A dangerous step backwards
...our minds, will keep on ‘involving’, until we return to the dark ages where knowledge and logic were too scared to fight mythology and bullshit.
In 1615, Galileo was tried and convicted by the Italian inquisition for his unorthodox views on the heliocentrism of our solar system. His denial to comply and bend over before the established power threw him into house arrest until the end of his life. However, it also sparked a scientific revolution, an attempt to distance knowledge from established sayings, dogmas and stories, whilst giving birth to one of the brightest periods of humanity. For the first time, knowledge and the logical search for truth was put ahead of fairy tales and excuses to sit on gold thrones under marble cupules.
what amazes me is how easily authorities punish a scientist for wrongly predicting something, but let any CEO walk away freely after their wrong 'predictions' collapse entire economies
Now, it seems, Italy has decided that science’s nice and fruitful run has reached its end, and decided to return to its old methods of castration of the intellect and witch hunting.
I understand that the press is probably not reporting the case in the right way; that there was probably avoidance and trampling of established emergency protocols under seismological alerts; that if the scientists did not mess up the ‘advice’ they gave on whether the whole town was going to disappear off the face of the Earth or not, plenty of lives might have been saved.
However, what amazes me is how easily authorities can punish a scientist for wrongly predicting something which is by definition unpredictable, yet can let ‘Nobel prize winners’ (I do not believe in Economics to be Nobel-worthy) or any big framed, patchy headed CEO walk away freely after their wrong ‘predictions’ collapse entire economies and, with them, millions of lives.
The difference between these two is exactly the same one that separates doctors from holistic reiki touch therapy scumbag con artists or pharmaceutical research from watered down solutions of watered down active components, so watered down they don’t exist anymore.
And as long as we don’t get these straight and this tendency to punish knowledge (or the attempt to achieve it) continues, our society, our minds, will keep on ‘involving’, until we return to the dark ages where knowledge and logic were too scared to fight mythology and bullshit.
