Should we defund science? - Challenges of defunding the most dangerous force on the planet.

Defunding is too weak of a solution which will only cause minor inconvenience. We need restructure things so developing such evil technology like nuclear weapons isn't even an option.
TheRedChair said:
We already have Nations of this world that thinks Science is an abomination. Just wear a turban, believe in Sharia law and submit everything to your Sunni/ Shiite leader.

I'll stick with the science crowd... at least I know what hygiene is.
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Scientists didn't invent hygene you dumbass
 
Bumping this since I was thinking about this thread again when I was watching one of my Chinese cartoons where the story is they make a religion that enforces strict taboos on which sort of technology is legal which maintains power by distributing super-batteries made by their collaborators in space. If you fuck up with the taboos, then you don't get the batteries, therefore your country's economy is fucked.

Maybe it's even compatible with religion since all the imams and priests and pastors could tell their congregation which science is good (like running water and personal hygiene) and which science is bad (like all post-2000 computer technology, mRNA "vaccines", nuclear energy, etc.). We'd obviously have to abolish all forms of energy more advanced than primitive solar cells and ban all fossil fuels, nuclear energy, construction of any sort of power plant, etc. The people running the show could be a committee of AI programmed by the people who set this ideology in place to rule over us forever and ever while the public face are religious figures, celebrities (for the stupid), etc.

Unlike in that animu, we'd totally get rid of all the banned technology and not leave any way to rebuild it and we'd publically punish anyone into banned technology through mockery and silencing while rewriting the history books and culture to portray people like Dr. Fauci, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, George Soros, Yuval Noah Harari, etc. as akin to Hitler and the Nazis while also being insane lunatics like L. Ron Hubbard.

Could this actually work IRL if we wanted to abolish science?
 
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"Science" should be defunded in the sense that the government needs to get the hell out of it. Which is kind of a boring take, because at this point the government needs to get the hell out of nearly everything, but I'll take 2 seconds to briefly explain. When the government gives out "research grants," it incentivizes people to make up reasons why their research matters so that they can get money and clout on the taxpayer's dime. It doesn't matter if the research is actually useful or not as they will suffer no consequences either way.

This is how you end up with the paper mill of academia churning out heaps of garbage that no one even reads, and then taking it one step further and inventing whole swathes of "fields" like sociology that are not only useless, but worse than useless as their "findings" actively harm society and make everyone generally worse off. Plus a bunch of other obvious perverse incentives.

If research must be privately funded, then research will only get funded when someone thinks it actually has a chance at making some kind of concrete return on their investment. Skin in the game.
 
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Drain Todger said:
We can make that happen. You just have to give up your control over your money, which you could use to purchase things to harm other people with, and you must have the aggression forcibly stripped from you, because you can't be trusted with that, either.
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That probably is how they think of us. Frankly, looking around at how people reacted to covid, or a quick look at Reddit, I can see why they do.
Drain Todger said:
You have two choices. You can either live in the world we've made for you, bound by the chains of servility we place upon you, or you can act like a disobedient child and starve.
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The problem is that doing that to humanity stops it being humanity. They have this dystopian vision that they think will work if they just control enough, but it cannot work. The chaos IS what renews the species. Frank Herbert has this as a central theme in ‘dune.’ The idea that periods of chaos are inevitable for the survival and development of a society. This is shown with the Jihad Paul can’t avoid, but it’s also show in the past with the butlerian Jihad,

They think that if we are all just good little boys and girls it’ll all be ok, but it won’t. They fundamentally misunderstand ecological systems amd the fundamentally misunderstand humanity. We will end up like bananas, or a monoculture field.
There’s a great meme I can’t find with a wolf looking at a campfire of cavemen thinking ‘I’m hungry what could possibly go wrong’ then ‘ten thousand years later’ there’s a sad look pig with its teeth at funny angles wearing a party hat.
That’s what will happen to us. We have to retain some of the wildness to remain humanity. There is no point living if you’re captive and domesticated. Their goals are fundamentally flawed. They would be more effective long term if they put us literally back to the Bronze Age . Again.
Lemmingwise said:
Ever since I read the mote in god's eye,
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Such a good book.
The only thing that will save us without sending us back to the Bronze Age or killing ninety percent of us is a new frontier to explore. We have to start exploring space properly, and colonising worlds. We will either explode outwards or inwards.
I have a lot more thoughts on this, to do with information and it’s control, but that’s the gist of it. Space or bust, lads and lasses.
 
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byuu said:
Kids spending too much time on their smartphone is really horrible, we need to go back to the good old days where half the kids didn't survive past infancy.
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Only infant mortality can bring us back to sustainable population levels where I can have three yachts.
 
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Otterly said:
The only thing that will save us without sending us back to the Bronze Age or killing ninety percent of us is a new frontier to explore. We have to start exploring space properly, and colonising worlds. We will either explode outwards or inwards.
I have a lot more thoughts on this, to do with information and it’s control, but that’s the gist of it. Space or bust, lads and lasses.
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I used to be in favor of that, but then I realized the obvious--we have no control over people who go to other solar systems. If they wanted to, they could invent rogue AI or genetically modify themselves into bug-eating freaks subservient to the Galactic Economic Forum who BTW wants to "enlighten" all humanity. It seems like the sensible model is to forbid anything besides dumb AI from leaving this solar system, reinforced with cultural taboos and the threat of being instantly shot down by a swarm of missiles/drones. Even if you only picked true believers as colonists, the more solar systems settled by humans, the more chances things could go wrong, and there's no way to solve the problem besides mass murder so the best scenario is to not let it happen to begin with.

And while eventually you'd reach the limit of resources, with dumb AI you could gather the resources of other solar systems and add them to this solar system. Within one light year you can fit trillions of solar masses without it collapsing into a black hole and you could probably do some shit to keep Earth inhabitable (which would be a technology permitted only for the priestly caste controlling our system to prevent us from using technology like we use now).
 
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