Taleb Again
Nicholas Taleb ignited a lot of
thinking within me. He talks about the
problem of induction. He speaks of being
fooled by randomness. He talks of travel
and speaking many languages. He talks
about the false history of science and technology when in fact this is s
history of tinkering more in line with engineering than science.
Thomas Nagel
I also downloaded the audio book
from Thomas Nagel. He is a guy who gets the problem of
materialism and understands clearly the problem of consciousness. Science is dead. The Avant Garde movement in intellect right
now is in Philosophy
of Mind. There is nothing new from
science since the advent of Quantum Mechanics.
That was almost 80 years ago.
And, given some recent research, it is doubtful that science ever
contributed anything useful to modernity outside of stealing ideas from
engineers and inventors and making them their own.
If Science is Nonsense, how to we explain…?
What caused the enormous
technical explosion in the last 150 years if it is not science? Well we had scientific thinking for hundreds
of years, with nothing to show for it.
What caused the great technical explosion was humans discovering a very
compact form of energy and exploiting it: coal, diesel, gasoline, and heating
oil. The reason we can build large
systems and get components for high technology equipment is because we have a
fast transportation system based upon fossil fuels that gets things to a
destination faster by an order of magnitude than previous generations 150 years
ago. It took about 6 weeks to cross the
Atlantic in the times of Samuel Champlain. Now, we can cross the same ocean in 7 hours
with a standard Boeing jet,
and in 3 hours with a Concorde. Materials for the manufacturing of goods can
be brought together very fast. We ship
food to remote areas whereas before we had a risk of spoilage and mostly had to
rely on local supply – very local supply.
The most important set of “laws of physics” are Maxwell’s Equations. Why were they developed? We finally had a source of energy – coal and
steam – and we wanted to transport this energy across large distances using
electricity. Engineers figured all this
out, and scientists swooped in and took the credit in the history books.
A New Civilization
What causes advances? Experimentation. Tinkering.
It is those with the Fortitude (balls) to take risks and try new
things. These tinkerers will use
everything at their disposal to mix things up and come up with something
new.
Freddy Martini
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