The 2016 US presidential election was a difficult business. Deep political divisions made a commitment to any particular issue a potential liability and consequently criticizing the past was an easiest choice for all candidates. Fraudulent and wasteful government spending was a safe drum to beat and it is no wonder that within days after the election the newly minted president created a committee, nicknamed Fraud Squad, that was charged with the task of digging up the truth behind the enormous financial footprint of the US government.
Science
The US academic community was clamoring about paucity of research funding and raising hell about inadequate support for discovery and innovation. Indeed, the expenditures represented a tiny blip in the entire budget. The Fraud Squad decided to take a look nonetheless. However, rather than to study the incremental data, the analysis was carried from the first principles.
For weeks Fraud Squad was inundated by torrent of data about publications, discoveries, institutes and other byproducts of academic pursuits. The data was vast and confusing and committee members were scratching their heads trying to make sense of it.
In the end the conclusion stunned everybody - science is a pyramid scheme fabricated four centuries ago by a relatively small community who fancies the life of leisure. In a hindsight the truth was in plain view. Every scientific work is validated by other scientists, and for most part it is incomprehensible to the outsiders. The community manages itself regarding jobs, promotions, and governance and does not allow outsiders to meddle. There is constant demand for societal contribution fueled by enormous hutzpah of empty promises. Most scientific discoveries are irrelevant while others create a horrendous burden, and scientific community demands more and more resources to deal with the fallout. All of it was evidenced by a long parade of distinguished scientists admitting to not publishing enough, publishing too much, pursuing trite and irrelevant topics and generally having fun satisfying their curiosity at the society’s expense.
The reason why it took so much time to discover this fraud is that it is the only known case when such large community colluded to enrich themselves without creating obvious signs of abuse. However, for this scheme to work the scientists needed to peddle their incomprehensible wares to the entire society and exact the contribution. And in the end this scientific proselytization brought the entire pyramid down.
Progress
Work of the Fraud Squad attracted a lot of attention and soon enough intellectuals started asking questions. After all, scientific advances are linked to societal progress and last several hundred years represent a giant leap forward. Isn’t it a contradiction with science being a pyramid scheme? Clearly there is a great deal of genuine scientific discoveries that are being made all the time.
At this point Fraud Squad was standing on rock solid conviction that their work is valid and it welcomed a new challenge. Yeah, progress through science - is there really such a thing? In short few weeks the Fraud Squad discovered the truth. In a nutshell, every human idea has its primary consequences, secondary consequences and so forth with no obvious bound. The primary consequences are easy to see and most prominent but the rest is rather opaque. As long as the spread of ideas is tightly contained everything works fine. But with unchecked proliferation, the secondary and tertiary consequences are multiplied million-fold by repeated applications and little understood phenomena emerge. Global warming, depletion of ozone layer, traffic congestion, pollution, nuclear contamination are just a few of the myriads of results of scientific discoveries applied on such unprecedented scale that their secondary consequences led to the creation of a whole slew of new problems.
Working toilet, running water, electricity, internet, kitchen stove and a car in the garage - these signs of progress were never meant to be available to everybody. They represent a parasitic spread of scientific know-how propagated by the community that should have been watched more carefully.
"From one-percent to one-percent” was a slogan coined by the Fraud Squad to describe the necessity of the containment of scientific output.
End of the Age of Enlightenment
After sounding death knell on science and progress, the concept of rational thought, the bulwark of Western Civilization came into plain view. Red-hot Fraud Squad was unstoppable at this point. In their own words “rational thought and scientific knowledge is a paper thin veneer of illusion laid on a solid core of chaos and randomness.”
"I know that I know nothing,” these words of Socrates challenged the generations of scientists who tried to prove them wrong. In the end of their findings the Fraud Squad confirmed Socrates’ primordial intuition and marked the end of science.
Indeed, the ability to abstract the universe in form of communicable ideas is uniquely human ability, and an evolutionary dead end as it seems. Nature does not need any thought at all, and even within human communities rational thought does not give an edge when confronted with irrational thought, a more prevalent modus operandi. With this conclusion the Fraud Squad closed the books on 400 years of Enlightenment and signaled the dawn of a new era of more modular society.
Reprieve
Hordes of marauding scientists were waiting for the executive orders that would complete the extinction of their disciplines. With the exception of mathematicians who were defunded years earlier and stopped paying much attention to political fads there was a lot of chest beating. Chemists took the blame for styrofoam cups, engineers for the coal-fired power plants and computer scientists finally admitted that if something has “science" in its name then it probably is not a science at all. The old custom of auto-da-fe came back and various scientific societies were marching on weekends self-flagellating and denouncing their leaders. In the end all this contrition paid back and the rescue came from an unlikely source.
In restorative yoga, props are used for support allowing you to open your body through passive stretching. The new Restorative Science aims at fixing the damage of old science and uses politicians, celebrities and practically anybody who is willing as props to keep the scientists from running ahead and loosing focus. The constraints of Restorative Science are significant and the emphasis is on broadening the horizons in a relaxed setting, something that was sorely missing in the academic environment.
Surprisingly, it turned out that unlike bankers and lawyers, the scientists are well liked and since they cost as much as what the country spends on potato chips nobody really minds if they do their nerdy stuff as long as they do not break anything. Unlike old science that not that many people cared about, Restorative Science is quite popular and “nerding out” became a fashion statement for people with more serious ambitions in life.
Science
The US academic community was clamoring about paucity of research funding and raising hell about inadequate support for discovery and innovation. Indeed, the expenditures represented a tiny blip in the entire budget. The Fraud Squad decided to take a look nonetheless. However, rather than to study the incremental data, the analysis was carried from the first principles.
For weeks Fraud Squad was inundated by torrent of data about publications, discoveries, institutes and other byproducts of academic pursuits. The data was vast and confusing and committee members were scratching their heads trying to make sense of it.
In the end the conclusion stunned everybody - science is a pyramid scheme fabricated four centuries ago by a relatively small community who fancies the life of leisure. In a hindsight the truth was in plain view. Every scientific work is validated by other scientists, and for most part it is incomprehensible to the outsiders. The community manages itself regarding jobs, promotions, and governance and does not allow outsiders to meddle. There is constant demand for societal contribution fueled by enormous hutzpah of empty promises. Most scientific discoveries are irrelevant while others create a horrendous burden, and scientific community demands more and more resources to deal with the fallout. All of it was evidenced by a long parade of distinguished scientists admitting to not publishing enough, publishing too much, pursuing trite and irrelevant topics and generally having fun satisfying their curiosity at the society’s expense.
The reason why it took so much time to discover this fraud is that it is the only known case when such large community colluded to enrich themselves without creating obvious signs of abuse. However, for this scheme to work the scientists needed to peddle their incomprehensible wares to the entire society and exact the contribution. And in the end this scientific proselytization brought the entire pyramid down.
Progress
Work of the Fraud Squad attracted a lot of attention and soon enough intellectuals started asking questions. After all, scientific advances are linked to societal progress and last several hundred years represent a giant leap forward. Isn’t it a contradiction with science being a pyramid scheme? Clearly there is a great deal of genuine scientific discoveries that are being made all the time.
At this point Fraud Squad was standing on rock solid conviction that their work is valid and it welcomed a new challenge. Yeah, progress through science - is there really such a thing? In short few weeks the Fraud Squad discovered the truth. In a nutshell, every human idea has its primary consequences, secondary consequences and so forth with no obvious bound. The primary consequences are easy to see and most prominent but the rest is rather opaque. As long as the spread of ideas is tightly contained everything works fine. But with unchecked proliferation, the secondary and tertiary consequences are multiplied million-fold by repeated applications and little understood phenomena emerge. Global warming, depletion of ozone layer, traffic congestion, pollution, nuclear contamination are just a few of the myriads of results of scientific discoveries applied on such unprecedented scale that their secondary consequences led to the creation of a whole slew of new problems.
Working toilet, running water, electricity, internet, kitchen stove and a car in the garage - these signs of progress were never meant to be available to everybody. They represent a parasitic spread of scientific know-how propagated by the community that should have been watched more carefully.
"From one-percent to one-percent” was a slogan coined by the Fraud Squad to describe the necessity of the containment of scientific output.
End of the Age of Enlightenment
After sounding death knell on science and progress, the concept of rational thought, the bulwark of Western Civilization came into plain view. Red-hot Fraud Squad was unstoppable at this point. In their own words “rational thought and scientific knowledge is a paper thin veneer of illusion laid on a solid core of chaos and randomness.”
"I know that I know nothing,” these words of Socrates challenged the generations of scientists who tried to prove them wrong. In the end of their findings the Fraud Squad confirmed Socrates’ primordial intuition and marked the end of science.
Indeed, the ability to abstract the universe in form of communicable ideas is uniquely human ability, and an evolutionary dead end as it seems. Nature does not need any thought at all, and even within human communities rational thought does not give an edge when confronted with irrational thought, a more prevalent modus operandi. With this conclusion the Fraud Squad closed the books on 400 years of Enlightenment and signaled the dawn of a new era of more modular society.
Reprieve
Hordes of marauding scientists were waiting for the executive orders that would complete the extinction of their disciplines. With the exception of mathematicians who were defunded years earlier and stopped paying much attention to political fads there was a lot of chest beating. Chemists took the blame for styrofoam cups, engineers for the coal-fired power plants and computer scientists finally admitted that if something has “science" in its name then it probably is not a science at all. The old custom of auto-da-fe came back and various scientific societies were marching on weekends self-flagellating and denouncing their leaders. In the end all this contrition paid back and the rescue came from an unlikely source.
In restorative yoga, props are used for support allowing you to open your body through passive stretching. The new Restorative Science aims at fixing the damage of old science and uses politicians, celebrities and practically anybody who is willing as props to keep the scientists from running ahead and loosing focus. The constraints of Restorative Science are significant and the emphasis is on broadening the horizons in a relaxed setting, something that was sorely missing in the academic environment.
Surprisingly, it turned out that unlike bankers and lawyers, the scientists are well liked and since they cost as much as what the country spends on potato chips nobody really minds if they do their nerdy stuff as long as they do not break anything. Unlike old science that not that many people cared about, Restorative Science is quite popular and “nerding out” became a fashion statement for people with more serious ambitions in life.
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