I have mixed feelings about this, but suffice to say it's very worth reading.
Edward Luce has made the point about public spending on research before. I know that's a subject that features heavily in the lives of a lot of hubskiers who have to pursue grants.
One of the quickest ways to determine if someone is talking out of his ass is to look for new definitions of existing terms. "The Golden Quarter?" Check. It's also expedient to find contradictory, poorly-understood concepts paraded as fact. Chernobyl killing "only dozens?" Check. I'll be honest - lately I've become hypersensitive to "Rule Britannia bullshit" because all of my historical reading has led me to believe that the British deservedly assed themselves out of the 20th Century for perpetuating the same imperialist bullshit they've been guilty of since fuckin' Henry VIII. So when I see someone whinging about the Concord and Babbage's difference engine, I know I'm reading a stupid limey fuck trying to reconcile himself to the fact that his nation's greatest exports of his generation are Amy Winehouse and Gordon Ramsay. But hey. That's not their fault and I'd be bitter, too. So rather than shit all over this in a truly annoying and unreadable fashion, allow me to simply point out that it's called the "Golden age of Capitalism" for a reason, that being that feeding the world's economy steroids is gonna be great until it develops acne, boobs and inappropriate facial hair then suddenly starts acting aggressive and beats up the 3rd world. The "war on cancer" was a brand name created by the Laskerites in defiance of the majority of the scientific community. Yes, drugs take longer to come to market these days but that also helps prevent another thalidomide or Vioxx. My own aunt is alive now, where she wouldn't have been in 1971, because Hodgkin's Lymphoma was essentially untreatable until 1974. "Golden rice?" Please. The fact of the matter is the world food system has been stretched to the breaking point ever since the green revolution. Hedgerow to Hedgerow wasn't about progress it was about economic warfare against the USSR. Which is gone, by the way. And the developing world is doing way the fuck better now than in 1971. Thailand is the hard drive capital of the world. Wanna see Kuala Lumpur in 1971? And I love, by the way, that he brings up curing smallpox but not chicken pox, hepatitis or malaria. I'm as cranky a futurist as anyone. Crankier than most, in fact. But whenever I see someone bitching about the Concorde no longer flying I know I'm listening to someone who has never internalized the fact that British Airways couldn't find enough people to pay $14k per seat to keep it in the air. And that most countries wouldn't allow overflights because they were noisy enough to break windows. I mean, I own this. and with it, the entire sales package Boeing was using to sell the 2707 to airliners. And I gotta say: from an engineering standpoint, supersonic transport makes a shit ton of sense when gas is damn near free and noise standards don't exist. But we don't live in that world anymore. We never really did, once you get rid of the externalities and start accounting for true costs. The British Empire was pretty shitty for most of the non-British world. And I understand that it sucks being British these days. I wouldn't live there. But it's no reason to bitch about the kids on your lawn. On a free, worldwide communication system that updates instantly and is searchable via plaintext from a computer small enough to fit in your pocket. That you bought for less than the cost of a transatlantic flight. Which has dropped in real cost by a factor of two since that magic era you're lamenting.The Expert Group concluded that there may be up to 4 000 additional cancer deaths among the three highest exposed groups over their lifetime (240 000 liquidators; 116 000 evacuees and the 270 000 residents of the SCZs). Since more than 120 000 people in these three groups may eventually die of cancer, the additional cancer deaths from radiation exposure correspond to 3-4% above the normal incidence of cancers from all causes.
Let me rephrase - if you were to devil's advocate against your own argument, what examples would you use to prove that progress has stalled? One point in the Aeon article is that on the surface, a lot of technologies fundamental to the 20th century are about the same as they always were. Cars, planes, tv, radio -- all radically improved, but without the "paradigm shift" factor. Even more basic stuff, lifestyle stuff, furniture, appliances, homes.
I'd probably point to the 1971 Dodge Charger And the 2015 Dodge Charger. I mean - cars is cars is cars. They're both Dodges, they're both ugly, they're both expensive. But the comparison doesn't hold up. For one thing, you really gotta fuck up to not walk away from a wreck in the 2015. The '71 had a steering column that would impale you like a bug. The '15 has eleventy seven airbags and shoulder belts for everyone. The '15 also makes like 700HP and 31MPG. The '71 got 16 with a tailwind and 400HP running voodoo 104 octane nuke gas. And the '15 is a primitive slug by any automotive standards. It's still running pushrods, FFS. Here's the thing: the advances of the 20th century were mechanical. You can look at a typewriter from 1915 and a typewriter from 1955 and go "we've come a long way, baby." It's all right there. Your average male could look under the hood of a '71 Dodge and have a pretty good idea what everything was and what it did. The '15? Find the spark plugs in this picture: So yeah - mechanical advancement hooah. But if I show you an NE5534N... next to a Westmere EP... One of them has more pins. But the NE5534 is a quad op amp. The Westmere is a 12 core workstation processor. And if electronics isn't your thing, it doesn't look like "progress." I think that the 20th century saw an improvement in mechanical things that any casual observer could tell was going from zero to sixty pretty damn quick. I think that if you aren't really big into electronics, the distance between a Motorola Startac and an iPhone seems like a big phone to a little one but it's hella more than that. And I think what you linked to is a variation on "we can put a man on the moon but we can't cure the common cold" which just illustrates that the speaker doesn't understand that the Apollo program was essentially Robert Goddard plus money, energy and trial and error while one of the guys who discovered DNA is still fucking lecturing. I mean, take a breath. Your phone can give you directions because it leverages general fucking relativity. Your TV is thin and flat because it has the same shit as the surface of the sun instead of an electron tube. And you can get a fucking status report on the diseases and shit you're likely to face in your life for $99 online. Fuck your paradigm shift. 20 years ago neither you nor I would ever meet, let alone read this article, let alone argue about it. Take a step back to 1971 and imagine the fucking Khan Academy. Yeah, motorcycles still have two wheels. Your computer still has a QWERTY keyboard. But I said "okay, Google, take me home" yesterday to an empty car and got turn by turn directions to my house from the very fucking building I was in. Maybe a toaster doesn't need a paradigm shift. To add: No animosity towards you or anyone here. The argument just gets to me sometimes.
Unfortunately, the 23andMe $99 DNA kit doesn't offer any health screening information anymore. It's just an ancestry service now, after getting nailed by the FDA for failing to prove the reliability of their claims about their "medical devices" which these kits are now considered. And looking around for some more services is kind of confusing. Searching by genetic tests, DNA screening kits, etc. results in articles discussing the FDA's recent crackdown. I say this not to dispute your point, but I was seriously curious about getting a peak into my health through one of these tests and now you can't seem to do it.
We did one that costs like $2400 because we got it free from one of Deb's reps. That one was about screening for Down's and the like. Interestingly enough, they could tell us what chromosomes they found but refused to sex the fetus because they hadn't been approved for that by the FDA.
Question: is it possible for me to agree with all of the specific criticisms you just made^, and still agree with Tyler Cowen that innovation is on the decline? ^part of the reason they were so easy to make: this writer is not very smart, and chose very bad examples (what the fuck was he on about w/Chernobyl?)
Progress usually seems to be a kind of punctuated equilibrium. The amount we know about the fundamental processes behind these technologies has accumulated just as quickly as it ever has (quite a bit faster, actually). The problem is that paradigm shifts, huge leaps forward in viable applications of theoretical understanding, requires a relatively full set of knowledge. If you're working towards the next big thing, knowing 95% of what you need to know is, to the general public, as good as knowing 5% of what you need to know. Ultimately, it's not enough. So you build your body of knowledge, learn more and more and more about the world, keep refining what you can refine, and maybe 5% of what you learn is applicable at the time. And then, after a long, gradual process, the applications come about in abundance. If it takes, say, 100kJ/mol of energy for some chemical reaction to take place, the difference between adding 10kJ/mol into the system and 90kJ/mol into the system 1. 80% of the total required energy
2. Completely indistinguishable as far as the result goes (they both fail completely to initiate the reaction) The difference between 99kJ/mol and 100kJ/mol is 1. 1% of the total energy required
2. The difference between a failed reaction anda successful reaction It'll take 80 times as long to get from 10kJ to 90kJ assuming a constant rate of change, and you'll get the same outcome during that entire period, but the progress isn't being made any more slowly. Edit: Also, while the author of this article is a "science journalist," he's still a layperson with a profoundly shallow understanding of the technologies he's writing about. Just because a layperson doesn't see progress (or appreciate the progress they do see as significant) doesn't mean progress isn't being made.