I'm not old enough to remember but from what I've read, when the Soviets launched Sputnik, the American public was shocked having SSSR machine passing over them and they can't do anything about it and don't have anything to match the soviets. They believed that the USA was the frontrunner in technology but the Sputnik demonstrated that this may not be the case.
So from my understanding, the technology become a populist agenda as a result of that.
It's also interesting to watch old American movies like Rocky or Top Gun where the Soviets are portrayed as the more technologically advanced nation but Americans prevail thanks to their spirit and courage.
Maybe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, science and technology got a pushback in popular culture? When you come to the end of the 90's and the beginning of the 2000's you have movies like Fight Club and Matrix denounce technology as the destroyer of the society or humanity. You even have Lord of the Rings trilogy that tells an epic story about an industrialist who dares to start a mass production and tech research, meritocracy instead of race but "the good guys" are those who are deeply involved keeping the world as-is for thousands of years and value separation between races, masters and servants.
And what we have now? Red pills, blue pills, black pills from the Matrix, quest to restore the manliness from Fight Club, race separation, leader worship and and looking down to technology and multiculturalism from Lord of the Rings. Half Joke, half serious of course :)
No, the late 70s-80s gave us Terminator, Alien, The Day After, War Games, RoboCop, Cyberpunk, and on and on. There was definitely a palpable distrust and fear of technology even back then. Under the shadow of the bomb, you had people coming to terms with more and more of their world being run by big mainframes in far-away office buildings, whose arcane workings you could maybe get a glimpse of through text on a abyssal screen. I actually wrote a short essay exploring this and the notion that people haven't actually become any more comfortable with technology as it really is, only the increasingly friendly interfaces we interact with. I'd post it, but a few months after I wrote it, I realized that the file had become corrupt and that the first weekly back up of it had come a couple days after when that corruption was likely to have happened.
Robocop did question the technology but also the good guy was a half robot.
Blade Runner is a good example about a tech dystopia but the story is ultimately about the machines quest to be humans, not to destroy them.
If we're being honest, there's a small confluence in that Soviets were often portrayed as robotic, and anxieties about Communism were often pushed onto various movie monsters: robots, aliens, zombies. I think the common denominator is "Future Shock," fear of radical changes in society (that book was 1970).
There are people who do work of all kind all the time but when the public is ready to take it it becomes iconic, that is, it represents the psyche of the popular culture. Sometimes when the public is ripe and there's no current work of art to match the public, you can see old movies, books and music that went mostly unnoticed for years suddenly become popular.
So, it's not like movies/books/music push public opinion but they can become icons of an idea. A materialisation of a thought that people were trying to put into words but they couldn't until they read a book, watch a movie, listen to music.
Sometimes the creators of the art hate it when their work becomes an icon of something they do not support.
One other thing to note of the pre/post-Soviet dissolution sci-fi media: the contrast of dominance over the enemy vs surviving within a status quo that is unlikely to change. That may be part of why you see protagonists "befriending" AI; it's more a reflection of hope than expectation. Once you get to post-9/11 media, relationships with AI become more complex and nuanced: I, Robot, Ex Machina, Her, Transcendence. (Perhaps a reflection of our decidedly mixed, toward the negative side, experiences in the Middle East; as well as the multiple crises that threatened the "end of society" and the subsequent recoveries, all within a generation.)
Really depends who's in power. By the 2000s, film people were obsessed with litigating 9/11, the Iraq war, etc. Avatar comes to mind. Looking at ultra big name top budget stuff, it's going to be a product of its time because that's what's marketable.
M.I.A. has some cuckoo beliefs, but her performance aesthetics and her harping on giant Internet and media companies was wildly ahead of its time. Was that anti-technology?
YouTube is the populist agenda, it is the #1 Internet time sink, did people want technology or did they want free music and TV? How are you supposed to advance an anti-audience agenda?
I do find it funny you reference movies almost entirely from the 90s in you conclusion, movies over 20 years old.
Maybe in the movie, but as far as I know LOTR movies did no changes related to that.
All the good-guy societies are deeply hierarchical. Even Frodo and Samwise, who ought to be equals, immediately fall into “gentleman with his valet” patterns: “Please, Mr. Frodo, sir.”
Anyway, I’m not totally convinced, but with just 5 minutes of remembering I’m finding plenty of material, so you could probably find a counter-narrative with study.
But even then, this analogy falls apart immediately. The uruk-hai were designer soldiers that were the best troops in the army because, you know, they were designed to be the best class of troops.
I do not know of any details in LOTR that goes into the promotion policies of the officers of Sarumans military.
I have not read LOTR and got about 10 pages into the Silmarillion before giving up, but my understanding is that Tolkien designed his world meticulously. If he didn't go into detail on this matter I have to assume that it was for a purpose, possibly either of avoiding unfortunate implications by comparison or of enhancing the dehumanized characterization of the, er, foreign hordes.
Outside of the fandom, LOTR is commonly understood to be problematic in its treatment of "race" and social structure, at least wrt contemporary society and its necessities for peace, order, and dignity. I don't know that this is a controversial take at all.
Parts that were shown included plenty of violence, treachery, oppression including slavery and other mistreatment (all included also orcs as victims).
With basically no reward for merit.
> All the good-guy societies are deeply hierarchical.
Yes, but the same is true for evil ones.
And if anything, good guys have less extreme hierarchies. Especially hobbits.
And in LOTR Sauron was neither promoting meritocracy nor against racism.
While in TLR more industrialised side was not depicted negatively.
So even if it is referring to TLR then it still makes no sense.
I don't recall the USSR being portrayed as a more technologically advanced nation in Top Gun, and they absolutely weren't in Rocky (in Rocky IV they were portrayed as more committed to using the power of the state without ethical boundaries in sport)
> When you come to the end of the 90's and the beginning of the 2000's you have movies like Fight Club and Matrix denounce technology as the destroyer of the society or humanity.
Maybe the Matrix; Fight Club focussed on consumerism and blind capitalism, not technology (and even then, the attack on it was literally a manifestation of mental illness.)
But since I mentioned Terminator, it bears more discussion here too. Terminator plays on the apocalyptic fears of that era with an technological antagonist who is literally from the future, and greatly predates the Matrix in that respect: as "dangers of technology" stories go, it's one of the most influential of our time. But even before Terminator there was a cultural moment in the USA that precipitated this fear. It happened, as a lot of things, between the late 60's and early 70's, through a culmination of events: The civil rights and gay liberation movements, the moon landings, the birth of UNIX and modern telecommunications, the shift away from the post-war economy towards the neoliberal regime, the Vietnam war, and yet more.
One of the reasons why the 70's feel less clearly articulated in outlook is because the reactions to all these events were still forming. The conservative and anti-technological backlash to this era's progressive breakthroughs found a voice through a mix of vigilante narratives like Death Wish and Dirty Harry, and slasher horror like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and then as time went on, in post-apocalyptic fiction as well, like the Turner Diaries(explicitly white supremacist and championing a death-cult outlook).
A common thread in this is that the Soviets are just one more shape of the Other, often never even appearing onscreen, but playing a role in the pantheon of threats to society regardless. And so by the time you get to Rocky IV the narratives are simply blended together: Ivan Drago might as well be fighting on behalf of Skynet, and Apollo Creed's place in the series is often a stand-in for race relations, in this case using his death as a punctuation - it is white America that must fight for survival.
The Matrix, then, is in its own way a development and turning point to these tropes. While Neo does act as a "white savior", the critique of technology is through its efforts embodied in Agent Smith to give up his crusade and push him back into the system - into normative white society.
In general, it's more the exception than the rule for any of these stories to be technology-centric, rather using it as one of several themes.
I don't understand how such big heads cannot understand such a simply basic human situation, and instead they produce videos talking about the scientific method, as if Mr. average Joe is going to go download some papers and datasets and spend thousands of hours reproducing the results.
It's a bit like free software. Why use it? Do you personally go through every source code of every application you use or do you just trust in the community? Now what if I spread a conspiracy theory that actually some big maintainer is injecting malware and other free software developers are in cahoots with him? You might think such a conspiracy theory is ridiculous but others might find it compelling.
What specifically are you referencing here?
I completely agree with you that we need a lot more science explainers. There are already a lot of good content on eg YT, but no doubt it’s not something that gets surfaced to most viewers.
In school, nobody really taught me what the scientific method was. I was never told that Science isn’t just “gospel truths” like scriptures but instead (essentially) this growing body of peer reviewed papers that are used to form a shared understanding of the principles by which we believe the world works.
Meanwhile YT is swarmed with conspiracy theories almost daily, because it’s so fucking easy to make a stupid shocking conspiracy video.
The depressing thing is that people really do genuinely believe this nonsense, and it is the source of much despair in their lives.
Not being a religious person, I classify religious beliefs on the same level as conspiracy theories. Except that, most of the older ones have been refined by religious scholars over centuries to at least be interpreted in socially advantageous ways.
For example regarding climate change: you can construct an argument around the ridiculous idea that scientists are somehow taking on the worldwide fossil fuel industries, and the most powerful and ruthless countries on earth, including the US, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, and they are doing this because by inventing a lie about the earth warming up. The very lopsided power dynamics in this scenario expose the conspiracy theory for the farce that it is.
You can read a bit about it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_deficit_model
Everything through the grant applications, working with different industries and government groups, presenting our results. Everything ended up being political.
Our data ended up being locked behind a paid government database against the approved plan in our grant application. This came shortly, coincidentally after we ended up discovering an endangered species in an area they hadn't been found before near an active mine site.
I also seen first hand as a wetland restoration project was carried out for absolutely no reason after water samples in a lake pointed to the town golf course being the problem.
Sampling was immediately stopped, there was no more talk of the golf course and a project was approved to mitigate lake pollution by building a wetland on the opposite side of the lake away from the golf course.
Tens of thousands of dollars were wasted on this project. The lake's just as polluted as ever. But the town council just couldn't not have the greenest, green on their golf course.
The whole actual issue was fertilizer run off from the course and it was totally ignored.
Now the average Joe is pretty fucked, so blaming someone else is a successful strategy.
The promise of prosperity sounds like a long con these days. Science was the gateway for prosperity and hope and now it seems only to deliver bad news.
Here is what the tech and science crowd is projecting these days:
You are no longer the center of the universe, you are infinitesimal and unimportant.
Everything you do is destroying life in someway.
There is no meaning; everything you believe was wrong and misguided.
The world is capricious and your personal security can change at any moment no matter how hard you work. Adapt or die.
Most of humanity is too dumb to understand how great this is!
Who wants to hear that?
The average Joe has lost all faith, so in order to cope they drop all pretense of rational behavior and go with what feels good at the moment.
Science is telling people that everyone driving 20k miles per year in large individual vehicles and flying to a tropical island twice a year for vacation will eventually result in altering the parameters of nature so that it’s no longer possible to do that.
People don’t want to hear that, but they need to hear that. Covering their ears and going lalalala isn’t going to exempt their kids from the future. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem most people are adult enough to face the music.
The first restriction is so alien to much of the population as to be meaningless, the second is a threat to their livelihoods. An accompanying promise of public transit rings hollow for many Americans, who think of their local governments as only marginally competent enough to fill potholes in the road sometimes.
Naturally people will bristle at the abstract of many climate restrictions. Not because the fun will stop, but because they aren't having any fun in the first place, and they just don't want things to get less fun than that.
Then the problem is not that people don't understand the science, it's that profit-seeking entities pay money to muddy the waters and people whose paycheck depends on the non-acceptance of the truth choose to believe the convenient lie.
Worse, because it then becomes a political issue, the side that was originally right starts to fight anyone who says anything at all convenient to the other tribe, even if it's correct.
So you lose the ability to do good science because both sides are polluted by politics and money.
Both socially and economically, the average American was doing ok then compared to today.
Although it must also be said: norms and laws around same sex marriage and Drugs were different too, so this analysis certainly leaves out those parts of American society affected by them.
The legacy of the unfinished great society, the accommodation of racists and poor infrastructure choices is already haunting us.
With society and the economy completely dependent on science to function, doing science now has a certain speaking truth to power aspect, in that scientific results can threaten wealthy established interests. This does not make science entirely popular among the kind of people who write the mental firmware for the 'America first' crowd.
Several large piles of money have waged deliberate campaigns against public faith in the results of the scientific process [0], and this will certainly have had an impact on public faith in science.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/big-tobacco-kept-cancer-risk-in...
An excert: < "“Whatever the reason we first mustered the _Apollo_ program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of _Apollo_. What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival.
Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again.”
Manuscript: https://www.loc.gov/item/cosmos000039
"Anti-science" is just a propaganda term extremists accuse each other of being. It's a very easy tell.
Nobody is against science. What people fight about is politics. "Man can be a woman", "climate science", "masks vs no masks", "lockdowns", etc are not scientific issues, it's political issues.
"Educate more" wouldn't help because it's not a matter of science, but politics. And there are plenty of educated people on both sides.
Also, when a political group tries to use science to push their agenda, people should be wary. Pretty much all the genocides and horrors of the past 200 years have been a result of politicized science. People forget that modern white supremacy, nazism, communism, etc are all a result of politicized science. People who use terms like anti-science today are the same people who accused supporters of racial equality as being anti-science 100 years ago.
And it's been my experience that people who accuse other people of being "anti-science" have no background in science or understand the history of science. They are just political extremists who undeservedly wrap themselves around the good name of science as if it were a flag to attack their political opponents.
The problem is climate policy determines climate science.
> I also think the blame for that can be placed squarely with those who have chosen to attack institutions of scientific truth
"Institutions of scientific truth". Sounds rather orwellian, but yours is a form of appeal to authority. Institutions don't determine "scientific truth", experiments do.
> because they are opposed to policy that might result from what is clearly true.
Spoken like a true believer.
> Blame the politicization of "science" on the pro oil propagandists that put in the effort to make it that way
Enough blame to go around. And you aren't any better than the oil propagandists.
> The naive "pro-science" stance is a reaction.
Yes. Oil companies funded the oil propagandists. Who is funding the "green" propagandists. I wonder?
Now, society is getting back to explore science more and more, but with a better, lasting attitude. See, for example, Space X. Likely, they'll send someone to Mars without deaths or even huge accidents that could only be justified by a lack of financial responsibility in NASA's early days.
I think it’s premature to claim SpaceX will make it to Mars without deaths. They’ve only done two manned space flights to LEO at this point. While it does appear to be easier, cheaper, and safer to send people to space, sending people to Mars has never done before. It is going to be extremely dangerous.
I’m not sure NASA was financially irresponsible. They were doing things for the first time. Mistakes are going to be made, lessons were learned. That’s even true of SpaceX.
If your prediction that SpaceX gets people to mars with no deaths turns out to be true it will be because of NASA, not in spite of them.
All launches of Mercury era rockets had non-crewed test flights of the spacecraft. And they were on proven boosters. One benefit of using ICBMs is they start out autonomous.
Both launch vehicles for Gemini (Atlas and Titan) were again completely autonomous because they were ICBMs. They were tested and proven before astronauts flew them.
The first Saturn V launch was not crewed.
As I understand all US spacecraft were largely autonomous, especially in the boost phase.
SpaceX has refined that to automate docking but it’s not new.
Societal policy and morality were issues for politicians and priests, scientists (though they did occasionally chime in). The USSR's technological progress served as a constant reminder that science was an epistemological tool, and not a teleological one.
The public was also directly downstream from the benefits of scientific advancement. Microwave ovens, color televisions, better engine, cheap refrigeration, the increasing ubiquity of plastics, and the jobs they all brought with them were conspiring to raise the American standard of living by leaps and bounds over a short period of time, and automating away many of life's greatest inconveniences. Almost every technological leap raised the tide of human experience, and every boat was lifted along with it.
Science was also the bulwark between the country, and the USSR. The advent of the nuclear bomb showed us how awesomely destructive and game changing a technological advance could be in the field of war. By the mid fifties, it was generally understood that if the US didn't have a riposte for every possible Soviet weapon, then the US could not continue to exist.
Scientific advancement was material, it was flashy, you could touch it. Rocket engines propelled humans beyond heights previously imagined, and jets shrank the world exponentially. Helicopters flew unlike anything we'd ever seen before, and even primitive computers performed mathematical calculations on their own with unprecedented speed and efficiency.
Today, science has advanced much more subtly, especially since the maturation of the microprocessor in the mid 2010s. Many of our physical advancements are refinements to technologies established in the 50s and 60s, rather than fantastical new applications of hitherto unknown physical phenomena.
Advances in material sciences and automation offer large increases in performance for industrial applications, but at the potential cost of employment, in exchange for often only marginal increases at the high-end of consumer products.
The lion's share of consumer-facing advancements in automation in particular, has been developed to manipulate, cajole, and to track our every choice. Our refrigerators remind us we need milk, our coffee makers try to protect us from unlicensed nonproprietary coffee blends. We can't share what we buy, because new technology ensures that we can only license. Every minor convenience we receive is another bar in a gilded cage being constructed around us.
More transformative advances are so abstract as to be inapplicable to the average person's life, too expensive to leveraged, or squirreled behind the closed doors of military and industry.
Scientifically sound advice for society is no longer liberating. Stay indoors, don't work. Get rid of your cars, they're bad for the earth. The words of scientists anymore often advise caution and restriction.
Science is now less often treated as a tool, and more a cudgel to justify social and economic policies. Politicians will launder their beliefs policies through lopsided studies to give their ideologies an air of impenetrable objectivity
A large handful of the population has sought to fill the existential/moral/purposeful void in their lives by looking to our scientists and technologists as if it were a new church. This is perhaps inspired by the legends of 20th century scientists, and profundities of great scientific communicators such as Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
These people tend to be incapable of differentiating between a scientifically sound policy regime meant to fulfill goals that align with their value system, and 'the will of science'.
Others, objecting to these policy regimes, not knowing better, assume these people are right about the 'will of science', and throw the baby out with the bathwater, rejecting scientific knowledge outright, ignoring that nothing about science as an epistemological framework is reasonably morally prescriptive.
'Science says' has become shorthand for _"A group of academics or liberals want this, they think they know how they can get there, no it's not up for debate'_. So most people who don't believe in a neoliberal future ignore, reject, and sneer at the use of the term.
Through all these things, the brand of 'science' has been diluted, and tarnished to the point where much of the population no longer takes it seriously. Especially since 'science based' policies are occasionally accompanied by white lies meant to coerce people into behaving a certain way.
Instead we have a POTUS constantly downplaying the threat, accusing China of being responsible for deliberately infecting the rest of the world with this (supposedly nonexistent?!) threat and masking is seen as treading “freedoms”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_crisis
The common enemy went from Anarchism (WWI) to Communism (WWII) to Terrorism (WoT), but now it's each other; the Left's common enemy is the Right, and vice versa. I'll let the reader surmise where that will lead.
The common enemy of both is the moderate in the middle who prefers rational discussion to confrontation.
In my experience, a moderate is a conservative in all things that effect them, and a liberal for anything else.
Most moderates I know revile anything that might effect change, until it effects change. And once the change is implemented, they bristle at anything that might change that.
No political block gets to claim the province of rationality in a world where political disputes are as much about values as they are about coherent policies.
A hypothetical moderate might believe all of the following:
* Gay marriage should be illegal
* Abortion should be legal
* Firearm rights are important
* Taxes on large businesses and wealthy people should be much higher
* NATO should be scrapped
* The USA should bomb Iran and Syria
* Free markets are good
* Free trade is bad
This person has too many strong and politically diverse viewpoints to consistently back either major US party, and ends up voting based on whichever candidate most effectively signals alignment with the small number of policies the “moderate” voter currently feels most strongly committed to.
It’s easy for someone to come across as a “moderate” if they have a different primary motive for policy preference. A devout catholic might believe that both abortion and firearm ownership should be strictly forbidden, which is hard to fit into either party platform. Someone with a commitment to individual liberty might support gay marriage, unrestricted abortion access, drug legalization, free markets, free trade, and low taxes; very hard to reconcile with a party platform.
While obviously a generalization, this is very insightful. I never thought of this before, and I admit I might be a moderate.
Which is why center is loosing alot. Except in presidential elections, IMO both Biden and Obama are center by any reasonable definition. Even Clintons were center, but she lost, so.
These days science is viewed as a means to various ends. These ends are all wonderful...eliminate poverty, curtail climate change, cheaper energy, etc. But what's missing is the idea of doing something for the sake of doing it. It's not totally clear what landing on the moon or maintaining a space station really accomplished in terms of material goals. They're glorious accomplishments because of their difficulty.
I think that attitude is what's missing. Listening to JFK's "we will go to the moon" speech is almost unbelievable today. Politicians of either party absolutely cannot talk like that today.
Post-moon, human spaceflight programs seem to be have been largely directionless. The early space stations were probably originally meant as a stepping stone to developing orbital habitation, but the fact that we haven't really expanded much further makes it look more like faffing about. The US developed the space shuttle with the intention of building a low-cost, human-driven satellite launch and servicing service, but the only real success it had there was the Hubble. Instead, a lot of the real purpose probably lies more in geopolitical goals: the US-USSR cooperation helped drive some amount of detente. The ISS in particularly was driven in large part by a desire to keep ex-Soviet rocket engineers gainfully employed and not seek employment with rogue states looking to rapidly develop a missile program.
There's a reason we talk about the Space Race and not the International Geophysical Year. Popular and political support for the Apollo and predecessor programs were ultimately driven by the geopolitical goals, and once the Space Race had been "won," that support dwindled to the normal, pitiful scientific research levels. Spaceflight and space research reverted to just being yet another scientific field trying to catch a few drips of the governmental funding pipeline. It's the sad truth here.
This isn't to say that all science is driven by geopolitics. A lot of high-energy physics research isn't, for example (although supporters of the SCC did try to frame cancelling it thusly to try to preserve its funding, though they ultimately failed).
Retroactively misattributing human action to fulfill a moral narrative produces a distorted view of the world, conducive to making dangerously naive mistakes.
That the space program was a friendly front for a highly visible ICBM program doesn't negate the glorious achievement of reaching the moon.
Not everyone working on the space program particularly cared about missiles. I'm certain most of them probably just wanted to reach the moon in the spirit of patriotism and scientific advancement. Their victory was pure. We just shouldn't pretend that their project was only facilitated due to a confluence of circumstances that made it a political necessity.
Friedman, and Zeihan have both proven very prescient over the last decade or so.
Besides, I hardly think there's a lot of latitude for interpretation. As far back as 1958 the USAF was mulling over nuking the moon as a show of force with incidental scientific ramifications. Sagan was involved in it. [0]
I think willfully ignoring those parts of the story stretch credulity within the context where the events of the space race happened borders on historical revisionism for the sake of creating a moral parable about the virtues of human endeavor.
Is there any documentation of this?
Climate change is also a similarly difficult problem, but neither of this gives a Hollywood movie style ending in a capsule format the “we are the greatest” crowd really wants - not just America though . Humility, empathy, and non-military-gained peace doesn’t give a movie style ending.
This is also why the mass public doesn’t give credit to leaders for solving issues though diplomatic means
The point about JFK’s moon speech is that it was justifying an endeavor that was a hard challenge without any particularly useful outcome. Nobody thought it was going to solve world hunger or prevent an energy crisis.
It would be like Trump giving a speech to justify sending astronauts on a trip around Venus. It’s super difficult and mostly useless scientifically.
Based on my reading of history, it seems unlikely that this day will ever come through voluntary means, so I wonder if it could be brought about organically via incremental improvements. I wonder what percentage of people can agree on the general notion of whether the aggregate actions of the media divides people, for now completely leaving aside whether this is intentional or not. It would be fun and informative if HN had polls on questions like this, and perhaps could even lead somewhere.
> It makes me think the solution to today's anti science bias isn't just "educate more".
I agree. It's weird how outside of technology and science, we insist on coming up with solutions before even trying to analyze what the problem is, while simultaneously complaining about people being anti-science.
Framing it as a competition for supremacy against other countries really seemed to get people with different political views to unite.
I'm not advocating for returning to the political and social climate of the 50's and 60's, there's a lot of obvious problems in that time period too. But it was striking to realize how intertwined politics, society, and science was, and still is.
It makes me think the solution to today's anti science bias isn't just "educate more".