[jfengel]

The 19th and 20th centuries were extraordinary periods where "hard" sciences gave us amazing things, but technologists like the ones on this site are often fooled into thinking that those are the only things that matter. Any problems involving human beings are theoretically "reducible" to physics problems, and therefore only physics matters -- even if we don't actually know how to perform that reduction.

Questions of how human beings organize and treat each other are immensely complex, and of enormous importance. They're incredibly hard to study, and what study we can do is only in its infancy. But it's equally infantile to declare that it's irrelevant. And oddly, for people who pride themselves on their intellectual prowess, those who do tend to make it on the basis of a cursory "study" rather than serious engagement.