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> You could think of it as a sort of techno-myopia. Or, more accurately, you can think about it as a different set of priorities. For instance, someone might
by tablespoon 4y ago
> You could think of it as a sort of techno-myopia.
Or, more accurately, you can think about it as a different set of priorities.
For instance, someone might want to spend a ten billion dollars of tax money to survey all the ball pits across the world, and accurately count the number of balls in each at precisely the same moment, just to have that knowledge "for its own sake." Is it myopic not to care about that?
A lot of people meet some of their needs for mysticism and meaning with astronomy, but it's also perfectly valid not to use it that way, and instead see it as blurry pictures of places that aren't even theoretically possible to interact with in any way.
- rcme 4y agoThis is a pretty techno-myopic view.
- aintgonnatakeit 4y agoSo basically unimaginative townies
- tablespoon 4y agoWill you please support the ball-pit survey project? Anyone who doesn't is an "unimaginative townie."
- smcnally 4y agoFrom anigbrowl’s root comment > techniques developed for the collection and analysis of such vast datasets find their way back into more quotidian applications. Which is different from knowledge "for its own sake." Townies with and without imagination will get behind aspects of the techniques, data, products and byproducts that resonate with them. NASA has plenty of examples.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y agoPeople who fail to articulate the value of projects like jwst have been neglected by educational institutions and this is but one of the consequences we bear for their failures.
- tablespoon 4y ago> People who fail to articulate the value of projects like jwst have been neglected by educational institutions and this is but one of the consequences we bear for their failures. Not necessarily. For one, I'm not talking about being able to articulate some argument for its value, I'm talking about agreeing with that value. To put it bluntly, not sharing that value isn't some kind of personal failure, though a lot of people here seem to mistakenly treat it that way.