Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
People are wrong about many things. A new one I’ve noticed is the idea that a goal is stupid because people in the past have tried to achieve it in stupid ways.
The opinion, if you can call it that, sounds like this: “The means were absurd, therefore the goal is absurd.”
For example: “Anti-aging and longevity research is the elixir of life for today’s non-magical people.” Of course it is. The problem with the elixir of life was not that prolonging human life would be an absurd or impossible goal, but that the means of alchemy were (arguably) extremely unsuitable for achieving it.
The feasibility and feasibility of a goal is a separate issue from the effectiveness of any particular method of achieving it.
Using the example of alchemy, transmutation is possible. In nuclear reactors.
Many things that people tried to do in stupid ways in the past are now usually done by other means.
It was inappropriate to try to fly with the help of ointments, to walk my Simsalabim on carpets and jump off cliffs with feathers stuck to their hands, but nowadays there are airplanes. So you know – the desire to fly was not a problem.
Seeing things and talking to people on the other side of the planet, accessing all human knowledge at will, seeing naked women doing unspeakable things from the comfort of your home – the magic black mirror in your pocket now does it all. It’s also a completely different kind of black mirror than people imagined.
The fact that communists were (are) murderous cretins who make things worse – especially for the working classes they pretend to be – doesn’t mean the social problems aren’t worth solving.
For a particularly stark example, consider human genetic enhancement. Historically, this was extremely bad – violence based on junk science was just a cover for spewing private hatreds. But the selection of embryos, the editing of genes – these things are radically different on a moral level, if we understand well enough what we are doing. Of course, this is still far from the case, but the Chinese selflessly volunteered to provide data by experimenting on themselves, so… xixi.
Trying to cure serious diseases with leeches and spells was pretty stupid, but curing serious diseases is actually possible and good. People can see it retrospectively on already (partially) solved problems, but can’t extend the logic to things we’re still figuring out – to them it’s silly or impossible. in fact, they are to be stupid and impossible.
“It’s a bad goal because someone tried to do it badly in the past” is a fallacy (mistake?) that has been overlooked until now, and deserves to be named and canonized. Check my Latin, unused for ten years, but maybe “Malo modo, ergo mala res” – “Bad means bad”. Even better: “Male, ergo malum” – “Bad, therefore, bad.”
Yes, I know that “Man, ergo malum” is also a feminist catechism. In any case.
Do not confuse the incidental properties of the means with the essential properties of the end.
The matter is not absurd, the means were inappropriate, and this is a completely different thing.
Our goals haven’t changed, but we’ve become better at finding not crazy, but really effective ways to achieve them.
Ironically, if science is the key to actually getting the job done—which it almost always is—defending supernatural notions is directly counterproductive to the goal.
You need to stop believing in magic in order to do magic properly.
People were so emotionally invested in karg cult (karg occult) ways of chasing things that they beat down anyone who tried to do it in a way that actually worked. Who knows how many centuries it cost us.
You may be disappointed in the methods, but not in the goals. If anything, knowing what didn’t work is a step in the right direction.
This indifference, in which the child of great aspirations is thrown out with the water of ancient superstition and organized stupidity, gives rise to much of the modern sense of futility and longing. But this is a simple mistake.
What’s worse is that whenever and wherever people are working on interesting things, demolishers, demoralizers, despair whisperers, Grimm’s worm tongues, techno-pessimists, who, among other great examples, have only recently insisted that “the dream of human flight is futile and will never be realized,” “no one will ever need a personal computer,” “the Internet will never be big,” come out of the woodwork. “traveling at 30 km/h is unsurvivable for a person” and a million more such idiocies. Now they do it with Marslongevity, Tesla, cryptocurrencies, advanced nuclear reactors, the very possibility of interstellar travel and all the other promising technologies and interesting things in the world. why? I suspect why.
Basically it’s:
People who have lost hope try to make others give up hope. The insistence that nothing interesting or exciting is possible always comes from a place of insecurity, it’s a coping mechanism. Losers try to shit on what they gave up. They know they’ll never do anything interesting, so they hope no one else will either – and try to talk them out of it to make sure. Screw them.
We’ll close with a quote from Elon Musk: “Engineering is real magic. Or at least the closest thing to magic that exists in the real world.”
As Arthur C. Clarke said, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. To that I would add that you don’t get there by reaching for magic, you get there by reaching for technology.
Always remember, we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the wonders we can achieve in this universe.
