[EnigmaFlare]

I think all the really obvious and influential products of science and technology happened in the 20th century and now we're so comfortable because of those that we take it for granted. Then people find reasons to hate it because they forget how bad things were without it (previous generations). Same goes for political stability.

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.

[autoexec]

> now we're so comfortable because of those that we take it for granted. Then people find reasons to hate it because they forget how bad things were without it (previous generations). Same goes for political stability.

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.

[armada651]

> 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.

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.

[autoexec]

I think things like the opioid crisis where doctors were getting outright bribes from pharmaceutical companies who knew they were killing people has done a massive amount of harm to the trust people had in medical science. It's been a problem for a long time, even going back to the tobacco industry hiring researchers to lie about the dangers of smoking. Those researchers didn't lose their jobs and become unhireable in their fields. They just went on to work for the oil companies to lie about how climate change isn't real and are now working for companies currently trying to convince the FDA about the safety of food additives.

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.

[_yb2s]

> I'm not sure that most people are really all that comfortable. They're a lot more distracted though certainly.

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.

[ithkuil]

People don't _feel_ comfortable but they objectively are much more comfortable that 120 years ago or more. Unfortunately being objectively more comfortable doesn't make you feel more comfortable and ultimately it matters how you feel and want to fix whatever is causing them to feel like shit.

[EnigmaFlare]

We're physically more comfortable and that's mainly what technologies promised and delivered. Maybe a new wave of technology improving how we feel emotionally will come with just as much enthusiasm as the old physical technology, but so far it seems we're only going backwards. Maybe that emotional technology was invented thousands of years ago in religion and social norms but we never bothered to adapt it to our modern environment so we lost it.

[Aerroon]

I think what societies need is a feeling of hope and improvement. As long as people feel that things are getting better they are happy.

[Angostura]

> 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.

OK, I’ll bite -examples?

[jstanley]

You won't get any because of https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

[nathan_compton]

This is such a cop out, especially given this is a fairly anonymous space AND pretty friendly to "cancelled" ideas.

[tim333]

A historical example might be communism which impeded a lot of people's lives and was pushed by intellectuals going back to Marx himself.

More recently some people are unenthusiastic about promoting trans stuff and affirmative action.

[mschuster91]

In Germany, unlike every other European country (maybe except the Polish, not sure if they're doing the same with Auschwitz?), we have every generation of school children visit a Nazi Konzentrationslager once - precisely to avoid forgetting how bad it was, by showing the actual, undeniable evidence. And on top of that the Nazi dictatorship is usually an entire year's worth of history lessons in schools.

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.

[Maken]

I do not think it's working. The AfD was the second most voted party for the European parliament, despite their candidate literally defending the SS a few weeks prior.

[mschuster91]

European elections are usually used to deliver a "Denkzettel" to the currently governing party, it's the same across Europe as these elections are (wrongly) seen as consequenceless.

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.

[1] https://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/

[2] https://dawum.de/Sachsen/

[racional]

I'm honestly not sure how to combat that any more, outside of a 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.

[bartekpacia]

Yes, in Poland we do the same (mandatory visit to Auschwitz)

[codesnik]

I wonder, how it is usually spinned? I'm asking as Russian and I see direct evidence of how people who grew up in the constant narrative "fascism is awful, that war was important, our grandparents are heroes" also, it seems, consumed it in easy/stupid form of "fascism is something that those weird germans do, they attacked us, and we won, so we can't be fascists ever".

[garaetjjte]

No, it isn't. I think it's rather weird tourist attraction to pick for a trip.

[literallycancer]

I'm pretty sure there are places in Europe where the AfD equivalent doesn't get 15%.

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.

[agumonkey]

when the ratio between education and society sophistication flips you get problems. It's a strange group dynamics still.

[nathan_compton]

Do you really think there is no intellectual work to be done on moral subjects? That morality is entirely in the realm of folk intuition? If you thought very hard about some moral question and came to another conclusion than most of society, what would you do about it?

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.

[EnigmaFlare]

I don't really know the state of moral understanding, but I do know people, even intellectuals, can't separate their personal ideologies from their work, so they're not really capable of objectively figuring this stuff out.

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.

[nathan_compton]

I don't understand how anyone could separate their personal ideology from their work unless they happened to mostly align already. I might disagree with a person's ideology, but I can only agree with a person who believes their ideology ought to inform everything about their life, including their work. What other use is an ideology if it doesn't compel you to change the world or, at the very least, yourself, despite resistance from the world?

> "all the obvious cases are already solved"

This seems highly optimistic.