[throw4847285]

It fascinates me how popular science is just a salve for people's fears and anxieties. Science does not provide the kinds of answers people want, so popular science steps in to make unfalsifiable claims about human immortality or whether or not aliens exist, or whatever else is gnawing away at people. I don't have any deeper analysis than that. It's just interesting.

[matthewdgreen]

Science in my lifetime has produced tiny pocket computers, machines that talk and think like humans, cars that drive using the sun as a power source, effective treatments for a variety of afflictions including HIV, and a drug that lets me stay skinny without consciously dieting. Maybe we’ve just developed unrealistically high expectations for what “science” should do.

[throw4847285]

You're conflating science and technology AND making a pretty bold predictive statement about the future of humanity that sounds extremely naive, to me at least.

Also, I find the kind of language you're using really grating. The attempt to mystify modern technology in order to strike awe always backfires. Yeah dude, I know what a cell phone is. Sure, they're very cool. But what's the argument you're trying to make?

[matthewdgreen]

The distinction you make doesn't make any sense to me. Every single one of the technical advances I listed was preceded by a scientific advance, usually a series of them. To take one example: how do you think we discovered the role of Glucagon and then learned to build similar peptides like the receptor agonists in Semaglutide and Tirzepatide? How much (of what we would both consider) "pure science" went into making these drugs possible?

The only distinction I would make is that "pure science" has also produced many additional findings that are not immediately useful to me today, but some of them might be in the future. (And that's the only prediction I'm making about the future in this entire thread.)

[throw4847285]

Technology is much more ideologically laden than science (at least ideally). Science on its own does not have a purpose other than the acquisition of knowledge. Once you choose what to do with it, and especially once you use it to make a consumer product, you are no longer in the realm of "pure advancement." You can use advances in scientific understanding to build something that makes people's lives much worse.

That's why I bristled at the whiggish march of progress you depicted. You can believe that science is an ever increasing grasp of the truth without being naive about what the outcome of that knowledge might be. We could all still nuke ourselves into oblivion, in the most extreme example.

I know people hate that kind of doom and gloom. I'm just saying that, when you make the jump from "wow, science is amazing, look at what we've discovered" to "wow science is amazing, look what technologies it has unlocked" you are implying an inevitability to technological progress that does not exist.

[matthewdgreen]

I'm not arguing with you that science and technology can produce nightmares. And I'm not saying that science is all sunshine and roses.

But the original post said "science does not provide the kinds of answers people want." I think what most people want from science is to have better things, or less disease and misery. I would argue that it has done a lot of that in our lifetimes. That doesn't mean everyone is spiritually fulfilled, nor does it mean that we won't nuke each other. But it has done real things that make our lives much better.

[m463]

Every once in a while though, science-y things take off.

cars that move with electricity, little helicopters with 4 motors that can hover easily, small cheap computers on one board, ham radios with computers that everyone carries now.

[throw4847285]

Those are all technologies.

[jerf]

The limits of science, either experimental or observational, are not well taught. It is to the benefit of a lot of people to claim it can do a lot more than is actually possible.