longer.blue

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/markfabian.bsky.social/post/3lvfnwv5jcc22 "Once you notice this pattern you see it everywhere." I not only agree with your general sentiment: it's so much worse than this! A noteworthy attack on it will require extremely drastic measures. "The profit motive is indifferent to truth; what matters is whether it pays." It's not simply profit. First, there's the technicality that in a strict economic sense, non-profit organizations are involved in this. Second, at least with the profit motive, there's still quite a strict limit to bullshitting: if you promote too much crap, your won't strike the right balance of income and expenditure, even if you split up your market across people differentially receptive to different kinds of bullshit. You'll get laughed at. What we actually see is business getting run into the ground. Our economies aren't even so much about maximizing short-term profits, unless higher management pay packets count towards that. It's at root political, mainly driven by the most powerful political influencers, which also drives the massive poisoning of scientific discourse (compounded by popular science). I continue to point at Bennett & Hacker's "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience" as evidence for widespread and stubborn conceptual confusions, and psychology also has tons of those hiding in methodology and epistemology. p<0.05 was until recently far too widespread a meme! I don't mean that the situation's hopeless. My view's still more pessimistic than one expressed in Sanbonmatsu et al 2025 https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2025-71528-001.html but like them, I see no hard blocker to us gaining good insight. But we need independence from the interests of at least most ruling-class people, at least most of those who want to be rulers, and at least most of any lackeys of both. And the independence has to be in every politically-relevant way, including economically and intellectually. But more worryingly, there actually IS a care for truth with or without the profit motive, but it's only there because it's subordinate to a motive to spread crucial lies. Many awful ideas not only have grains of truth in them so that they pass enough smell tests from enough philosophers, scientists and journalists. These ideas' defenders also often use broadly true premises and trustworthy science to hide the lies. For example, they'll draw silly conclusions from undisputed data, though they probably won't look silly to most (see above). This is encouraged at various distances on purpose. Careerists get their bag. "So once an incorrect idea is commercial, correcting it based on updated science is very hard." It's even harder if it's politically and/or philosophically fashionable, not just because that stuff's highly commercializable. "Incidentally, this is why we should discourage people from writing pop books based on 5 year old science. Your critics haven't had time to write their responses yet." We have to at the very least strongly encourage writers to say "THIS IS CUTTING-EDGE SCIENCE AND THE STATE OF THE ART POSITIONS ARE CONTROVERSIAL AND ALSO SUBJECT TO CHANGE" without letting them even dogwhistle "you know what the reality is" through at most hiding the winks and nudges behind heaps of straw man considerations of limitations.