/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.14588897]

Why was science from the late XVIII to the early XX century so productive, and why did it become stagnant?
At that windown of time:
>all fields of STEM become systematized and incorporate math
>most fields of Humanities develop (psychology, sociology, anthropology, economy, etc)
>in a lifetime, inventions completely changed the lives of people
>dozens of fields of math invented
>several breakthroughs
Now:
>few fields of math invented after the 1960s if any
>advances in material and technical stuff, or incremental advances to old ideas, but no breakthrough
>physics become increasingly abstract and handwaving wishy washy bullshit
>much more people doing science, much less results
>much more of a technician mindset than a scientist mindset, scientists work either at bureaucratic academic institutions or greedy corporations, academia is not what it used to be
>reproducibility crisis in most of humanities, health science and even a lot of the "hard" sciences
Also
>inb4 muh low hanging fruit
Bullshit, this has no weight as argument as its only an unfalsifiable hypothesis. People thought that nothing else remained to be invented before electricity was a thing, also you can apply that for example to earlier civilizations and ask why these so called "low hanging fruits" were discovered only after the XIX century and not earlier?

[Anonymous No.14588922]

>Why was science from the late XVIII to the early XX century so productive, and why did it become stagnant?
Woman

[Anonymous No.14588931]

>>14588897
Simple question. The answer is academia and science are full of faggots, females, and niggers nowadays

[Anonymous No.14588935]

>>14588897
the real technological breakthroughs that happened in the last 3 decades are owned by private entities and not known to the public.

[Anonymous No.14588941]

>>14588897
It wasn't and it didn't.

[Anonymous No.14588967]

>>14588941
Care to elaborate?
I have put a lot of points that add weight to my argument in the OP
What would you say to add weight to your point?

[Anonymous No.14588968]

>>14588897
Literally low hanging fruit and an abundance of solutions that can be derived analytically.

Turns out most problems are more complex than A = f(x) where f is some nice function and x is a single variable. Everything actually being done in the world is done numerically and a lot of times these aren't simple numeric calculations and take a long time to churn through.

Midwits like you don't even study stem. Just shut the fuck up and look at where the actual innovations are occuring. I'll tell you, it's all slow optimizations to numeric problems that are pushing us forward. All the simple shit was solved. Classical Physics is essentially a complete STEM field and it's the simplest stem field (and don't take simple for lacking rigor or being easy either).

Unless there is some magic method to simplifying large highly complex and interrelated data, we aren't gonna see shit in terms of major innovations. By the way there is a whole field dedicated to this problem (Data Science), but the techniques often just aren't good enough.

Sorry dude, but STEM in general doesn't have all the nice and simple properties of basic physics (which drove innovations). You will never see Innovations like that again in your life. The closest you'll get is perhaps some nice machine learning algorithm that can spit out predictions but not really explain well what the underlying relationships are.

[Anonymous No.14588988]

>>14588967
Everything you said can be aplied to today while the reverse can be applied to 19th century. It's just a big meme.

[Anonymous No.14589003]

>>14588968
The problem with the low hanging fruit argument is that it is a post hoc rationalization and you cant prove it
Euclids could be considered low hanging fruit before calculus
Calculus could be considered low hanging fruit from our perspective
But that explains nothing and only obscures clear thought
If calculus, set theory, formal logic, non euclidian geometry, topology, group theory, game theory etc etc etc are so low hanging, how come no one invented them before? With applied sciences I can understand that we are limited by equipaments, but thats not true of math, and low hanging fruit doesnt explqin why so many math fields were invented between 1750 and 1970 and nott hat much before or after

[Anonymous No.14589006]

>>14588897
Because the time period before that was so unproductive that all the discoveries bunched up and got discovered at the same time when people actually began looking for them

[Anonymous No.14589011]

>>14588988
You gotta be trolling
The incorporation of math and creation of applied humanities could be applied to today? Any point of today could be applied to the past? Please

[Anonymous No.14589014]

>>14588897
I'm pretty sure the advancements from 1980 to now are way way bigger than those from, say, 1790 to 1830, so I don't know what you're talking about.

things literally have never progressed as fast.

[Anonymous No.14589015]

>>14589011
Yes. Math is more important than ever in most sciences today. Any other points you need me to blow you out on?

[Anonymous No.14589024]

>>14589014
>>14588897 (OP) #
>I'm pretty sure the advancements from 1980 to now are way way bigger than those from, say, 1790 to 1830
Maybe
>things literally have never progressed as fast
No
Try comparing 1980s to now with 1850 to 1900 or 1900 to 1950

[Anonymous No.14589026]

>>14589024
1980 to now was the bigger change, objectively speaking of course.

[Anonymous No.14589032]

>>14589026
Mostly its from the inertia from 1850 to 1950

[Anonymous No.14589039]

>>14589026
>>14589032
Also not that big as you claim

[Anonymous No.14589045]

>>14589032
So any other points, getting blown out pretty hard so far

[Anonymous No.14589049]

>>14589015
You know,
>incorporation of math into stem =/= math being important
I thought you were a troll, now I see you are just challenged
Have a good evening

[Anonymous No.14589052]

>>14589049
Yes that's what I mean, it's being incorporated now more than ever.

[Anonymous No.14589053]

>>14588897
They are advancing rapidly but as a result of large teams of individuals.

We have just about reached the peak of the amount of things that can be discovered by individuals with bountiful free time and limited resources.

We are also rapidly approaching the same peak for individuals in many other things, such as computer science and even in the creative industries. I rarely see stories or art that have never been done before anymore.

[Anonymous No.14589065]

>>14588897
Late Renaissance natural philosophers became increasingly skeptical of ancient Greek and medieval philosophy.
At around the same time, watch and telescope makers developed increasingly precise micrometers and other tools essential for fine scientific devices.
Mathematics was still highly informal by modern standards but scholars began to develop more standard ways of expressing math problems and discussing them in essays.
European finance, loans, insurance, and other math heavy forms of commerce expanded the pool of people who understood advanced math.
Various royal societies to patronize natural philosophers were created.
Natural philosophy also become a popular hobby for aristocrats.
Very roughly speaking, most science until the late 1800s involved instruments and methods that a small team of craftsmen could build and a small team of scientists could use for experiments. You could build a telescope and make novel observations, or do basic experiments on heredity, germ theory, and chemistry if you had a basic lab and a few craftsman to build stuff for you.

This got harder and harder in the 20th Century. By the 1950s, scientific instruments weren't just the work of a small team of craftsmen but might involve hundreds of engineers, infrastructure for materials like liquid helium, and so forth. You might have scientists evaluating devices just for signs of subtle interference.. they don't even primarily work on the main experiment.

I think to describe early progress as "low hanging fruit" is an acceptable historical explanation. We have reached a point of diminishing returns with our current tech and theories. We spend vast resources to try to cheat the physical limitations of detecting things at the smallest scales. We are looking for a breakthrough that changes that but for now progress is slow.

The idea that science ought to progress rapidly for an indefinite period is itself a unscientific, unfalsifiable, hidden assumption.

[Anonymous No.14589095]

>>14589053
I domt think its true of stories and creative stuff
Each epoch and civilization has its own sensibilities, and range of possibilities to draw from. Maybe you could argue we are exhausting the current rangr but theer will always be new ranges
Art is not something that progresses to absolute truth like science, and its nor purely combinatorial as the ai tech bros would make you believe, but it relies on a cultural context to give it meaning
The mere notion of seeing art as "we ended art! We exhausted it!" Is antagonistic to the spirit of art. Art is not a race towards something

[Anonymous No.14589107]

>>14589065
Im OP and even if Im skeptical of low hanging fruits rgument, this is the best answer in this thread atm
Doesnt explain math tho

[Anonymous No.14589136]

>>14589003
>The problem with the low hanging fruit argument is that it is a post hoc rationalization and you cant prove it

That's a falsifiable statistical claim, not categorically different than a paleontologist making predictions about the prevalence of fossils in an unexcavated hillside.
You could study it like this,
>There are core theoretical entities for each physical science field.
>In chemistry, the elements are such entities. The average rate of element discover since 1820 was approximately 1 per 3 years. This implies that in the next 10 years three new elements should be discovered.
>Now consider novel elementary particles...
>Now consider novel organic structures in biology...
...until you have a sample of core theoretical entities across scientific fields where we can compare the past rate of discovery to the future rate. Then we wait 20 years and see if the rate decelerated, maintained, or increased.

[Anonymous No.14589359]

>>14588897
Scientists basically waste their time: writing grant applications, trying to maximize the impact of their papers (not their research), prepare for conferences so that they can travel and stay att luxury hotels, and do other worthless paperwork. In the end, a professor uses maybe 80% of his time on actuall research.

Its explained here:
https://youtu.be/josSZtyYBxo

[Anonymous No.14589365]

>>14589359
I ment uses 20 % of their time on research and waste the rest

[Anonymous No.14589374]

>>14588897
It was chugging along fine until neoliberalism flourished. Scientific achievement used to make countries proud, but with the dissolution of national identities, the spirit of the aesthetic scientist is challenged. Add in nonsensical funding cuts and a push toward privatization where that scientist might not be allowed to take credit nor share the discovery and it's the nail in the coffin.

This was before we buried the coffin by making science geek chic. Cool science forces politicization of science and just smothers the aesthete.

[Anonymous No.14589376]

>>14589003
Literal midwit. Holy shit. Here I'll explain it to you, since you're actually retarded. All these fields ARE low hanging fruit, they came together because information was able to finally travel at a reasonable speed and be transmitted clearly and exactly (a.k.a. the printing press and factories making books cheap as shit).

Euclid was studying outright low hanging fruit, it's just collecting the prerequisite information and formalizing it in any way is not a trivial process. This isn't a complicated idea, all these discoveries and explosions of 'knowledge' occurred because information, paper, writing, etc. became cheap as shit. It's not anything remotely special about the people that discovered them. If the printing press and industrialization starting in the early 20th century we would be seeing the exact same explosion right now.

I've already explained why you don't see more, all the problems are numeric in nature. Anyone with a half a brain has realized pushing the fields of math is kind of meaningless when they aren't aiding in numerical algorithms. The noise elements ALONE in many fields require numerical solutions to crunch through.

[Anonymous No.14589383]

>>14589003
>how come no one invented them before?
If they were invented before, you'd still ask the same question.

[Anonymous No.14589435]

>>14588897
Is this one of those threads OP asks a question that he has already formulated a pet theory for and he just calls everyone retarded until someone says what he wants to hear?

[Anonymous No.14589443]

>>14589003
>The problem with the low hanging fruit argument is that it is a post hoc rationalization and you cant prove it
I have to agree with the other anon. You're retarded. I'll point out the other reason you're retarded: This argument applies to you, and the OP, first. You are literally objecting to what is the primary objection to your arbitrary starting point and golden age fallacy.

Well, I reject your premise. You have merely arbitrarily assumed some superior value to tasks far easier than the ones remaining. Fuck off.

[Anonymous No.14589454]

>>14589383
YES, PRECISELY
Thats exactly the problem with low hangin fruit, which I was trying to demonstrate
Things happen before or after some date, and what is considered low hanging fruit is defined after the fact
If somehow computation theory developed before calculus -as it almost did in ancient india with Backus and other grammarians - then by definition computation would be lower hanging them calculus, but because it really was developed in a coherent way only in the 1940s, calculus is considered lower hanging than computation
But its all a matter of defining low hanging fruit by what happened, which renders it arbitrary and null
Explanations of low haning fruit like
>>14589065
Which take into account material conditions of different epochs are better
But still doesnt explain why, for example, a possible new field of math wasnt invented yet
And
>>14589376
Also doesnt suffice, even if theres some truth to it, because for example galois and group theory was a stroke of genius and not just "information that could have accumulated anyway in the mind of anyone" as this anon claims

[Anonymous No.14589466]

>>14589454
>Thats exactly the problem with low hangin fruit, which I was trying to demonstrate
It is first a problem with your own assertion. Pointing out it COULD BE a problem with asserting another way IS NOT A DEFENSE OF YOUR BULLSHIT.

[Anonymous No.14589467]

>>14589435
Nah, I gave a lot of credit to this anon that claimed low hanging fruit
>>14589065
Because he explained it in a coherent and substantial fashion, with the caveat it doesnt expalin maths progress
I just disregard posters that say "low hanging fruit just because" and never called anyone retard, even though some rude anons deserved it
>>14589443
For example this anon, he has nohing to say but
>you are retadded you are wrong
If he said the burden the proof was on me to prove that we made more progress before, ok, I could engage with that
But as he chimped out, I cant do much about that

[Anonymous No.14589473]

>>14589467
>>14589467
>>>14589443 (You)
>For example this anon, he has nohing to say but
>>you are retadded you are wrong
>If he said the burden the proof was on me to prove that we made more progress before, ok, I could engage with that
>But as he chimped out, I cant do much about that
Oh okay so you're a liar. Cool troll bud. Here's what I actually said,
>Well, I reject your premise. You have merely arbitrarily assumed some superior value to tasks far easier than the ones remaining. Fuck off.
See there how I pointed out the problem? Or the paragraph before that,
> You are literally objecting to what is the primary objection to your arbitrary starting point and golden age fallacy.

But no, all I did was call you retarded, right? Fuck off retard.

[Anonymous No.14589482]

>>14589473
>If
You try to prve your point but you keep chimping out
As I said, had you only, with civility, argued that the burden of proof was on me, no problemo, I would engage with you
But as your goal seems to seethe and chimp out, I wont oblige you sorry sir

[Anonymous No.14589487]

>>14589482
I'm content showing you're an obvious dishonest troll. You're terrified to engage honestly because you know I caught you. Too bad for you.

[Anonymous No.14589500]

>>14589107
Believe it or not, 1950s onward is the golden period of math. Inventing fields is sort of the wrong metric since most problems people are interested in are already categorized. But if you look at subfields and new (useful) methods and the level of "technology" there has been rapid progression since then. People are, all the time, proving things that even a few years prior experts would claim would not be solved in their lifetime. Of course, a lot of these results are far too abstract to fit into a news article or YouTube video so the stagnation meme persists.

[Anonymous No.14589501]

>>14588897
Because discovering and working with Phosphorus and Sulfur was way easier that discovering and working with Flerovium and Moscovium.

What I mean by that is that even if our understanding and technology is evolving, it's becoming harder and harder to have access to what nature still hasn't let us discover.
Electricity was all around us before we learned how to use it, there's nothing similar to that anymore.

[Anonymous No.14589503]

>>14589500 (me)
But also, if you study any amount of formal logic it will eventually become apparent that "low-hanging fruit" is essentially baked into mathematics and reality. I just don't think we've reached it yet (but might in another hundred or two hundred years assuming we survive that far).

[Anonymous No.14589733]

>>14589467
I think you're making a conceptual error regarding math.

With math we can assert an indefinite number of mathematical proposition that are valid and sound. So in one sense there is ample progress if you care about a grad student proving something in the chess variant they made.

But only a subset of these will be at least tangentially applicable to mainstream physics, compsci, game theory, and other fields. We tend to only consider math results that have at least some practical impacts as worthwhile contributions to the field. This makes it math progress inevitably linked to scientific diminish returns.

We are also cognitively limited. Simple shit like condition probability can trip-up seasoned statisticians. Really advanced math can be so much harder because it strains the limits of our abilities to conceptualize.

By the way, I don't care about the falsifiability of the claims in making because they are clearly philosophy of math, not regular old science.

[Anonymous No.14589810]

>>14588897
Fuck off with roman numerals gay teenage FAGGGGGGGOTTTT YOU,RE NOT COOL OR SMART YOU'RE a big FAGGGGGGGGOOOOOTTTTT

[Anonymous No.14589846]

>>14588897
>why are there less things to discover after more things are discovered

[Anonymous No.14590029]

>>14589500
Your argument about math not being measured by creation of new fields I can get behind, it just seems fummy that there was a sudden explosion that lasted 100 years and then sort of stopped
But I guess we have to sort all the mess out
>>14589501
Also a good point
>>14589503
What do you mean here?
>>14589733
I was not only considering applied math, but pure math too. One of the goals of oure math is just to create more math afaik, but theres a distinction between semi trivial and specific results and deep beautiful and general results
Cognitive limitations as you pointed all may play a part in every science, along with specialization, to delay progress

[Anonymous No.14590186]

>>14588897
T retard


https://www.sciencedaily.com/

[Anonymous No.14590258]

>>14590029
Give me an example of important pure math that does not have a tangental application to applied math.

[Anonymous No.14590338]

>>14588967
you "put a lot of points" but you're still asking why reality doesnt match up to your expectations. your points dont matter and you may be a r-word

[Anonymous No.14590407]

>>14590029
I still think you just aren't familiar enough with math to have a good judgment of this. Have you considered that older discoveries are easier to comprehend and thus more likely to make it into the "popular science canon"? Especially since those were more directly linked with the natural sciences.
I can point to basically any century starting at 1500 and claim that there was a significant amount of mathematical progress that laid the foundation for the future.
This includes our current century, by the way, even though we're barely a fifth the way through it.

[Anonymous No.14590430]

>>14588897
>low hanging fruit
You're right, this is midwit cope, but unfortunately you are very obviously a midwit pseud so your opinion will be mocked by every other midwit ITT.

[Anonymous No.14590646]

>>14588897
Unironically, low hanging fruit.
>inb4 muh low hanging fruit
It's the truth, whether you like it or not.
All the developments you speak off came right after Isaac Newton revolutionized physics and science as a whole by making science inherently mathematical.
>People thought that nothing else remained to be invented before electricity was a thing
The fuck are you going on about? Even Newton was aware that electricity was going to be the next big thing after mechanics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Scholium#%22The_Spirit%22
>also you can apply that for example to earlier civilizations and ask why these so called "low hanging fruits" were discovered only after the XIX century and not earlier?
Because the Romans were a thing. The Roman Empire put a stop to Greek science. Emblematically, it was a Roman soldier who killed Archimedes. If science stagnated under Rome, it actively backslid under medieval Christianity, and only during the Renaissance secular scholars rediscovered Greek science and built upon that. Progress isn't linear.

[Anonymous No.14590660]

>>14589003
>Euclids could be considered low hanging fruit before calculus
Euclid's main work is called "The Elements" exactly because it was low-hanging fruit even back when he wrote the book. His more advanced work on conic sections has been lost since it was superannuated by Apollonius of Perga and so scribes stopped making copies of Euclid's Conics and just made copies of Apollonius's Conics instead.
>Calculus could be considered low hanging fruit from our perspective
Calculus is not low-hanging fruit. Calculus routinely filters women and minorities. It is the starting point of truly advanced mathematics. Calculus may seem trivial to a contemporary mathematician with a PhD, but it is without doubt a game-changer from the point of view of any college student compared to anything he has studied before.

[Anonymous No.14590713]

>>14588935
Why aren't they profiting off of their property, why would they spend all that money on patents and IP protection, just to hide their breakthroughs from the public?

[Anonymous No.14590939]

>>14588897
The stagnation was sort of inevitable because scientists assumed from the beginning that matter is dead stuff and their consciousness is the result of dead stuff interacting. At a certain point (like now) science must broaden its scope to get any real idea of the nature of reality. That means studying dreams, out-of-body experiences, altered states, and so forth. Maybe take a hard look at the placebo effect.

[Anonymous No.14592285]

>>14588897
>hurr durr science is stagnated
please watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik
and tell me if you changed your mind.

[Anonymous No.14592291]

>>14588897
Loss of religion.

[Anonymous No.14592299]

>>14588897
Academia has become corrupted.
One of my first classes was a mandatory critical thinking class.
I passed with a perfect score, everyone else in my class used a multitude of fallacies.

If they cant even think critically, how are they truly able to comprehend anything thats being taught in academics? They cant. They just learn to memorise certain things and never develop a deeper understanding. its all been pullted.


Also the next big step will take place in Asia, they are more open to gene editing. Gene editing is inevitably the future.
AI is massively overrated, because people go about it the wrong way, I dont have a solution but I can see that this path will never lead to some sort of superhuman computer who can solve all our problems.
Besides we know how to fix most of our problems, but they still exist because they bring a lot of advantages to powerful people.

Anyway Im glad Ill die before any of that shit happens.
Humanity will eventually become a species of mostly slaves with a few elite ruling over the masses

[Anonymous No.14592305]

>>14592299
>they are more open to gene editing. Gene editing is inevitably the future.
A poisoned chalice.

[Anonymous No.14592354]

>>14589454
>Strokes of genius
Get the fuck out of here. Galois theory would have been discovered without Galois. Every theory in math would be discovered without the individual genius. A different genius, at a different time, would just come up with it.

I'm not claiming that anyone can discover this shit you actual midwit. Just that they were discovered at that time largely due to information being easily accessible.

It's literally not a hard concept you just refuse to accept it for some autistic reason. Do you think after you fully melt ice into a liquid and then a gas that you will suddenly have more ice come from somewhere? You know there might be just a limit to what can be actually reasonably modelled by analytic means right?

[Anonymous No.14592369]

>>14588897
The printing press gradually increased European literacy and led to cultural diffusion of knowledge over the next few centuries.
Around the turn of the 20th century, a certain tribe hijacked the levers of power and began an agenda of endless wars and degeneracy which continues today, stunting our growth.

[Anonymous No.14592372]

>>14588897
>muh low hanging fruit
But that's literally it

[Anonymous No.14592375]

>>14588897
>>few fields of math invented after the 1960s if any
There are so many questions in math which are straight way too hard to answer at the moment. Most everything related to number theory, for instance, it was a miracle that we could even solve FLT desu.
>>physics become increasingly abstract and handwaving wishy washy bullshit
For the longest time physics was driven by questions which needed an answer, but an answer wasnt attainable due to lack of technology. Right the standard model describes most everything on Earth, theres nothing left to capture with mathematics. Naturally this has led to people seeking answers in more abstract math.

[Anonymous No.14592383]

>>14588897
Because they were stronger men with no distractions.

[Anonymous No.14592404]

According to Woodley english genetic IQ peaked around 1870.

[Anonymous No.14592455]

We've hit the peak. There's nothing left to find.

[Anonymous No.14592627]

>>14588897
Eh, I think you're extrapolating based on your personal experience with maffs and physics/chemistry. Geology and paleontology have had massive leaps in the understanding of Earth's processes and history since the first half of the 20th century, astronomy has been revolutionized by the creation of larger telescopes, medicine is breaking boundaries in what we previously thought was possible, and entirely new fields such as genetics and computer science have emerged.

[Anonymous No.14592630]

>>14592627
I mean Christ, we didn't even have a mechanism for plate tectonics until the 1950s when nuke sniffers gave us info on the seafloor.

[Anonymous No.14593193]

>>14592291
Could be. All the retards who belong in church are in universities now. But then there should be some healthy balance so that thiose retards don't dominate the society to the level of closing all the universities down or converting them into their babble learning facilities.

[Anonymous No.14593214]

>>14593193
>All the retards who belong in church are in universities now
Catholic Church was the one that invented the first universities. Most scientists of the past were religious and interested in Theology and some even studied it. There's a correlation from when scientist stoped being religious and science becoming soulless. Instead of scientists looking inside the nature of God, and we're doing it for it's own sake, they are chasing funding and national agenda.

[Anonymous No.14593218]

>>14588897
>>few fields of math invented after the 1960s if any
I can't speak for other sciences, but over the last couple of decades math has developed more than before that since the beginning of civilization combined

[Anonymous No.14593325]

>>14593214
>Catholic Church was the one that invented the first universities.
This is what they teach in their universities, but it couldn't be further from the truth. They destroyed all the universities, and only centuries later they began to lead what they couldn't stop (and it took humanity several centuries more to establish truly scientific communities during the age of enlightenment, when the church was btfo)
Here's one of the first ones you were not taught about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musaeum

[Anonymous No.14593371]

Science stagnated? Seems like there is so many new things happening all the time in science

[Anonymous No.14593486]

>>14593371
Very true, but school course doesn't speak of them so one may have such illusion, also because tv are professional dilettantes and hardly ever observe what is really happening right now.

[Anonymous No.14593518]

>>14589454
When you dstudy history, you learn that many people we call a genius were only doing what being talked about during that time, the genius was maybe the first to connect the point. But in any other environment, he would not be able to do that. Galois came up with group theory because there was already paper on this, it was not 100% created by him. Do read history, anon.

[Anonymous No.14593539]

>>14593518
>If I have seen further than most it is only because I've been standing on the shoulders of giants.

[Anonymous No.14593543]

>>14593214
Dude there were literal universities connected to the library of alexandria.

[Anonymous No.14593548]

>>14593539
The real reason Newton said that was to make fun of Hooke since Hooke was a manlet. Newton was saying Hooke's ideas didn't help him at all.

[Anonymous No.14593561]

>>14593548
That's funnier, still a good quote even with the dual meaning.

[Anonymous No.14593855]

>>14588897
I think alot of people are just dismissing OP without considering his point. If we've made such progress, why are these "low hanging fruit" not accessible to the average person outside academia? Why are these institutions so irreversibly corrupted?

If there is another big leap to be made, i doubt a soulless society like this be the one to produce it. Clearly we use the equivalent of mental retard strength , genius level iqs, to compensate for what a pathetic failure our culture has at transmitting knowledge of any value.

The cultures that those older genius' came from had enough great mentors and environment for learning with people you could call peers that it produced greatness. Given we live in a society of single parents and no real respect for masculinity, then there wont be great mentors for the next generation and it will get increasingly worse. This board is an great example of how our brightest are relegated to meaningless online existences as opposed to collaborating with like minds in their own communities and doing great things.

[Anonymous No.14593921]

>>14588897
This is very simple actually.
>Late XVIII to early XX

This literally was the period in which the German Empire suddenly popped into existance in the middle of Europe, destabilizing the balance of power and forcing literally every single modern nation to innovate, improve and increase their firepower in preparation for the coming war. The war that came, and then came again, and then left us with our current world order.

Post WWII we have been in a situation where the balance of power was kept completely stable. The U.S. was king with Western European countries being little princes. When you are in power you never want to rock the boat. Hence stagnation.

Let me tell you how this affects science. Look at the average academic working at top academic institutions (or gov) in those pre-war times. They were incredibly economically successful. Being a scientist working at one of those top labs would afford you a pretty and young wife, a big house, and all the money you could possibly spend. You weren't rich rich, but you would be really well-off. Nowadays to afford those kinds of houses you'd need to pay like $2M or probably more so those scientists very upper middle class with emphasis on the 'upper'.

Nowadays what does a scientist have to do to get this lifestyle? Ditch academia, that's what. So top minds bail on academia and go into the corporate world. I made a thread some months ago about a young woman who had the perfect academic track record and now she was working at Pepsi creating ML algorithms that could predict food trends on twitter.

Her mind could be used to design modern weapons of mass destruction but instead she is making fucking twitter scripts to tell if you want to buy a pepsi. Hooray. But I reckon that war with China is coming in 1-2 decades and if the government is not retarded they will immediately poach all of those researchers to get them in the war effort.

[Anonymous No.14594159]

>>14593921
> wars motivate innovation
a baseles assumption straight outta hegel's ass
It's google-translated pasta time:
Imagine this situation: you send your child to school. Enter the building and see the school wall newspaper. And there, in the most prominent place, there are colored pictures of the main hooligans and large articles about their art. And about honors students and athletes modestly so in the corner without photos. Well, what will be your decision? Would you send your child to this school?

Now imagine an adult multi-page newspaper with the front pages devoted to the antics of adult hooligans. Where it is described in detail how these hooligans bomb cities, kill children and do all sorts of outrageous things. Imagine a history textbook made up entirely of stories on the topics "How ours piled on them" and "How theirs ran into ours in lawlessness." Imagine a pantheon of national heroes, 90% composed of murderers - however, what to represent? Take any national pantheon, take any history textbook, take any newspaper, it's the same everywhere.

For some reason, it is believed that wars are the most important aspect of human activity, worthy of the most detailed description. Who remembers when and where the first nuclear power plant was built? Few people remember: the school curriculum does not require knowledge of such dates. But every educated person should remember when and where the first atomic bomb exploded. In addition, many people remember when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded: the explosion, of course, is a more historical phenomenon than the peaceful atom. Wars, catastrophes and dates of coronations are the basis of any chronology; and the stories of these incredibly significant events, arranged in chronological order, are usually called world history. This is such a gloomy and monotonous, but very instructive story, in which a person appears as a monster, pathologically prone to violence and capable of spoiling any good undertaking.

[Anonymous No.14594161]

>>14594159
2/2
Who needs such history? Personally, I don't need it. Lately, I've increasingly imagined a textbook where 1941 is the year the first modern computer was built, and 1945 is the year the first high-level programming language was created; and the military events that took place in Germany between these dates are mentioned in passing, as an unfortunate misunderstanding, because of which the calculating machines Z1 and Z2 died. In this textbook there is neither Hitler, nor Stalin, nor Napoleon, nor Charlemagne - after all, they did not invent anything, but only prevented people from living. Why should we remember these parasites and troublemakers? The history of mankind is not a path from war to war, but a path from caves to the stars, covered in a fairly short period of time. Such a history to be proud of; such a story will not be ashamed to tell brothers in mind when we finally meet with them. And then after all, we will show them our Hitler-Stalins - and what will they think of us?

But this is all utopia. As long as the world is commanded by the military, the history of the world will be military anyway. And history books will teach children what to understand. By the way, have you noticed that in independent Russia the Day of International Solidarity of Workers somehow atrophied, and the anniversary of the Workers' and Peasants' Revolution was completely pushed aside? But both military holidays - February 23 and May 9 - not only survived, but every year more and more magnificent ...

[Anonymous No.14594179]

>>14594159
Thats fine sentiment and there is probably some truth to the idea that things could be better if media influences were keyed in on using their influence to make it so, but overall neglecting the horrifying true nature of humanity is an irrational attempt to escape from reality. Incessant news of the evil that men do allows people the opportunity to avoid falling prey to those evils themselves. Censoring fair warnings like that only gives murderous aggressors even more of an upper hand.

[Anonymous No.14594191]

>>14594159
>>14594161
No, my point is not 'wars motivate innovation'.

I thought I was pretty clear: pre-war motivates innovation. And not because of the 'war' part but because of what pre-war implicates. During pre-war world powers feel the heat of a potential enemy on the horizon coming to destroy everything they have.

The germans feared the french would take their lands and rape their women -> they innovate to make sure this does not happen.


The french feared the german would take their lands and rape their women -> they innovate to make sure this does not happen.


The british feared the mainland europeans would take their lands and rape their women -> they innovate to make sure this does not happen.

Etc. When over-funded world powers start feeling fear they start writing the checks. Once war actually explodes those research budgets are really just the remnants of existing pre-war budgets.

If the current world power feels totally safe and is sure that no one is coming to rape their women then they have no reason to invest in anything. Things can just continue as they are because hey, they are the current winners!

[Anonymous No.14594199]

>>14594179
>the horrifying true nature of humanity
What you call true nature of humanity is nothing human, it's beasty to the core, it's not rooted into reason which makes humans different from others.
> Incessant news of the evil that men do allows people the opportunity to avoid falling prey to those evils themselves.
The opposite is true. Those news program people to repeat those tragedies again and again (just as before Russia invaded Ukraine russian populace were brainwashed with military propagadna and anti-ukrainian rhethoric for twenty years)
> Censoring fair warnings like that only gives murderous aggressors even more of an upper hand.
Who said about censoring them? History of wars will always be easily available for anybody's scrutiny, it's just not a very good material to raise kids on. Just as sex is much more intricate element of human culture, but it doesn't make it a good idea to show porn to minors.

[Anonymous No.14594207]

It actually wasn't productive, largely due to a lack of suitable tools. These tools were gradually defined by electricity and it's uses - as our understanding of electricity developed, so did the rest of science as we could now build adequate measurement tools. When interactions between electricity and magnetism were unified (or rather, understood to be closely related to each other through algebraic formulae) our understanding of the universe was greatly enhanced. This happened by Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, who needed to know how such E-M interactions worked to make electricity in large quantities. And such is why 1890 - 1958 was the most productive period for science ever. Personally, I use the discovery of the (electric) haber-bosch process to be the tipping point and the AEC to be the golden age.

What's missing from your post OP is the understanding of electric power's development and spread. It took until WW1 for the government to even take science seriously, and until WW2 for the government to formally adopt a science doctrine. The first country to do so was the USSR, particularly under utilities minister Leon Trotsky. The second country was the United States through the Muscle Shoals Project, also known as the Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA would ultimately create the Y-12 complex for the Manhattan Project. The subsequent AEC would continue doing extremely important physics search through the Atoms For Peace program, although this ended in the 60s due to new nuclear treaties. By the 70s nuclear was pretty much over and with it big physics projects. The last big physics project, the Desertron, was cancelled in the 90s because Republicans wanted the F-35 instead.

[Anonymous No.14594208]

>>14594191
>pre-war motivates innovation.
In other words, peace motivates innovation (When the cannons are heard, the muses are silent)
>world powers
in other words politicians, those faggots don't invent shit.

[Anonymous No.14595767]

>>14594159
Wars motivated greater financing of science. The end of the cold war saw a decline in funding of science.

[Anonymous No.14595775]

>>14595767
>science = gibes me dat research money fo free
>i wanna play sandbox games for the rest of my life, produce nothing of any worth, and get paid and also prestigious status symbol titles while nobody except myself benefits

[Anonymous No.14595847]

>>14595767
Military faggots make smart people work on means of murder instead of what they would be inventing otherwise. The time between coldwars brought us the revolutions in IT and biotech.

[Anonymous No.14596271]

>>14588897
I think you're begging the question, its because as you said we as a society have a technician mindset above all. New fields and discoveries emerge when creativity and freedom of thought is encouraged because thats what you need to understand whats unknown. Is that encouraged now or is all thats encouraged now is autism? Not saying that back in the days you could do whatever you want but its certainly better than now in that sense. As time when on and especially after the industrial revolution, it became more about deadlines and results, creativity less and less. This is also why more polymaths and autodidacts started popping up. People who had to rely on themselves or have a diverse skillset so they could have more freedom since formal institutions weren't made for them. Hell, one of our recent greatest scientific discoveries is computers and it became wildly successful and powerful. Some people choose to equate this with the scientific tradition in Europe valuing creativity and when america took over all it cared about was practicality and utility so thats another angle to see it from though Im indifferent about it. The point is you get your discoveries and new fields when creativity is more valued, the low-hanging fruit argument isnt even relevant since discovering the unknown is exactly what creativity is to begin with, "difficulty" be damned it prevails every single time. As things are now though I highly doubt society will turn on it's head so quickly anytime soon, but we can hope and be the change we want to see and all that.

[Anonymous No.14596276]

>>14596271
I dont know why Im bothering because itll happen anyway, but Im going to stress that Im not completely against practicality and utility either. You obviously need a balance between the two, too much practicality and we stagnate. Too much creativity and no actual work gets done.

[Anonymous No.14596283]

>>14588897
Women.

It's not that they weren't allowed to do science, there was no reason to ban them, if you had the occasional woman like Marie curie who doesn't give a fuck about attention or being taken seriously as a scientist by all the men and just wants to do science its a non-issue

But ever since it became a political issue to push for equal representation of women so that all the women who only care about attention and being taken seriously by men as a scientist and don't give a fuck about science should have equal or ideally more representation in science than people who just want to do science, it's completely fucked