As Max Planck observed: "Science progresses one funeral at a time".
And really, the same can be said for political beliefs.
Humans are stubborn creatures that stratify power. Death has always been the great equalizer. But perhaps soon, no longer.
Politics is treated by most people as essentially a religion. And religion does not progress with death. It just cycles through periods of greater fundamentalism and less fundamentalism.
There aren't enough people studying political science and studying it rigorously enough for the Planck observation to apply.
Religion is also a human endeavor full of interests, and can also ascertain certain truths. Often people who subscribe to scientism gloat that even in the farthest reaches of space, other aliens will arrive at the same equations. Similarly, I think at the farthest reaches of space aliens will have to reckon with wickedness, duty, hospitality, forgiveness, etc. It can even make numerical predictions like "there will always be the poor". So far so true.
There are reasonable things to say about science, but the anti-objectivity bit was an attempt to undermine science and reduce opposition to political rule by fiat. The rise in authoritarian rhetoric and beliefs is why we're seeing the anti-science and anti-expert ideas become fashionable again.
Notice that the anti-expert/anti-intellectual/anti-science people always have something else they're selling you that conflicts with the experts/intellectuals/science.
Anyway, good luck.
The tobacco-funded studies that failed to prove cigarettes harmful? Those were scientists doing "objective methodology." Pharmaceutical companies suppressing unfavorable trials? Scientists. The replication crisis? Scientists following the same process.
These aren't exceptions. They show that science is a human practice embedded in institutional and economic contexts.
Acknowledging that science involves human interests doesn't undermine it. It's how you maintain critical perspective when bad actors claim scientific authority. Or should I trust the current experts that Tylenol causes Autism?
Also I really dislike the categorisation into scientists and non-scientists, this really makes science sound like a dogma. I prefer inventors, pioneers, or simply curious people.
Which these stem cells, if they pan out, very specifically fix
I have never seen someone which is left on the political spectrum at 30 become a Keynesian by 50.
I know such people exist, but they are the exception.
Personality psychology shows personality does not change much after 30.
And there is even some theories such as the “impressionable years” (15-25) which are even more extreme in that respect, stating that basically very little changes after 25.
Overall this makes me doubt stem cells can change any of this.
But I am myself way past my impressionable years, my mental flexibility is lessened, I may be wrong and not open to new ideas.
It would feel sad though, having civilisation lead by the same people over hundreds of years if not more, somewhat stratified, predictable, dull.
Yes that was obvious in your first post.
Feyerabend was writing during the cold war and was influenced by Marx (an authoritarian) and Marxist critiques of science promoted by the Soviets at the time. You get the same threads running through people like Kuhn and Popper.
The backdrop of these ideas is that the authoritarian Soviet state wanted to undermine faith in science within the US for the same reason it wanted to undermine democracy. They also wanted to promote the idea of alternative views of science at home because Soviet science was constrained by needing to be consistent with Marx. These ideas percolated for a few decades as propaganda before people like Feyerabend gussied them up and tried to publish them as academic works.
First, state communists kill anarchists. That's history.
Second, the Soviets were incredibly dogmatic about science because they used it to justify their materialist ideology. They promoted Lysenkoism (fake genetics) to conform to Marxist doctrine. That's literally the opposite of epistemological questioning.
Third, claiming Kuhn and Popper were Soviet mouthpieces is unhinged. Popper wrote "The Open Society and Its Enemies" as an anti-communist text. Kuhn taught at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton. They were Western academics, not agents.
You've gone from defending naive scientism to claiming anyone who critiques it is a communist propagandist. That's McCarthyism, not an argument.
The problem you're facing is you don't believe in any sort of objective reality so you're acting as if ideas are about which team you're on instead of how they relate to the truth.
We see your other posts where you're asking why murdering your enemies isn't okay and promoting conspiracy theories. I don't have to imagine who you are, you've told us.
Sigh this is the most annoying thing on the internet. It's like every online debate a leftist post-structuralist has to say "nuh uh actually everything is relative because it's all about structure and there's no objective truth man." It's a lazy critique. You can aim post-structuralist critique at literally anything. You're right, science is an artifact of the society it's in, and actually society is based on the Wim Hof breathing technique so really science is in service of Wim Hof Breathing. You can't argue with me because everything is relative and based on structures and Wim Hof breathing is the root of all social structure.
If you're going to trot out a post-structuralist critique, build an alternate theory, don't just pick an argument apart. I'm hardly the first person to note this continental Leftist weakness. Zizek has written about this extensively. I don't need to believe in Soviet conspiracy theories to think your argument is weak.
It's furious cherry picking. The scientific consensus is that cigarettes are harmful, the globe is warming, Tylenol DOES NOT cause autism, etc.
This is, ironically, an absurd echo of every autocrat's self-defense. "It is just the commies/right-wingers who hate our Dear Leader and want to undermine his benevolent authority for their own nefarious purposes."
Scientists are humans, prone to every vice that plagues humanity: jealousy, lust for power, greed, willingness to bend data to make their theory work, plagiarism, and, lately, blatant misuse of AI without even acknowledging it aloud.
The scientific community absolutely needs both internal self-policing, external policing, and mechanisms that limit abuse of power by the elders against their subordinates, or it will lose the necessary integrity and thus also any trust of the outsiders.
If you deny this, you basically deny humanity of everyone involved. And I say this as a former young scientist with a PhD from algebra. I have seen enough, with my own eyes.
I have no problem with you "drawing everyone's attention" to the fact that I think so. Indeed I consider the above to be self-evident, because humans aren't angels.
Maybe you confuse policing with censorship or political pressure? That is not the same thing.
"The rest is just rhetoric."
Nope, you just prefer to ignore the 800 pound gorilla in the room whose name is "replication crisis". Partly caused by outright fraud.
I think it's nonsense. Society is the way it is because of the prevailing conditions. We haven't really had to deal with getting rid of dead wood in science because death always did that anyway, if death goes away then we'll just adapt. That witticism from Planck is just an observation of the times, not some universal, uh, constant.
> There is plenty of reason to welcome death
Maybe we should welcome it even faster then! If death speeds up science so much, then maybe society shouldn't provide health care to scientists at all. In fact maybe we should euthanize all scientists at age 50 - or earlier. Right?
If the answer is "No, they don't," then it follows that part of progress is newer generations moving into positions of authority and bringing their new ideas with them.
Which closes the circle, nature already invented all that: your kids are a version of you that's free from both the baggage of harmful mutations and the baggage of harmful presuppositions.
Not at all clear to me why we want to reinvent an inferior version of this process, it works remarkably well.
That sounds like something that someone who is not open to change would say.
Not all change is worth accepting, but if I'm wrong about this one my death will eventually put an end to me being wrong.
It's not scary to make a mistake if any decision you make is temporary anyhow. Knowing that I die no matter what I do with my life gives me so much more freedom in how I can live it.
The second sentence deserves some response, but I don't know what to make of it. Mistakes are good, surely? More mistakes faster. Well, I suppose you mean something like life-ruining mistakes, but in the first place I'm not sure there really can be any - unless you have a low threshold for "ruined" - and in the second place, immortality gives you endless hope of staging a comeback.
Literally everyone operates within some framework of unprovable dogmas to be able to tell good from evil and to decide how to act. Accepting that fact is a IMO a better path than striving for some sort of non-existent objective skepticism (but that's only better within my framework of what better is, of course).
And surely I worry whether I'm right, and all the time. It's just that when I worry and estimate the expected value of my decisions, I don't get NaNs and INFs. My life is not infinitely valuable to me, engaging in activities that involve possible loss of my life is often a good decision because the upside is good. That's largely true because I die anyway, I'm not sure the same calculations would hold if I were immortal.
UPD to respond to the second part that was added later
> Well, I suppose you mean something like life-ruining mistakes, but in the first place I'm not sure there really can be any - unless you have a low threshold for "ruined" - and in the second place, immortality gives you endless hope of staging a comeback.
It's remarkably easy to ruin your life by dying or getting a permanent disability. Would you climb a mountain with a risk of avalanches and rockfalls if you were otherwise immortal? Even commuting to work by bicycle becomes questionable, chances of getting hit by a car on a crossing are pretty high compared to taking the metro.
More to the point, you can refrain from being unnecessarily dogmatic. As I'm sure you do really. But that means anticipation of death, to wipe out your ideas, shouldn't diminish your will to filter them through argument or thought. It just acts as a safety mechanism against your possibly losing your grip on rationality and becoming an intransigent old nuisance, I suppose.
So the second point is that self-sacrifice is less expensive for the mortal. I guess that could be seen as a rather cold fact that a mortal person is less valuable. But immortal people could be hindered by being all neurotic about risks to their lives, if that even is how we make decision about self-sacrifice and mortal danger (however mild - germs?) ... but I suspect that isn't a calculation we'd do, even if immortal. I suspect the basis for these decisions is something different. This makes me scratch my head, I may come back to it.
I understand you're trying to perform reductio ad absurdum but I would like to point out that the proposition is less absurd than you make out.
E.g. if Ancel Keys died at 50 then health risks of sugar consumption would have been accepted by the scientific community decades earlier saving tens of millions of lives. I certainly don't suggest to euthanize anyone however I'm glad he died eventually. In fact I'm glad everyone dies eventually me included.
Now if my world model is correct, the immortal societies will see a decline akin to the Byzantine empire (which never actually declined, just progressed slower than it's neighbors). As the result they will either succumb and integrate into their mortal counterparts or perhaps continue existing like some sort of native tribal reservations. If I'm wrong, the inverse will happen.
In the end the more effective and stable socioeconomic model wins because it's the only thing that matters in the long run. It may take a while to reach the equilibrium though.
Only when painfully ill, this reverses old age symptoms correlated with some of those painful conditions.
> As Max Planck observed: "Science progresses one funeral at a time".
If the aphorism was causally true, Spanish Flu, the Nazi's death camps, and Pol Pot's Cambodia would've created a lot more science than they did.
Even for politics: the Holodomor didn't end Stalin; the deaths in WW1 didn't change the world order enough to prevent WW2.
It means something else. When old, entrenched scientists die, they lose their ability to prevent younger scientists from studying topics they personally don't like. Dead people cannot deny the living use of labs, grants etc.
Plenty of otherwise impeccable great minds died "stuck" on bad ideas. For example, the great German pathologist Rudolf Virchow utterly rejected the idea of archaic humans existing, and did his best to slow down the research on the Neanderthals etc.
Einstein himself rejected the quantum theory, though, to his credit, he didn't prevent others from studying it.
Ancel Keys, who lived to be almost 100, tried to destroy career of every nutritional scientist who toyed with the idea that saturated fats may not be the killers he pronounced them to be, and defended sugar from more scrutiny.
For example: History is written by the winner.
Certainly not true on its face. The South managed to convince people that the confederacy cause was noble. It certainly wasn't. They managed to reshape popular narrative.
"The South managed to convince people that the confederacy cause was noble. "
A certain percentage of people will believe in anything. Putin is a virtuous peacemaker, Nazis didn't murder people in industrial ovens, Stalin was a good person, the American Civil War wasn't about slavery, you name it.
That still does not negate the overall observation expressed in the aphorism: winners have a lot more clout when determining how the war will be seen by future generations. The percentage of Confederacy supporters in the Western civilization is fairly small. They may be visible, but the vast majority of the Western population, to the extent that they think of ACW at all, don't support the cause of continuing enslavement of blacks.
Anyway, aphorisms shouldn't be treated like mathematical theorems. Their validity isn't as "hard" as that of maths, but in human society, nothing is. Aphorisms are the sort of model which is "wrong, but sometimes useful".
I am not treating them as mathematical statement, I just don't take it for granted that these "aphorism" are in fact historical truth.
Cursory search of "winners write history" already reveal to me a far more complex and nuanced reality. Indeed, such a statement is considered harmful.
Maybe someone else can explain it better than I can.
even if not, the aphorism is not a necessity. scientific progress is a very soft thing anyway in most fields (medicine for example), and just because nowadays when the old guard dies off a new paradigm takes over doesn't necessarily mean that were the old guard alive there wouldn't be paradigm shifts!
simply accumulating the necessary data to convincingly be able to claim that the new model is better takes decades ... which conveniently coincidences with some old dog dying.
sure, likely if the old guard would be alive for a few more decades maybe they would insist on even more convincing data.
but that would at least help us to have better science!
and no one is prohibited from exploring applications of the new models before they became de facto dogma!
... and so on.
most of the time progress is limited by methods (data collection, precision - repeatability, and of course replicability), but those are usually limited by engineering, culture, funding, etc.
see the whole story with Alzheimer's and the first mouse model problem, and the failed clinical trials of various treatments, and ... despite all this how still we have no better idea, despite decades of effort!
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h...
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-of-mice-mechani...
Already when living to our 80s and 90s, we can see the top strata of the society (CEO level, Parliaments) overflowing with very old people who don't want to relax their grip on power. The current US Senate is older than the Brezhnev politburo, widely considered a gerontocracy, once was. It is the same elsewhere. Few powerful people are as self-aware as Benedict XIV. was, or their lust for power is simply too big.
In autocracies, people like Putin, Erdogan, Khamenei and Xi built very resilient systems that could support them for decades, if not centuries, and death is the only way that can reliably get them out of the way.
I suppose that not even the Americans would like to see various replays of Biden vs. Trump for several election cycles, and the Supreme Court is a veritable gerontocracy as well. If longevity research succeeds, the younger justices like Gorsuch and Barrett may well stay on the bench until 2070 or even longer, shaping rules for a world they will no longer understand.
If we ever are to achieve very long lives, we need to expand into the universe as well, so that the younger generations can build their own domains somewhere else, unburdened by the dictates of the old.
I always loved going into HN comments, because the insights you could read here were very often of better quality than linked sources.
Now it's mostly doom and despair
I really agree with you. I wish I could find somewhere with as many interesting people to discuss technology and/or science without so much pavlovian cynicism.
Accumulating traumas across an eternity would harm society
And I think it's unfair to reserve that for the wealthy, if anything, eugenics should determine who gains access, only the most genetically advantaged should be allowed, in an effort to protect and strengthen humankind
But I don't think our society is ready to have this discussion, hence why, aging and death should not be frowned upon
Because this technology won't be available to these raising the humanity, but to those ruthless.
I don’t see any problems. If you want to kill someone, go ahead, that’s between you and them and your reasons for thinking they should die at a certain age. But I have no qualms about anyone living longer, healthier lives. This includes you.
I'm at an age where many of my friends have died and many more soon will. Even in the most optimistic scenario this technology will not become normalized in my lifetime--and if it does become normalized there will be many undesirable consequences. In any case, global warming will destroy human civilization and this technology will die with it.
In fact, even in our world, age-related death is an evolved trait, this isn't something obvious but that's something that arised through the natural selection because it improves fitness.