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> [...] most of the really great discoveries which had ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind had been made by men and women who were driven not by the d

by zvmaz 3y ago

> [...] most of the really great discoveries which had ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind had been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity. > "Curiosity?" asked Mr. Eastman. "Yes," I replied, "curiosity, which mayor may not eventuate in something useful, is probably the outstanding characteristic of modern thinking. It is not new. It goes back to Galileo, Bacon, and to Sir Isaac Newton, and it must be absolutely unhampered. "Curiosity" goes back to a few centuries ago, and in Europe? Short-sighted and eurocentric.

PedroBatista 3y ago
Curious if you could build a time machine, go back to 1939 and give them a earful.
oh_sigh 3y ago
Shameful that this man living 100 years ago isn't as progressive as I am. He's saying it goes at least that far back, not that Francis bacon invented curiosity.
- yterdy 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - oh_sigh 3y ago
    What civilization isn't subject to narcissism?
    - networkchad 3y ago
      [dead]
    - yterdy 3y ago
      What happens to a civilization that resolves not to be?
  - kiba 3y ago
    It would also be incorrect to say that we're not sophisticated or developed. That's just false humility.
    - yterdy 3y ago
      We seem to be quite advanced wrt edge cases that the wealthy and influential are concerned with. In the interests of a good humbling, however, a short list of issues that we haven't eradicated: >Homelessness >Hunger >Slavery >Genocide As to our level of sophistication, also, a short list of scams that we've fallen for in living memory that have lead to civilization-level crisis: >A bunch of guys learn how to fly planes so that they can crash them into buildings in order to draw us into a war. >The aforementioned war. >Banks sell people loans designed to default, sell insurance on those loans, get bailed out when the loans default and insurance is due on the failing loans. >Governments promise that sort of shutting down in-person economic activity for 2 weeks will stop a disease with an infectiousness period of ~3 weeks that relies on person-to-person contact, while helping businesses that will benefit from an extended pandemic set up related operations >Something something Eurozone austerity And not in living memory, but rhyming nicely: >A bunch of guys shoot a small-time royal in order to draw us into a war. >The aforementioned war.
      - debok 3y ago
        >Homelessness >Hunger >Slavery >Genocide All are greatly reduced in the last 100-150 years. Globally. In large part thanks to "Western" contributions to science. The rest are some very developed and sophisticated atrocities. Being developed and sophisticated doesn't make people good, it just makes their evil deeds more sophisticated and developed. Just to qualify: I'm not trying to promote the noble savage myth here either. I'm trying to say that the simplicity/sophistication scale is orthogonal to the good/evil scale.
        kiba 3y ago
        We basically licked the problem for food production but the issue is distribution. We now have specific terms for genocide, and varying amount of labor rights, such as non-free versus free labor, characterizing levels of deception, coercion, and force. Homelessness is a political problem that has no business of existing, because affordable housing will have huge benefit for everyone.
  - stodor89 3y ago
    Western (or any other) civilization has gotten over insecure narcissism? What have I missed again?!
    - yterdy 3y ago
      We have made targeted and limited progress, dragged kicking and screaming by the people for whom that progress was a matter of life/death and dignity/destitution.
      - stodor89 3y ago
        Ok, now that I can agree with. Let's hope that we live to see the day when showing vulnerability stops being perceived as being weak.
tnel77 3y ago
This seems like one of those examples of looking for a reason to be mad. They were hardly giving credit to Europeans for inventing curiosity.
felipeerias 3y ago
It is basically a teleological and short-sighted narrative: everybody was living in darkness until a handful of people plucked Enlightenment out of thin air. My point is not to disparage the contributions of those great scientists, but rather that they were working on a specific cultural and technological context, leveraging advances that others before them had taken centuries to develop. It is only because we usually take all that previous knowledge for granted that the contributions of early modern scientists seem to have come out of nowhere.
zyklu5 3y ago
No amount of 'progressive' re-writing of history or (ironically) whiggish re-interpretations of what some non-western cultures (including mine) did will change the fact that science as we understand it began in Europe around the early modern period and it had the most revolutionary effect on the the world. This is why the oft quoted trivia that Cleopatra is closer to us than to Imhotep is so striking. Having said that, there's an excellent scholarly work of revisionist history written by Lucio Russo called the Forgotten Revolution that I can recommend for some pleasuraeble outrage.
- zvmaz 3y ago
  You are reading too much into my comment, as others have done. "Curiosity" (note "curiosity", not science) does not go back to Newton, Bacon, Galileo. It's a stupid and shortsighted statement by the author. No need to read scientific counter-historiographies, be a post-modern "social constructivist" about reason and science, or a "progressive" cultural relativist to see that this statement is just stupid. I added that it's eurocentric because that's what it felt when I read it (and it probably is, since even non-human animals are probably curious, too).
lqet 3y ago
There is another source of really great discoveries: goal-driven research which fails to achieve its predefined goals, but discovers something completely unrelated which turns out to be useful. Anyone who worked in research knows that this is the usual way of discovery. Few people complete a PhD on the topic they originally aimed for.

by zvmaz 3y ago

PedroBatista 3y ago

Curious if you could build a time machine, go back to 1939 and give them a earful.

oh_sigh 3y ago

Shameful that this man living 100 years ago isn't as progressive as I am. He's saying it goes at least that far back, not that Francis bacon invented curiosity.

yterdy 3y ago
[flagged]
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  What civilization isn't subject to narcissism?
  - networkchad 3y ago
    [dead]
  - yterdy 3y ago
    What happens to a civilization that resolves not to be?
- kiba 3y ago
  It would also be incorrect to say that we're not sophisticated or developed. That's just false humility.
  - yterdy 3y ago
    We seem to be quite advanced wrt edge cases that the wealthy and influential are concerned with. In the interests of a good humbling, however, a short list of issues that we haven't eradicated: >Homelessness >Hunger >Slavery >Genocide As to our level of sophistication, also, a short list of scams that we've fallen for in living memory that have lead to civilization-level crisis: >A bunch of guys learn how to fly planes so that they can crash them into buildings in order to draw us into a war. >The aforementioned war. >Banks sell people loans designed to default, sell insurance on those loans, get bailed out when the loans default and insurance is due on the failing loans. >Governments promise that sort of shutting down in-person economic activity for 2 weeks will stop a disease with an infectiousness period of ~3 weeks that relies on person-to-person contact, while helping businesses that will benefit from an extended pandemic set up related operations >Something something Eurozone austerity And not in living memory, but rhyming nicely: >A bunch of guys shoot a small-time royal in order to draw us into a war. >The aforementioned war.
    - debok 3y ago
      >Homelessness >Hunger >Slavery >Genocide All are greatly reduced in the last 100-150 years. Globally. In large part thanks to "Western" contributions to science. The rest are some very developed and sophisticated atrocities. Being developed and sophisticated doesn't make people good, it just makes their evil deeds more sophisticated and developed. Just to qualify: I'm not trying to promote the noble savage myth here either. I'm trying to say that the simplicity/sophistication scale is orthogonal to the good/evil scale.
      - kiba 3y ago
        We basically licked the problem for food production but the issue is distribution. We now have specific terms for genocide, and varying amount of labor rights, such as non-free versus free labor, characterizing levels of deception, coercion, and force. Homelessness is a political problem that has no business of existing, because affordable housing will have huge benefit for everyone.
- stodor89 3y ago
  Western (or any other) civilization has gotten over insecure narcissism? What have I missed again?!
  - yterdy 3y ago
    We have made targeted and limited progress, dragged kicking and screaming by the people for whom that progress was a matter of life/death and dignity/destitution.
    - stodor89 3y ago
      Ok, now that I can agree with. Let's hope that we live to see the day when showing vulnerability stops being perceived as being weak.

tnel77 3y ago

This seems like one of those examples of looking for a reason to be mad. They were hardly giving credit to Europeans for inventing curiosity.

felipeerias 3y ago

It is basically a teleological and short-sighted narrative: everybody was living in darkness until a handful of people plucked Enlightenment out of thin air. My point is not to disparage the contributions of those great scientists, but rather that they were working on a specific cultural and technological context, leveraging advances that others before them had taken centuries to develop. It is only because we usually take all that previous knowledge for granted that the contributions of early modern scientists seem to have come out of nowhere.

zyklu5 3y ago

No amount of 'progressive' re-writing of history or (ironically) whiggish re-interpretations of what some non-western cultures (including mine) did will change the fact that science as we understand it began in Europe around the early modern period and it had the most revolutionary effect on the the world. This is why the oft quoted trivia that Cleopatra is closer to us than to Imhotep is so striking. Having said that, there's an excellent scholarly work of revisionist history written by Lucio Russo called the Forgotten Revolution that I can recommend for some pleasuraeble outrage.

zvmaz 3y ago
You are reading too much into my comment, as others have done. "Curiosity" (note "curiosity", not science) does not go back to Newton, Bacon, Galileo. It's a stupid and shortsighted statement by the author. No need to read scientific counter-historiographies, be a post-modern "social constructivist" about reason and science, or a "progressive" cultural relativist to see that this statement is just stupid. I added that it's eurocentric because that's what it felt when I read it (and it probably is, since even non-human animals are probably curious, too).

lqet 3y ago

There is another source of really great discoveries: goal-driven research which fails to achieve its predefined goals, but discovers something completely unrelated which turns out to be useful. Anyone who worked in research knows that this is the usual way of discovery. Few people complete a PhD on the topic they originally aimed for.