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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

How on Earth did the system being vandalised and dismantled by these morons ever come into being in the first place? It must have been a monumental effort by everyone in society to agree on norms that protect us from a completely unscientific attitude to processing information, be it conspiracy theories or healthcare or huge bot farms producing propaganda to divide us.

How can we go back to a more stable society once the truth has been systematically eroded? For example the white house press secretary said there would be no increase in the deficit yesterday, which is a complete lie. People now search for facts that prove their suspicions correct, not search out ideas that could change their default viewpoint. I really think a society without any truth is one doomed to failure.

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> It must have been a monumental effort by everyone in society to agree on norms that protect us from a completely unscientific attitude to processing information, (...) How can we go back to a more stable society once the truth has been systematically eroded?

Well, the last time this happened in the West, it was the conquest of Hellenistic civilization by the Romans, if we believe Lucio Russo's account. This was a gradual process that took centuries, but two notable events in it are the clear-cutting of Plato's Academy by Sulla in 86 BCE (whose soldiers also killed Archimedes) and the lynching of Hypatia by Christians in 415 CE. Western science didn't recover from that until somewhere between the 18th century, when Harrison solved latitude and Lavoisier began cataloging the elements, and 01966, when the Roman Catholic Church ceased to promulgate the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Despite the Dark Ages in the West, science did continue elsewhere in the world, and even progress, but did not reach the general level of Hellenistic science and technology until it resurged in the West after the Renaissance, centuries after the Dark Ages ended. Many places had very stable societies—Ming China, Tokugawa Japan, Australian Aborigines—without it.

So, how can we go back? There's no guarantee we can. But we will go on.

Where can one find this account by Russo?

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-18904-3

Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, etc. There are way more recent and relevant examples than the fall of Rome.

Well, hopefully this will be an event more like one of those, limited in geographic extent and duration.

Archimedes died in 212, and Sulla wouldn’t be born until 138. Sulla tore down the physical building of Plato’s Academy, but the Academic skeptics (by Carneades’ day the Academy had devolved into skepticism) had much less to do with science in its modern form than, say, Aristotle’s empiricism.

The Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum was never a serious obstacle to publication outside the Papal States: most secular authorities outside the Italian peninsula disregarded it.

I appreciate the correction and amplifications. Archimedes was killed by a soldier of Marcellus, not Sulla.

For me the central problem of the Index was not so much its secular effects (though it is easier to find those than you say; the secular prohibition on teaching Descartes, for example) but that by its nature it proclaimed that ignorance was a moral virtue.

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> if we believe Lucio Russo's account

Lucio = light/luminous

Russo = Russian

Looks like yet another disinformation attempt by the Russians, disregard!

;)

Many things lead to this. A society that gets fooled by clowns. Dehumanization of people from other groups. A system where the checks and balances are more of a convention rather than enforced and one part of the government has too much power to change the other ones. The two party system in general. A long ongoing process to erode democracy and trust in many institutions caused by forces from within and outside. The internet allowing everyone to find and organize with peers for even the most insane ideas, looking legitimate to outsiders because of group sizes we normally hardly see in person. And probably a dozen other reasons each being a tiny problem but resulting in a catastrophe together.

> How on Earth did the system being vandalised and dismantled by these morons ever come into being in the first place?

The saddest part, IMO, is that 20-50% of the population see nothing wrong with all of this. Things will have to get a whole lot worse before there's a chance for them to get better.

> The saddest part, IMO, is that 20-50% of the population see nothing wrong with all of this.

Give it a bit of time and we won’t be able to know this. Surveys are a bit too scientific. Process and standards are woke, leftist nonsense.

We need new leadership now because what's at risk is hundreds of millions of lives. The billionaires have their prepper bunkers and would be fine with the breakdown of civilization. It's the idiots, the corruption, and centralization of power that are meta existential risks that must be removed to ensure the survival of the species. And then address climate change, etc.

> It must have been a monumental effort by everyone in society to agree on norms that protect us from a completely unscientific attitude

It was never an agreement. It was more of a victory. One kind of science produced the nitrogen that fed the world; another produced the victory of the free societies in WW2; another produced the wonder drugs - the antibiotics etc - that allowed far more of the population to survive.

It will survive when the more truth-seeking societies win over those that survive on lies.

> another produced the victory of the free societies in WW2;

Much of the credit for the victory goes to Stalin's USSR. Perhaps "not Nazi nor Japanese" would be more accurate.

> It will survive when the more truth-seeking societies win over those that survive on lies.

Always the path of progress, especially in science it seems. Darwinism takes over when the remaining Creationist biology teachers finally die, etc. It's possible that the 20th Century moved beyond this - Relativity and DNA caught on within a single generation.

Agreed. In addition to the great historical observations below, I notice the progression from “Data Science” to “AI.” Ideally, data sci should have been about applying the scientific method to analyzing data — which should have come down to 1. statistics, by another name and 2. A broader set of procedures which may improve upon classical stats, especially in cases where data doesn’t fit the assumptions of classical statistical procedures. AI, to me anyway, feels all about technology. The methods are built on sound theory and math but the AI products are black boxes, functionally similar to web browsers of course. Prompt engineering is a thing of course, but it feels like ad hoc tinkering, and inevitably leads to overfitting. And rigorous performance evaluation is left to qualitative vibe checking - unless of course you bring in extra tooling like Snorkel - but that’s not part of the core foundation model produce. Anyway, in sum, it feels like we had “science” in the picture for a few years there but it slipped through our fingers starting in 2022-ish

You’re calling people with legitimate but equally confused positions morons, while lamenting division.

Truth has been eroded for many decades now and you seem to assume that the lying and murderous government that keeps lying and murdering is the best arbiter and warden of truth through the public schools and systems it enforces to impose its narrative on the minds of the majority of people who are little more than flesh-bots called humans, programmed and flashed over tv and social media.

How could the truth even exist when free speech is under direct assault even in the country in which it is a core feature of the foundational order? Lies and manipulation are not the truth, it’s narcissistic manipulation. The truth cannot even be approached without free speech, free thought, whether you like it or not; because the inverse of free speech is control over your freedom to hear/see. Censorship not only suppresses the speech, it intentionally suppresses people hearing what psychopaths that control the government fear.

It’s basic narcissistic manipulative abuse patterns along with all the same manipulative patterns like manipulative language changes and gaslighting, dark patterns … but at least you can remember “you wouldn’t get beaten if you followed the constantly changing arbitrary rules of how you may or may not think, what you may or may not talk about, and how you have to say things”.

You start by attacking the ad hominem of "morons", but then in the next sentence refer to those morons as "lying and murderous".

I agree that they are more likely liars than imbeciles, but stupidity is now praised openly by the US right wing. "I'm a maverick!" - a maverick is a useless horse that cannot be put to work. "Those ivy-league elitists" - a phrase actually used by ivy-league graduates to pretend they aren't well-educated.

You seem to be a symptom of the problem. I called the government lying and murderous because that is what it is, on account of all the lying and murdering, and I highlighted the hypocrisy of lamenting division while calling people moron, not something that leads to unity. They are categorically different matters.

What are you not comprehending, let’s work it out together.

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