longer.blue

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/reeserichardson.bsky.social/post/3lvm2uju4s22i The situation's much more dire than that, and I see only one way out for you guys now. Here's what I think it should involve: - MAXIMUM INDEPENDENCE of your funding, your supply networks of information, your publishing and your political defense. For example, don't naively take stats from governments. They have huge incentives to lie to the general public and release the really politically-sensitive stuff need-to-know. - COMPREHENSIVE INTELLECTUAL ATTACKS on the work of ambitious intellectuals favored by ascendant elites. That involves looking at work made by politically-minded people like the HBD folks, the weirdo scholars peddling those fundamental theories of the universe you hate, and painfully verbose pseudoscientists. You have to fully understand their work in scientific terms, drag any truth out of them, and ruthlessly attack any untruths and nonsenses. You should especially aim for the robustly political ones - they're by far the most ambitious. I'm currently building a list of examples and of candidate places to find them (DM me for what I have so far). But importantly, DO NOT TALK TO THEM. Don't even name them. They want you to do all of that so they can overwhelm you and control the discussion, just as a bunch of nearby trolls and political influencers taught them. You have to assess their research from from afar. Remember, this was NEVER a fair fight, and they often fight dirty. Save your charity for your intellectual honesty when discussing points they make - you must STILL be honest scientists, and the assholes know to lie rarely - and elsewhere, be ruthless. - INVOLVEMENT OF PASSIONATE, AMBITIOUS AND INTERDISCIPLINARY NERDS. Goes closely with the other two. Without those people, you're getting intellectually steamrolled, and your only company will be the frauds you're warning about. Everything you're lamenting is PLANNED AT VARIOUS DISTANCES, and fundamentally in line with political developments. If by "the scientific enterprise" you mean what happens in its former academic strongholds which dominated intellectual discourse in the 19th and 20th centuries (and often before that), and grew dramatically in the 20th centuries, then ALL IS WORKING AS PLANNED. The low-hanging scammers you're angry with have been given free reign at various distances by awful managerial decisions, and those managers rose to the top because of elite plans, as I outline below this. The people making those decisions probably knew what would happen. The recent attacks on universities and their labs from that Orange Clown and his band of grinning thugs are not coincidental. Sure, it's a large section of the political "right" having some fun, but they're actually cashing in on a much larger investment. A very long-term and general political strategy is paying off big time, with the most ambitious intellectuals having already at least in part moved elsewhere if they didn't originate in academia, to think tanks, at-least-seemingly independent academia and more. Again, look at the HBD movement as an example. Same goes with so many other pseudoscientific trends. For crucial context, I'll give you an attempt of mine at a short history lesson. The bulk of your most powerful intellectual predecessors were mainly sited in northwest Europe and the USA. Those places were the main strongholds of what became today's prevailing academic culture. (As it happens, the Eugenics movement came from Britain and found solid support in the USA) The "fascists" (e.g. Nazis, Fascists, Francoists...?) and communists, both with strong roots in 19th century European academic culture, didn't find as much success in those strongholds despite their crazed efforts and the sympathizers they found. Large sections of the political classes across territories dominated by those movements hated each other. NW Euro and US powers had to fight them, at the very least in WW2 and the Cold War. They needed a lotta tech and managerial infrastructure to support it. And this came on top of perennial elite desires to immiserate and slaughter the lowest classes, who were larger in number than ever. So they opened up the universities in ways that got large sections of the middle classes on board. Not that they were going to arm the middle classes with any ideas that would help the masses, ESPECIALLY not the worst-off - the ones elites specifically set up their political systems to torture and kill off, "naturally" or through absurd ritualistic sacrifice. Why would they want anyone getting any "subversive ideas"? The revolutions of the 19th and early 20th century frightened them! They had to ruin the movements in every way: not just in terms of material resources, but in terms of intellectual resources too. In any event, none of the fun for some of the nerdier parts of the middle classes was meant to be forever. When aggressive "left" movements found their way into universities, elites knew they had to not be a problem, not just to ward off USSR influence. (As it happens, many of those movements were rotten from the start, already addicted to the guru worship they'd cultivated in the 19th century - just LOOK at the Marxists, with their sectarianism and their tendencies which bear the names of influential "comrades"!) Political influencers gradually suppressed, softly any dissenting radicals within and outside both "fash" and commie group, both softly and harshly. They used every tool available as appropriate for each case: killing, silencing, getting their secret services stuck in to alter how intellectuals grouped together, coopting the research process through allocating funding to politically-convenient projects and probably also poisoning supply networks of information... The remaining seemingly-radical intellectuals got coopted into one or more elite groups' plans. With the Soviets gone, and with managerial and communicative technologies (e.g. the internet, banking systems...) having enabled political influence over numbers of people at scales and granularities all unprecedented, the motive and means to kill off the middle class dream of 20th century academia both went into overdrive. This mirrors the general trend of the "rot economy", like in the tech industry. It's long been time to thoroughly backstab the "useful idiots" who thought incumbent and/or ascendant elites were on their side. Again, the most ambitious intellectuals are now outsiders to the core remnants of 20th century academia. Incompetent admin, bureaucrats and middlemen only worsen the decline. The heirs of the zeitgeist are the anti-"woke" assholes with intellectual heritage in "fascist" and Eugenics movements despite some of them calling themselves "centrist" and "liberal". They have ascendant elites' blessing: look at who the "PayPal Mafia" (e.g. Musk, Thiel) have been backing. They also boast and recruit no shortage of extremely ambitious nerds. And that "woke"/"cultural Marxism" thing you'll often hear them screaming about was and is PART OF THE PLAN to capture and redirect ambitious nerds to both screw over radicals who'd try to destroy at least those ascendant elites, and use "woke" universities as one of many scapegoats and punching bags. And they largely relied on rising ruling class movements and intellectual fads: New Atheism, "reductionisms", TESCREAL, empiricist metaphysics, evolutionary biology... "Left"-coded responses dwindled in number and intellectual strength, often being replaced with merely performative protests. That gave ascendant elites and their "useful idiots" their needed pretexts, at once both to destroy the main remnants of 20th century academia and to choke radical anti-elite pro-masses politics. Ironically, many of these assholes pretended that THEIR politics was pro-masses, using stooges aiming to promote the supposed interests of "productive classes", "entrepreneurial" and/or "working". Yet these freaks wanna kill off a bunch of OTHER middle class dreams like popular versions of "identity politics" and "woke capitalism", and wipe out the sincere struggles (largely from the middle classes and below) that got coopted into some of that. As with all elite politics, it's about torturing and slaughtering the damned and the non-conformist. And this is what popular evolutionary psychology, "scientific racism" and the revived Eugenics movements are all about. It's so big and diverse that I bet any "intellectual dark web" list you can find doesn't name them all. And it's never been just an American thing. All of this is why your academic enterprises have been so obviously hijacked and destroyed more than ever now. The masks are off. The people who seemed to provide the necessary intellectual, political and economic support, as well as their predecessors, probably wanted you to fail in the long run while they jumped to "the new best thing". That's why an increasingly large fraction of editorial influence is thoroughly corrupt, and why publishers are running off with as much money as they can, rather than properly supporting desperate scientists. Worse: you know those "dissident" intellectuals which they and/or their friends are now favoring the most? You also gave them what they wanted: not just evil ideas and tech, but the good things that they have to come with for the sake of bait and plausible deniability. Crucial evil needs usually superficial good to hide itself. Crucial lies require nearby truths to themselves seem correct and sneak through intellectual defenses to gain acceptance, especially to excite ambitious nerds. You might think you've got past all that, but I got bad news: there's conceptual and empirical untruths all over popular science and philosophy, and also in stuff much closer to the state of the art (for example, read Bennett & Hacker's "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience" to see what's become of a field that's very politically-sensitive due to its relevance to medical and psychological sciences). In short, the problem you face is SO MUCH GREATER than this. Metaphorically. you're on a ship that once looked safe but was always designed to sink, and you're being circled and looted. You wanna help the vast majority of people, or at least keep good and comprehensive science going? Then please, PLEASE use the lifeboats. Make your choice NOW if you haven't already.