An observation about two disciplines.
The big science magazines have been lost in politics for a LONG time, not just the Trump era. SciAm was already lost in the 70s. NewScientist dropped into politics around 2000. Nature has also been there for a while, though I don’t read it regularly enough to spot the change. Even before they dropped into blind Democrat Party Teamwork, most of them were focused on the least scientific and most fraudulent parts of science. Quantum Quackery, Origin of the universe and social “science”.
They rarely notice real progress in the areas that still try to deal with reality. I’m closely in touch with neurology for courseware, and I also pay attention to petroleum and agriculture after growing up in oil and wheat country. Those three areas (and undoubtedly a few others that I don’t know about) are mostly free of speculation and craziness because they follow Carver.
Look around you, take hold of the things that are HERE, talk to them, let them talk to you.
The areas discussed by magazines don’t follow the rules. They refuse to take hold of THINGS, and pay no attention to HERE AND NOW. They deal with pure mathematical abstraction, or things a billion light years away, or things a billion years in the past, where you can’t possibly do real experiments.
If you aren’t doing real experiments with the THINGS THAT ARE HERE, you’re not doing science. You’re just speculating and fantasizing with no chance of proving or disproving your fantasies. Scifi is fun at times but it’s NOT SCIENCE.
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Big History has turned the other way. Real historians who read and interpret the records of real people have been restoring history to FACTS in the last few decades. Online history magazines and aggregators are full of FACTS about medieval peasants, Islamic science, and industrialization. Thirty years ago there were no FACTS at all in Big History. Books solely contained bizarre myths about peasants and the “enlightenment” invented by the same robber barons who gave us Gaia and Globalism and Bitcoin and Dark Matter and Quantum Quackery.
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What’s the difference? Best hypothesis is federal grants. Fashionable fantasies in science get billions of dollars in grants. CERN and NASA have unlimited budgets. Academic historians don’t depend on federal funding, so they’re better able to track down reality. Deepstate created NSF and NIH and WHO and CDC in 1946 as part of the coup against FDR. There isn’t an equivalent three-letter money source for Big History.
Polistra's Mill 