols, that almost disappeared during the 00's.

paganel 4y ago

> e.g. if climate is already worsening beyond human limits it's always good to know even Climate wouldn't have been worsened as much as it did without the technological advances provided by science. It's really, really difficult to cut the Amazonian forrest down using just axes and horse-drawn carts, but once you got mechanised stuff (with the help of science) then it becomes exponentially easier to do it (think just how much science went into the fabrication of bitumen/asphalt, once you have bitumen roads going into and out of the Amazon things get exponentially easier for those who are in the business of cutting trees in there). Which is to say that I fail to understand how come some of us still believe science and technology can get us out of this mess when it was science and technology that brought us here. To be clear, I also fully acknowledge that without science and technology our lives would have been way harder, for most of us life wouldn't have been possible at all: without science we would have had no green revolution, which means we still would have had famines around the world, never mind that the green revolution caused a lot of environment-related nasty things, so it's not always black and white.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nomel 4y ago
> how come some of us still believe science and technology can get us out of this mess when it was science and technology that brought us here. I can't understand the logic here. The progress of science isn't somehow dead. The problem is our priorities. For an example, the US just sent $50 billion to Ukraine. Imagine what 50, $1,000,000,000 science grants could accomplish.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  > For an example, the US just sent $50 billion to Ukraine. Imagine what 50, $1,000,000,000 science grants could accomplish. Not sure your example is clearly bad priorities. (Though generally I think the US wastes too much on the military.) What's the worst case scenario when the money is defending Ukraine instead of science? Science funding won't as help much if there's an unchecked bully marching across Europe.

colordrops 4y ago

The only reason we know that atomic physics leads to mass destruction is because we followed through with the R&D. We only know that the web is used to spread propaganda and track dissidents because we developed it so far for these problems to develop. You can't block technology based on understandings of consequences that you dont gain until the technology matures. We can't see the future.

dariosalvi78 4y ago

there is a difference between science, as in "understanding nature" and technology, which is about exploiting that knowledge for building something useful. Knowing everything about the atom is harmless, using that knowledge to build an horrendous weapon is evil. Also, knowing everything about the atom does not affect our behavior, except through technology. Social sciences are more problematic though because they are about us, as part of nature sure, but in the social context we live, which can be affected by what we know about it. So proper considerations must be made when designing the research questions and methods, and when discussing the results.

edgyquant 4y ago

The only bad faith actor reaching unintelligent definitions here is the one projecting them unto others. Hiding this knowledge from the world doesn’t make it not exist. It just makes people less prepared for when malicious actors use it against them. You promote ignorance as a solution to technical problems. I don’t.

Banana699 4y ago
Read what I wrote again, slowly this time, spelling each word.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  See what I mean
  - Banana699 4y ago
    You don't have a meaningful point to see.