It coalesced at a time when science was becoming more accessible to the masses, more educated technicians running around engaging in work and trade.
And these technicians were frustrated by bosses who didn't understand the science and technique behind things.
So there was great inefficiency because the bosses hadn't caught up to the technicians in their understanding of the world.
And so the political idea of "put in charge the people who actually understand the problem" caught hold of the technicians, and they were fired up for a period of time and they called it technocracy.
Not just that but the 30s was the tail end of a period of reduction and unification in science. If physics and biology (large portions of it) could be reduced to a handful of principles, why not economics and politics. Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein, Hilbert, the Vienna Circle. It must have seemed like science was on track to explain more or less everything.
It’s interesting that the theory of Quantum Mechanics emerged just after this point and threw a wrench in the idea that the universe could be neatly explained through a universal single theory, suddenly there were more questions than answers. And Einstein famously hated quantum physics.
There’s something to be said about the cultural impact of quantum mechanics and how it shifted people’s perceptions from a universe that could eventually be explained by a set of fairly simple, understandable laws of physics to one that is much more complex, mysterious and contradictory. Suddenly the laws of the universe were defined by randomness and uncertainty, rather than determinism and easily understood logic.
I don't know why it would matter, but Einstein didn't hate quantum mechanics. He literally got his Nobel prize for his role in discovering quantum mechanics. He is one of the earliest people to propose that light exists in quantised packets.
He had some strong opinions around interpretations of quantum physics, but that isn't even a question of science, it's a metaphysical discussion.
While we're at it, Einstein also wasn't a bad student, and he didn't hate mathematics.
Around the same time, Gödel proved the incompleteness theorems and Turing gave us the halting problem. These and the uncertainty principle tell us not only that the universe is somehow statistical and not mechanical, but that there are certain unknowable facts. That's got to be a major psychological blow.
I read and enjoyed the book " what is real" by Adam Becker that talks about this intersection between the philosophy of the day and its impact on what more considered valid interpretations of QM at the time and into the future. The logical positivists had a lot of impact on popular conception of quantum stuff, even to this day. Great read
It could also be a play to squeeze China or similar nation dependent on middle east oil. USA semicon production not ready, if there were signals that China was ready for a play on Taiwan maybe this is a gambit to buy some time.
Is China really dependent on middle-east oil? I read that they had been diversifying in preparation for an energy resource fight for some time now. For example, they've massively invested in Solar power generation, are building a 300-400 billion dollar gas pipeline from Russia, already buy a lot of oil to from Russia, and also purchased from Venezuela (though how that's going now is anybody's guess). They also have a good relationship with most of the players in the middle-east and helped repair ties between the Saudis and the Iranians.
Inflation is about what goes on inside the country. So you can have inflation internally while the domestic currency strengthens against foreign currencies, and vice versa.
If your currency is falling against foreign currencies but prices are also dropping domestically, you get deflation. This was happening in China a couple of years ago, and they were exporting this deflation to other countries.
Tower is human, gets tired, gets hungry; Tower made a mistake.
If Tower had some help, maybe an AI or maybe another set of ears, the tragedy could have been avoided.
An LLM monitoring instructions could easily have identified the mistake and alerted the ATC in time to save the situation. There was plenty of time to correct the mistake.
We have a gatekeeper already in the funding source - they do the work of vetting researchers prior to funding the work.
Piggy back this system so that the funding source publishes the papers itself, and researchers can only publish their papers that are directly funded.
This system requires the cooperation of an organization to build the publishing infrastructure, but this could be a lowest capable bidder, and less drag on the system overall.
This war has been planned for decades. I was a boy in 2003, but I distinctly remember the threats against Iran during that time period. Time Magazine ran it on their cover...
Game Theory is the name of his class. He is a high school teacher. I agree his ideas about the conflict are only loosely connected to "Game Theory" in the Academic sense. If you engage with more of his content, he often repeats that he is probably wrong and exhorts you to think for yourself and make your own conclusions. His perspective on past and current events is certainly not mainstream.
I think we should hold people to a higher standard especially when they talk with this much confidence and present themselves as a professor. The issue is that "Game Theory" is a technical term so there really only is an "Academic" sense otherwise it's just a marketing term for whatever ideas you want to push.
Now this is all conspiracy theory, but it's food for thought.
The USA's media strategy appears to be aimed at Christian Zionism to justify involvement in Israel's regional affairs. There are many influential Christian Zionists in government and politics in the US. Ted Cruz comes to mind as one outspoken example.
If you subscribe to these beliefs, all of this is perfectly rational, that this war is a signal of the end times, that the faithful should not shrink before the fight, the return of the Christ and millennium of peace are within reach.
There has also been conspiratorial speculation that one of the goals of this war is to incite antisemitism in the United States, to spur the return of the diaspora in America to the Holy Land. Israel needs bodies, if they are to realize the Greater Israel Project. Now this is all conspiracy theory, but it's food for thought.
Thanks for providing another link. I quoted The Guardian (a mainstream newspaper, whatever you may think of it) mentioning this same source, and got downvoted for it. Oh well.
There are not many Christian zionists in decision making positions in the US. You’ve named 1 person and how much power does Cruz actually have. The powerful are non Christian zionists. That much is blatantly obvious. Kushner, Witkoff, Lutnick, the entourage around Epstein, most of the cabinet of the current (non Christian president), most of the cabinet of the prior (catholic so non dispensationalist) former president. The media itself, which is used to manufacture consent is filled with, owned by and answers to non Christian zionists. Get a clue.
the people currently making decisions may not be christian but are certainly beholden to christian zionist, their largest voting bloc are reactionary suburban white evangelicals
Absurd. There are very few Christian zionists amongst Christians, and a dwindling number of Christians overall, most especially in the suburbs. Christian zionists are almost entirely poor uneducated (hence their misreading of scripture) rural southerners who have effectively zero political power outside very small regional elections where international politics have no relevance.
Evangelical pastors laying hands on Trump and praying for his success in his holy war against Iran. I don't know the overlap between Christian Zionism and evangelicals in the US, but I'm sure it's not zero.
Christian fundamentalists are influencing US policy to a noticeable degree. Nobody's saying it's the only factor.
“Christian fundamentalists are influencing US policy to a noticeable degree.”
Prove it. Cults that use Jesus’ name are not representative of Christianity. The Waco cult, Theosophy, etc.
Israel influences our policy and I can provide copious evidence of that by naming Israeli affiliated zionists in the cabinets of the past 3 or 4 presidents and by the activity of groups like AIPAC which happen to fund some of the cults that endorse Christian Zionism. The numbers and facts are quite clear.
> In my opinion, there's no way the Islamic Republic survives this.
But what if the Islamic Republic isn't a material thing, it isn't a government apparatus, it is actually the ideas and culture of a population under siege? 50-60 million Persians, and another 30-40 million muslims of other ethnicities. They have been embargoed for decades, the message that the US and Israel are evil has seeped into every corner of society there. It will not be so simple to erase that programming and you can expect a large portion of the population to resist to the bitter end. It's been over 20 years of planning to bring the USA to this point, 20 years because it was never a sure bet, and even today it's still not clear who wins. No, I think 4 days in it's too early to call winners and losers.
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