The paradox of living in this day and age is witnessing astonishing advances in science, while enduring the increasing levels of anti-intellectualism that pervades society like a cancer.
Another aspect is that a lot of intellectualism is really activism with "intellectuals" trying to impede other people's lives for the sake of some arrogant moral purpose.
I'm not sure that most people are really all that comfortable. They're a lot more distracted though certainly.
I think there are a lot of different reasons people today have a problem with science and technology. Some are scared of it. Some just don't trust it, which can be entirely fair depending on the degree/situation. Some see that the regulations, oversight, and accountability we expect and depend on to keep us safe aren't working like they used to or like we thought they would.
Mostly I think people see not only what we've gained, but also what we've lost and could/should have again. Reliable and repairable products that weren't designed to exploit and work against the interests of the person who paid for them for just one example. We've had many trade offs, where they've improved things in some areas while making them worse in others. It hasn't always worked out in our favor. It's also frustrating when you see that amazing things are now possible, but we can't have them because of politics, or greed, or fear of change.
Personally, I hope people never stop wanting and expecting better from science and technology. Especially in those cases where what previous generations had was better than what we're expected to accept today or where we've created problems previous generations never had to put up with.
We often forget that many people have been genuinely negatively affected by technology or science or know someone who has. Let's not forget that many technological and medical advances have come at a real human cost. People have been poisoned by harmful chemicals either during their occupation or because an entire community has been exposed. Entire communities have been devastated by the opioid epidemic which the medical community is directly responsible for. Not to mention the countless people who have lost their jobs or will lose them soon to automation.
There are people with genuine concerns about the way science and technology are heading and pretending anyone skeptical of modern science is simply uneducated or stupid is extremely counter-productive.
Between corporations being able to buy whatever research they think will get them a favorable headline, peer reviewed journals accepting any paper if you pay them to publish it (this one being a personal favorite https://www.sciencealert.com/a-neuroscientist-just-tricked-4...), the reproducibility crisis more generally, the total lack of any meaningful consequences when companies are caught outright knowingly poisoning people or selling dangerous drugs, it's really getting harder to explain to people at the fringes like antivaxxers why they should have more faith in the data we have and on the systems put in place to protect them.
If the people aren't held accountable for causing harm and scientists don't do a much better job self-policing I think the situation is only going to get much worse. Even if things do change it will likely take generations to undo the damage already done.
I think people in wealthy countries like the USA are very physically comfortable, but also quite unhappy- possibly much more unhappy day to day than they were historically when there was a lot more disease and discomfort- and a lot of that is directly a result of excess comfort combined with a life without any real difficulty, challenge, or sense of meaningful purpose. We feel like we want comfort, but it's mostly harmful to us. Humans just aren't built to be "house pets." People need a sense of purpose, of overcoming difficult challenge, and an ability to directly see positive results from their efforts. The challenges need to be both mental, and physical.
What we have now is lots of empty entertainment, stupor inducing comfort, and lots of sedentary careers that feel pointless, where nobody even notices the difference if you work hard or not. More and more people are burned out at work, and socially isolated.
I don't think the answer is to go "backwards" and lose all of our progress in treating disease, making labor easier, etc. but in a cultural and personal change where we find some new meaning and challenges, to grow even more. Personally, I've found this through being a scientist where I can work on hard problems, as well as doing physically demanding and uncomfortable hobbies like weight training, fasting, and cold water swimming.
I've noticed that the more intentional physical discomfort I experience, e.g. from cold, the more content I feel, and the less I crave comfort, or other addictive things like social media and overeating.
OK, I’ll bite -examples?
More recently some people are unenthusiastic about promoting trans stuff and affirmative action.
Despite the far-right being on the rise as well as everywhere in Europe, they still have a harder time here, which I think is mostly due to these two education policies.
Federally, the AfD is around 15-18% [1], which is still way too high in my opinion, but they're far from any chance to gain relevant influence on politics. Statewide is a different beast, sadly in Eastern Germany (the equivalent of the "flyover states" in the US) they're almost at the 33% required to block major legislation [2]. I'm honestly not sure how to combat that any more, outside of a (well deserved, given e.g Höcke directly using banned NS slogans) ban on the party.
Perhaps by getting rid of these haughty, and one simply has to say: typisch-Wessi notions of the new Länder as being "flyover territory". Which is part of what drives people to vote for AfD in the first place. As if the former West Germany doesn't have its own stereotypically maligned areas as well.
Trip to a holocaust museum is nice and all, but it probably fails at making people understand the problem. They'll kind of nod that yeah, Nazis were bad but then happily go and blame others for their bad decisions and vote for populists with easy solutions.
Somehow half of Germany thinks Russia is OK, because they "saved Europe", hammer and sickle symbols are still not treated the same as swastikas and, of course, the main outcome of the kind of education you mention is that Germany is basically freeloading wrt defense and very unwilling to do the only reasonable thing, i.e. help prevent another genocide as it unfolds in Europe.
Hopefully something has changed in the last 2 years, but the preceding decade, spending over 100 million euros daily on Russian natural gas is hard to undo. And that's with pre-war historical minimum prices. Since you all didn't get the memo that you need to stop buying Russian stuff until NS2 got blown up, the flow of money for natural gas from Germany to Russia in 2022 and 2023 is likely several times the pre-war annual number.
And then you have people saying shit like "we have spent enough on Ukraine" or "Ukrainian refugees are coming because of our social safety net", not even from AfD politicians (I think some CDU idiot, lol). Yeah sure, but you gave 100x the money to Russia, who of course spent it on weapons because they don't give two fucks about their own people.
Being sorry about things from the last century, while failing completely to judge the situation in the present doesn't really help. Not to mention Poland still didn't get the war reparations for WW2 last I checked. They probably don't want to shake the boat too much and just hope Germany will at least stop being useless.
Would you have called intellectual abolitionists people trying to impede other people's lives for some arrogant moral purpose?
Like, I get it, nobody likes a woke-scold, but it is still weird to complain about the idea that an intellectual who comes to a moral understanding might want to act on that new understanding/change the world/convince others.
I'm sure we can at least make some judgements about whether a set of morals is better or worse than another, but all the obvious cases are already solved and people strongly disagree on the ambiguous ones where they really have no idea.
One big moral concept is individual freedom vs long term survival of the system of social order they belong to. You can't have individual freedom without a society to protect it but you can't sustain that society without restricting people's freedoms (eg. military conscription). It's popular today in the west to value the individual over the future of their society, but a lot of history and the rest of the world is the opposite. People from these two camps seem to be blind to the weaknesses of these underlying assumptions, so they end up with moral ideas that seem totally immoral to each other.
> "all the obvious cases are already solved"
This seems highly optimistic.
I can't imagine having to watch a loved one slowly die knowing that you are surrounded by doctors who could save them if you only had the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars they demand or if you'd been living in basically any other developed nation on Earth.
Healthcare and medicine needs overhauling but it's maddening watching these downstream foreign benefactors damn the golden goose they'd be fucked without.
For the world's richest people you couldn't do better than to be a patient in America. For most Americans though, the US healthcare system is failing them. America does worse compared to other nations in some very basic measures like having a lower average life expectancy, a higher infant morality rate, more obesity and congestive heart failure and more hospital/pharmacy screw ups. A child or teenager in the US is less likely to live to adulthood compared to those in other developed countries. It's not any better when it comes to mental health either. The US is one of the worst nations when it comes to mental health outcomes and suicide and drug related deaths are higher in the US. Over thirty percent of the US population has been forced to put off getting the care they need due to the cost and preventative care is usually the first thing that people cut back on leading to bigger problems that could have been avoided entirely.
- The obesity and congestive heart failure issues is a function of poor dietary choices most Americans make (choosing fast/process food over cooking/making healthy foods), and not a function of healthcare access
Clearly having health insurance isn't enough to make healthcare affordable or prevent patient outcomes from being worse for Americans than patients in other nations.
> The obesity and congestive heart failure issues is a function of poor dietary choices
I also suspect that obesity and congestive heart failure issues are heavily influenced by diet, although I think that "choices" might be misleading here and that being unable to afford basic and preventative healthcare likely does have a major impact in healthcare outcomes even when the problems come from obesity and heart failure.
It's certainly not as if people in other nations don't also enjoy ultra-processed foods or are any less fond of sugar, fat, and salt. They just often have better access to healthier foods, and more stringent regulations concerning what companies are and aren't allowed to put in foods, what they are allowed to advertise, and how they are sold.
There is a huge difference between the number of people in the US who have little to no access to healthy foods when compared to those in other developed nations. Sometimes it's physical access (food deserts) and sometimes it's a matter of costs, but I don't think there's anything inherent to Americans that forces them to make bad choices. I'm guessing that instead Americans tend to have less choice and fewer opportunities for healthy foods in the first place, while having unhealthy ultra-processed foods that would be banned in other countries readily available, easily affordable, and heavily advertised to them.
On top of that, the healthiest foods are among the cheapest foods you can buy. Milk, oatmeal, potatoes, rice, macaroni, chicken are all cheap compared to most foods you can get. This stuff is available almost everywhere.
>but I don't think there's anything inherent to Americans that forces them to make bad choices.
It's partly cultural. But this isn't a uniquely American problem. It's just worse in the US. 72% of Americans are obese or overweight.
On top of that there was a recent study that found that BMR has decreased in the last ~30 years. Among men it was even up to 7%. That's a big enough difference to take someone from barely overweight to obese over a lifetime. But this is only a single study so far.
I'd argue that unhealthy food can cause a person to eat more. See for example https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(19)...
> On top of that, the healthiest foods are among the cheapest foods you can buy.
The usual argument here calls out "bulk beans and rice" instead of potatoes and chicken, but in both cases you aren't going to find that in a gas station or convince store which for many Americans (some 40+ million) is the only place they can get groceries. If they're getting chicken it's not going to be whole and uncooked. It'll be sold in a plastic bag leaching PFAS into the food and be coated in high fructose corn syrup (most packaged lunch meats have sugar or HFCS added). Those kinds of places tend to have very little fresh fruit and veg as well.
If you're looking at cost per calorie unhealthy food will often win out as less costly, not just in terms of money but also time and effort. Someone who works two jobs and spends hours sitting on or walking to/from the bus isn't always going to have the energy or time to roast a chicken. It's easy to see why they'd choose what's fastest, highly satisfying, requires less preparation and clean up, and is inexpensive.
Not that I'm suggesting that the 72% of Americans who are obese/overweight have those kinds of problems... just that you'll find more Americans who are in that position than you'll find somewhere like the UK.
I found the study on the decrease in BMR. That's pretty wild and if true, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a factor in the obesity problem.
What you should be looking for is cost per gram of protein. That's the only macro nutrient you need large amounts of. Calories per gram of protein are important too - oatmeal and dried pasta are the cheapest protein/$, but their protein/kcal is too low.
I think it comes down to 'not caring enough' to try to get it under control. All the obfuscation and noise around nutrition ("healthy food") doesn't help either, but it's doable.
>I found the study on the decrease in BMR. That's pretty wild and if true, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a factor in the obesity problem.
It might even be the main part, at least for men. If your normal TDEE is 2136 kcal and you eat at maintenance, but then your BMR drops by 7.7% (165 kcal) then you'll gain weight until your TDEE is at 2136 kcal again. During this you would go from ~80 kg to ~95 kg taking you from 24.7 BMI to 29.3.
An argument against the study is that it could be due to different measuring techniques. On the other hand, we have found that the average temperature of humans is slowly decreasing, so maybe it's true.
Even if you don’t do that there is a higher variance in life expectancy between different US states than inside the EU. e.g. California is about on par with the Netherlands, Germany, Britain while Mississippi and West Virginia are slightly below Bulgaria (of course mainly because of drugs..). IMHO that kinds of makes generalized comparisons semi-meaningless.
"Yeah, but just unimportant people from flyover states. We have to divide our analysis of the United States: Over here in California - you now were the people we care about live - life is just as good as in these other fancy European countries we don't look down upon."
That’s not what I said at all..
Because they are dying due to different reasons which can’t be solved all at once using the same methods.
> averages are still applicable.
For what? What do you think is the purpose of any statistics or metrics?
People in Portugal, where healthcare is "free", i.e. the government pays for it, frequently wait for years before being able to see a specialist due to long waitlists. The obvious outcome is that only poor people use the system and if you can you use private healthcare.
People in Czechia with single payer healthcare system with e.g. average wage of 2000 USD pay from 100 euros a month for health insurance (unemployed) to e.g. 500 euros (with 4000 USD salary) or more if you make more. You get the same shitty service (something like 20 years behid the US), you just pay a lot more if you make anything resembling a US salary.
There's no such thing as free healthcare. Can you make a single payer healthcare system that works better? Sure, it's just hard and even if everything is ideal you get maybe 50% discount. The main way to make healthcare cheaper is to drop coverage for diseases that are expensive to treat.
Medicaid has a ton of other problems starting with eligibility, but even if you are eligible and you successfully jump through all the hoops to keep it (which are sometimes totally insane: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bVIsnOfNfCo), you still may not be able to get the services you need. Many doctors won't accept it and you can die just waiting for an appointment. Studies have shown there was effectively one psychiatrist for every 8,834 Medicaid beneficiaries and just one cardiologist for every 4,543 Medicaid beneficiaries. These doctors can't possibly see, let alone adequately treat and manage the care of, everyone who needs them.
The closest we get to free healthcare in the US is care in the emergency room which is only required to "stabilize" you. They'll try their best to keep you alive if you're actively dying, but then they push you out the door and send you a massive bill. They won't give you chemo or radiation to keep your cancer from spreading
Even if we assume that's the case - as in, normal margins would be insufficient to finance the research - that does not account for the medical treatments themselves.
> the whole world laughs at us
Most of the world doesn't care.
If the government funded research that resulted in a more eco-friendly car I wouldn't expect to see one delivered to my driveway or that the car with the fancy new tech (which might be a lot more involved in terms of costs) should be priced the same as the old tech.
Healthcare should just be made accessible and affordable to everyone. It looks like the best way to do that is with publicly funded health systems.
>I wouldn't expect to see one delivered to my driveway or that the car with the fancy new tech (which might be a lot more involved in terms of costs) should be priced the same as the old tech.
we often pay a new user tax, or monopoly tax like the epipen thing. that should not be possible.
How much of the money that flows into the US healthcare system really goes towards medical R&D, and how much is effectively wasted due to the inefficient bureaucracy and out-of-control litigation?
Literally tens of billions are wasted annually on advertising. The cost is pushed to the sick and hurting while doctors are bribed to overprescribe whatever drug people are being trained to "ask their doctor about". I'd worry about that way before I gave a thought to "out-of-control litigation". Especially considering how companies like Purdue Pharma and Philips Respironics can knowingly kill people with their drugs and medical devices, try to hide the fact they were doing it, yet face no meaningful consequences and not one person is put behind bars. If anything, I'd say America should be demanding more justice from the legal system not less.
The US cost of healthcare is about 17% of GDP. In other first world nations it's about 11%. This isn't service delivery or value, it's underlying cost. Per capita healthcare costs over twice of what it does in the UK. Similar for Australia. Both those are socialised and have very active R&D communities.
The average life expectancy in the US is about 78. In other first world nations it's almost unilaterally closer to 84.
The US is ranked 69th globally in terms.of health system performance. The US is also ranked worse than the OECD38 average for death by preventable causes.
The biggest difference between those places I mention and the above is that the US views healthcare as a capitalist endeavour and tries to claim that competition will lower prices. Quite the opposite has occurred, and the system has become perverted. Intellectual property laws applied in this fashion ensure that you cannot have competition for health care since drugs are limited to a single supplier. You also don't get a choice in hospital care or doctors in most cases when you really look at how medical competition works.
In other places, the costs are socialised through taxation. Drugs are purchased through nationalised efforts where suppliers must either come to the table and negotiate prices properly or lose access to entire markets. It's funny how they can still be quite profitable even under this scenario, and yet the prices still be so significantly less by orders of magnitude than US pricing per patient/dose.
American exceptionalism ceases to be felt when you go spend time in other first world nations for any meaningful length of time. You realise it's reassurance of self rather than truth on basically all but defence technology spending.
It doesn’t help that (at least when it comes to healthcare) US is a dozen of different countries in a trench coat.
Life expectancy in richer states like California or New York is very close to that in Germany, the Netherlands, Britain etc. (and if adjusted for the massive disparity in drug related deaths they’d probably be closer to Italy, France or even Switzerland) while the poorest states are about on par with Eastern European countries where it’s barely above 75 years or so. So any average figure is semi meaningless.
Don't blame the world for your Pharma executives needing a third private jet for their mistresses.
Wouldn’t that discourage these companies from spending money to develop new drugs on their own in the future?
I’m certain that the US is in no way unique in that. Countries with universal public healthcare care systems do cost-benefit analysis all the time and access to the newest effective treatment options outside of the richest/most developed countries (or even in them) is far from guaranteed. e.g good luck buying latest cancer drugs from the US on an East European salary after your local healthcare system bureaucrats have rejected them because they are too expensive and/or are taking a year or two to decide of they are worth buying.
> or if you'd been living in basically any other developed nation on Earth.
That’s just beyond absurd, unless you think that only Switzerland and a handful of other rich countries are “developed”. Yes getting some minimum/acceptable level of care when you’re not rich might generally be easier. Getting access to latest or even experimental drugs (most of which are developed in the US)? Not so much..
It doesn't always work like this. Some drugs are just too expensive to manufacture and the minimum profitable price is too high for the benefit in public health care. But often the bargaining and purchasing power of a public health care system can achieve lower prices for drugs and other tools.
I’m not sure that’s strictly true at least when it comes to the most expensive/newly developed drugs:
https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/deadly-prices-medici...
Doesn’t seem that massively different from the relationship between insurance companies and drug companies in the US.
> In countries with public health care, setting the price that high will typically result in near-zero sales
Interestingly enough it seems like the poorer Central/East European countries end up paying more than the richer ones.
Also in the 1970s the Cambodians were searching out their intellectuals and executing them and the Chinese did a slightly less extreme version in the cultural revolution whereas now you get none of that and China is becoming a science superpower.
Admittedly some in the US seem to be pushing antivax and climate denial but it's not like the past events. Also it seems a bit local. I'm a Brit for example and see almost no climate denial here. A bit of antivax maybe.
It makes the most stupid and uneducated person think that they are equal to the top minds of present day in many aspects.
You can hold both opinions that an mRNA vaccine is an incredible new technology that has enormous potential, while a new technology that had never been tested on humans shouldn't be forced on people for whom the benefit was marginal at best (kids, healthy population under 50, people who already had covid).
And you can hold both opinions that health authorities clearly misbehaved or acted in a moronic way (lying about masks, origin of the virus, forcing vaccines on people who had already been infected, telling you you can't go outside, except if it's to protest for BLM, etc) while acknowledging that coming up with a vaccine against a new virus in only weeks is a technological wonder.
It's absurd to be systematically anti-intellectual, but also some healthy skepticism is well warranted.
only thing thats changed this time is anti-intellectualism is given a microphone.