[nycthbris]

This article is highly subjective. Yes NDT can make a whole lot of things boring if you'd rather not know how they work and prefer the mystery of not knowing or taking a different perspective (whether correct or incorrect factually). However the majority of things he describes are things that are no longer mysteries to the existing scientific consensus. They are things we actually didn't know about the world only a few hundred years ago. That is not to say that the mysteries are gone at all. If you dig deep enough into any topic in science (it's not actually as deep as some may think) you ask a question where everyone who studies it says "we don't know the answer". The mystery is still there, it has just moved away from things humans have been able to systematically investigate up to this point in time.

Yeah, IFL science can get kind of annoying and its followers can come off as evangelical but we're human and that's tribalism.

It was funny reading this bit given the point the author is making about a shallowing of intellectualism. The author essentially shares the same thought that the people he's mocking are having:

> ...and you are then supposed to think yes, I knew that, and imagine someone else, someone who didn’t know it already, some idiot, and think: I’m better than that person, I’m so much smarter than everyone else.