Edmund Storms wrote:
Wow, we in CF are in excellent company.
Yes indeed! It gives me confidence.
However, I doubt anything will ever change.
Then I think you need to study history more carefully.
Arrogant skepticism is a fixed characteristic of human nature and is self selected in certain professions, especially the academic. This is something we all have to endure because it will not change no matter how much we point out the harm. Its like complaining about crime, which has no effect on the criminal.
Human nature is indeed fixed, but the expression of it varies from one society to another in one era to another. Obviously, complaining about crime has no effect on criminals, but other factors do. The crime rate waxes and wanes depending on all many complex factors.
Some of these factors are not known, but others are clear, and not so complex. For example, modern police forces, telephones and radios greatly reduced some kinds of urban crime in the U.S., such as mugging. In the 19th century, the per capita rate of muggings and robberies in places like Philadelphia was far higher than any place in the US today because there was no effective means of stopping it. That is to say, there was no way to call the police in time, or for one policeman to call another. Also, the police themselves were engaged in crimes, as they are today in Texas, where they routinely hold up loan motorists and steal thousands of dollars. (See http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/05/05/texas.police.seizures/) This kind of thing can be stopped, it has been stopped in the past.
By the same token, academic politics are inevitable, but the level of academic politics can be increased or decreased by making changes in academic institutions, funding mechanisms, government agencies and so on. The present system encourages corruption and politics at levels far higher than they were in 1880 or 1930. This is partly the result of rules put in place to prevent academic fraud, which resulted in micromanaging by government officials in Washington, and excessive peer review that results in plagiarism of new ideas by established scientists, and suppression of new ideas. We did not have these problems to this extent in the past and we will not necessarily have them in the future.
These problems are partly caused by the very high costs of some modern experiments. The book "The Hubble Wars" describes this. In the future, if society grows much wealthier than the cost of research relative to other things may fall and the problems may abate.
Increased wealth and relative changes in monetary value have also reduced some forms of crime, such as pickpocketing. People seldom carry cash, and there is no point to stealing watches or even iPods these days because the resale value at pawnshops and fences are so small. To give a gruesome example, during Napoleonic wars wounded soldiers routinely robbed of their watches and money by stretcher bearers and hospital attendants. Officers never carried their watches into battle, for fear of losing them. A good watch was worth thousands of dollars by today's standards. By WWI and WWII this problem vanished because a wristwatch was hardly worth stealing, and soldiers did not need to carry around much money to get food and clothing. Taking wristwatches from captured enemy soldiers (and dead enemy soldiers) was still popular, but that was more for a a souvenirs than for the monetary value of the watch.
The human heart will never change, and people will always be as evil as they are, but in the future I expect nearly all crime will be eliminated by technology, because no one wants to be robbed and the means of preventing it will become very cheap and reliable. I discussed this in the book. The combination of artificial intelligence and cold fusion energy will allow guardian robots of various sizes and descriptions that will prevent breaking and entering, fires, or small children wandering off unattended. Such events can be prevented by technical means. We have already seen the first stage of this technology in the form of electronic monitoring ankle bracelets.
- Jed
