Re:Please Fund More Science
by jkingsbery on Monday March 30, 2020 @04:58PM
(#22732226)
I'm all for inventiveness and solving problems. It's great. We also need to look at the limits of our own knowledge and ability to design things, elegantly summarized as
> The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
We can invent those things, sure, but we can't necessarily anticipate all problems with them. For example, a city with 10 million sq. ft. (according to Google, about 0.36 sq. mile) of open space would be very cramped compared to New York, which has Central Park (1.3 sq miles). A virus like COVID-19 in a more dense location than NY could be far worse. Or to take another example, plastic bags are certainly one way to capture waste, but there was a movement to produce fewer plastic bags.
We really don't have all the answers - we have people who think they have all the answers, and we have some other people that understand that the questions are hard.
> The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
(https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Fatal_Conceit#Ch._5:_The_F...)
We can invent those things, sure, but we can't necessarily anticipate all problems with them. For example, a city with 10 million sq. ft. (according to Google, about 0.36 sq. mile) of open space would be very cramped compared to New York, which has Central Park (1.3 sq miles). A virus like COVID-19 in a more dense location than NY could be far worse. Or to take another example, plastic bags are certainly one way to capture waste, but there was a movement to produce fewer plastic bags.
We really don't have all the answers - we have people who think they have all the answers, and we have some other people that understand that the questions are hard.