Lazy. Weak argument.

No, I didn’t make it up.

Most people haven’t ever thought about this or checked their assumptions and biases. And I say that because you’re assuming I made it up but YOU don’t actually have the figures. Very interesting.

You want the citation or can you look it up all on your own?

I’ll give you a hint. Its very hard to find any citation that will compare defense to science in a direct way.

What you can easily do is find a number for the science spending as a percentage of GDP, and a number that gives you the defense budget with identical terms.

Once you check you are welcome to report back if you disagree.

So this will really require two citations and some critical thinking

[ * elsewhere I commented that we spend more on science in the USA than rhe transportation sector. Feel free to check that also, but again, you can’t read this anywhere except by asking the questions yourself.]

With all due respect, do you know that more money is spent on Science than the entire defense budget?

Like I take your point, but also it’s more complicated. I’d argue that zero science can be done without policing the worlds shipping lanes and supply chains. There is possibly a lot of waste corruption and destruction in the defense budget BUT…

Further down the comments in this very discussion someone starts talking about how Einstein and the theory of relativity began the development that causes the GPS grid.

I could advance an argument that ALL the current high technology is a product of public defense spending and not science funding. Like virtually all the technology inside the modern cell phone originated as defense spending that was then given over free of charge to large corporations to make consumer products and privatize the profits. (Touch screens computers, radio, satellites, GPS, the internet etc are from military).

Like, it’s not as pure an example as I think you’re hoping to make. There absolutely is a clear high return on investment on part of defense spending. A lot of pure science doesn’t create this kind of result.

I think it’s proof that we are civilizationally pretty broken that this could happen, but also it’s nice to look at it realistically and consider what this means about us.

When people first start looking for gold, they find giant nuggets just sitting there.

Then they use pans, horses and pickaxes to find chunks of gold in rivera and seams in the rock.

Then they build huge floating factories to dredge up entire landscapes and sift for tiny flecks of gold sand.

THEN they gather a massive amount of human slaves to gather host rock and process it with cyanide to leach the gold out of massive amounts of overburden.

At some point whatever new gold is left to go get takes the wealth you already have and lowers it. You will spend more gold mining than you will pull out of the ground. Nobody is saying you can’t go mine new gold today. It’s that it has a negative return on investment. This is beyond the inflection point. Many many things could go into the calculus for what it costs… Your technology, your price of energy, the degree of automation, etc. You might be able to play with your accounting for a long time and find corners of the planet that are favorable…

But to go mine for something that isn’t there and isn’t producing a return make you poor now. In reality / realistic terms this is now different.

So then you end up asking yourself: “what is this gold even for?” And that’s like looking into the abyss because our culture doesn’t have a collective meaning to organize society if this goes away.

Ok, so that’s an analogy. Science used to work, and everything is screaming that we are close to the end now.

Like every government, every company, all our organizations, they all depend on this facade continuing… And so the end of science is extremely damaging to the story we tell ourselves.

If that story were to go away we would have to ask some big questions

It sounds like you are positing that at a certain point, we should be happy with the fruit that we have and not build the next rung in the ladder since that ring is much more expensive than the last.

You almost understand my point.

It’s not JUST that it becomes MORE expensive (than before).

It becomes MORE expensive than THE RETURN. Ie, its actually dependent on the host body which it depletes like a parasitic relationship.

Therefore this acts as a collapse acceleration device.

This is not MY idea, I’m telling you what’s in the scientific literature of the study of collapse.

Like in the middle ages, they would have a whole class of clergy and they can build a beautiful basilica while people are diseased and starving. But it didn’t help their civilization survive. Most of these civilizations collapse due to internal damage to their culture of surviving BEFORE they trigger bio-physical scarcity. Its quite sobering. [ * read Peter Turchin and his theory of elite overproduction causing political economic collapse before physical collapse. The more unproductive members of the society are dependent on the society, the faster and more unstable the collapse becomes.)

Like the last Norse in Greenland didn’t outlive the seals. You get it?

This is why the collapse science people focus on complexity versus simplification

Thought experiment for you: Imagine that we cannot go out and look for any new solutions any more. We would therefore have to solve all our problems with what we already know how to do.

Would there be any point in kicking the can on solving our issues? Or would we need to get started right now? If we couldn’t invest in speculative solutions that will solve our problems tomorrow I think that a great deal of what’s going on today would immediately be suspect.

Like, we hold hope that we can find something NEW that will change how hard survival will be and what it will really cost us.

Precautionary principal today simply gets thrown out if we think we can fix our mistakes in the future.

This is how we created our systemic overshoot in the first place. This is why it pushes peoples buttons to even suggest that this is wrong… The illusion serves a purpose. A lot of people don’t really realize that science failed 50 years ago and that it has been propped up as a secular religion/ideology.

If a person came out of a 50 year coma in 1900 they would not recognize their world at all. In 1950 they would have no clue what’s going on. A person waking up from a 50 year coma in 2026 doesn’t see a new world that they don’t have a basis to understand…

So science is telling us we either bend or break.

Bend means stopping growth and new knowledge production.

Breaking is to push further. Like every new piece of knowledge will be applied to accelerating the damage to the environment and drawing in more planetary boundaries.

The end of growth is guaranteed either way, right?

Science 101 is that the fruit flies in the jar die. Are humans able to consciously reduce their impacts below the carrying capacity or will nature do it for us? Both paths are valid solutions.

I’d argue that you have a cynical view from the perspective that the planet is finite. The theory of black holes will not outlive the last human alive. It’s cynical to kill the humans not yet alive through a fairy tale religious fervor.

There are three ways of looking at it.

1. I don’t want to get the medical test in case it’s a bad diagnosis. I’ll just be happy.

2. I’ll get the test, but if I don’t like the result I’ll just take alternate treatments, not update my will and be happy. Person #2 isn’t in literal denial, but they deny the meaning of what they know. Implicatory denial.

3. I’ll get the test, get my affairs in order, and live realistically.

I’d argue that you are arguing for #2, and I’m arguing for #3. That’s ok, we can disagree.

Do you need Einstein if you can not and will not pay for nuclear power stations?

I realize how you will hear and understand that as an “anti-science” stance, but I’m actually from a science background. That’s not my purpose.

Complexity is ~entanglement.

Nobody is going to make a new Elegant Non-complicated Theory without the following:

• 47 additional authors
• Teams of journal referrees and their publishers and websites
• An entire staff operating a remote sensing satellite
• A team of programmers updating MatLab
• A million dollar microscope
• A database engineer working on the school’s data source
• Complex computer models running on advanced computer architecture
• A huge squadron of training institutions, funding institutions, grant and loan programs, and all the staff, administrators and accountants behind that
• A prosperous society willing to take a chance on funding this endeavor

Etc etc.

This is NOT newton getting hit on the head by an apple kind of “processes”.

Complexity is a hidden tax.

Ok, wait a second.

WHAT is complexity in this context? Define please.

Complexity =/= complicated. You are going off on a reaction without even understanding my argument or the conceptual framework I’m coming in from.

If wasn’t 100% correct in the analysis that scientific production requires complexity, then you have no complaint about modern government funding major institutions to go acquire more knowledge, your issue is moot. Just go do science. Einstein worked in a patent office. What’s the issue?

Diminishing returns are largely unavoidable, and not a sufficient argument against anything, really.

Did the invention of the wheel have diminishing returns? Be very careful now.

Like, you’re assuming a priori that this is an unavoidable situation? That’s wrong in my view. The “Diminishing Returns are Unavoidable” line is what modern institutions accept as generationally normal, but this is a very special condition that definitely did not exist before ~1970. (Think about science like Newton Mendel and Einstein and how much they achieved with how little.)

Diminishing returns TELL US something very important. Science has studied science-itself. The question is whether people are really open minded to accepting what we are seeing.

This is a form of “implicatory denial”. Nobody is outright denying that a lot of this isn’t money, time, lives and careers wasted in pursuit of not many results. However, we are not truly willing to accept it. Because we have nothing else to hope for. The implications of there being no more “low hanging fruit” of knowledge expansion and what that might mean for the civilization and its future are very threatening to our sense of moral and cultural narratives. It’s existentially awakening to ask this question.

Nobody is willing to say (yet) that the Jenga tower should not go higher, but that’s what the message really is. All the research is saying that we are not investing in the right things [*].

( * like, my background is in science and I read a lot of science now. You only need high school physics and you can debunk a lot of space exploration as a dead end from a results perspective (it’s not a solution that exists) which doesn’t stop NASA from generating indirect returns to the society. But a lot of current day research and development is purely “instrumental” (closed loop cause-effect) and not systemic in importance. At what point do we ask ourselves WHY we’re doing anything?)

So science is to be applied towards efficiency?

Or science is purely information?

Which goalpost are you using? (You keep switching every comment.)

I’m saying that it’s both definitiona, the more all encompassing idea. This is how Tainter approaches it also.

Simple question for you: is science sustainable?

Take for example the purely monetary question…the USA is currently spending more on science research than it already spends on transportation. At what level of scarcity and collapse and resource constraint would be a point where that seems likely to be a tradeoff not worth making?

What’s your definition of complexity?

I’m using it in the collapse science definition.

As the highest-return solutions are exhausted, only more costly approaches remain to be adopted. As the highest-return ways to produce resources, conduct transactions, process information, and organize society are pro- gressively implemented, adaptive problems must be addressed by more costly and less effective responses. As the costs of solutions grow, the point is reached where further investments in complexity do not give a propor- tionate return.

We do science to be more efficient, not less.

That’s how collapse accelerates. (Jevons paradox.) Your scholarship of collapse is lacking. Every civilization collapse is at a technological peak.

Technology is problem solving.

Technology is problem creating.

You should back up and read what the academic have already worked out.

Tainter points out in the linked paper that research has TWO functions. One is to create new context (resource discovery). Another is for creating new information (information and communication is around 90% of all science funding now)…

Like, first of all understand what you’re even talking about.

We are already at a point in the collapse where progress in the sciences comes as a trade off. In order to pour millions into R+D, that’s money that can’t be spent on schools and bridges. Science is not free, the society pays the overhead.

The question is whether the society gets a return on the investment or not. Obviously science produces results, but are the results worth the cost?

Joseph Tainter wrote about this in his paper "Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies".

There is a pretty good discussion of this issue around pages 16 onward.

Basically we have this near-religious faith that progress comes from research and new technology, but basically that stopped being true over a generation ago. He shows that the returns to society diminished after all the easy knowledge was figured out.

Scientists don’t drive to the lab looking at homeless people and think “I caused that”. But that’s how the system has been working. We are not creating prosperity.

Not so fun fact: If we stopped production of greenhouse gasses today (so we achieved net zero by 2026), we still have a climate problem.

People treat the rate of annual pollution as the target, and they pretend that hitting this target fixes something.

Only removing the carbon from the atmosphere will permit the Holocene to continue.

Shifting the conversation to far off climate targets or distant emissions standards is just a brainwash. We are doing something right now.

Canada is right now investing in global trade, high technology, fossil fuel production, manufacturing, expansion, growth economics, etc. The entire OLD Jenga tower civilization stack is being invested in and its getting higher.

https://removepaywalls.com/4/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2515030-why-1-5c-failed-and-setting-a-new-limit-would-make-things-worse/

If you have never seen these lectures by Economist Steve Keen, they are well worth watching.

This one he delivered at Nordhaus’ home university: https://youtu.be/QGfaqALkc40

A deep dive into the shockingly bad “economics” that was used to inform policy: https://youtu.be/aoFiw2jMy-0

(He eviscerates Nordhaus starting at 25-30min continuing.)

(At, 47min, he goes over Nordhaus’ Nobel prize lecture wherehe claims 4° of warming would be “optimal”).

So, Nordhaus has to be one of the most interesting bastards of history. It seems like he came into prominance FIRST by publically attacking the Limits to Growth study.

The Limits to Growth study was the first major attempt to use a computer model to study the complex system that is the economy-environment. People had never really done computer models before this.

Nordhaus basically argued against this study and said that the market will solve the problems. But basically, if you do a deep dive on his argument, he failed to understand the computer model or the fact that it was a complex system. It kind of went over his head.

THEN, a few years later, he does his own extremely similar study using extremely similar methods and wins the Nobel Prize in Economics. Like at some point he grasped the idea of Limits to Growth, then totally rips off and plagiarizes their approach. He feeds in some junk data and makes his model prove that we live in a cornucopian economic world.

And THEN, people in policy positions listened to him.

Nordhaus is not just some economist, he’s actually evil.