The Best We Can Do? The Rise of Bullshit Research
AnonTechie writes:
Do you feel it? The sense that this civilization has run out of creative juice. That we've reached the cliff edge of the Enlightenment.
That big ideas are dead, killed off by the technocrats of the ruling class. If an idea is proposed that doesn't grow the economy, does it really exist as a thought?
This sense struck me hard recently reading BBC Focus, a popular science magazine. One of the articles was about a team of university researchers in California using AI to predict hit pop songs.
Professor Paul Zack said: "Streaming services can readily identify new songs that are likely to be hits for people's playlists more efficiently, making the streaming services jobs easier and delighting listeners."
There is so much of this going about. Click on any science tab at any of the big media outlets and there'll be a story about a research "breakthrough" that crushes the soul. Here's a ground-breaking study from the news today about how smiling makes you more attractive.
[...] We are being fed trivia and bullshit about delighting listeners and smiling while the ecological foundations of our world are being destroyed. What happened to the great sense of inquiry that I've read used to exist in the world? It wasn't so long ago that people would spend years writing history-changing theses articulating political, economic, and social models to cast off subjugation and injustice, secure new material conditions and propel humanity forward.
Let's call this bullshit research, the sibling of those bullshit jobs made famous by David Graeber.
[...] They questioned the current approach to academic research "in the context of the approaching climate apocalypse. What is the point of all this in the face of wildfires, superstorm, and megadrought ?"
They were too polite to say it, but the gist of their critique was: stop focusing on bullshit research. Seize the spirit of the Enlightenment. Start focusing on big, transformative ideas before we lose everything.
[Source]: OK Doomer
Do you feel the same ?
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