"After uttering something unprintable, he said: 'I did that [stuff] so you wouldn’t have to.'"
I'm dying of squamous cell carcinoma, although that dying has been arrested slightly and temporarily by a clinical trial drug: https://jakeseliger.com/2023/11/20/finally-some-good-tumor-news-but-also-is-that-blood-i-just-spit-up/, and a lot of well-meaning people have said or implied that medical suffering builds character or makes me stronger or grants me wisdom or something. Maybe they're right, but I doubt it, and the word "cope" comes to mind.
I'd have preferred to have had effective drugs that prevented the recurrence and metastases to this kind of adversity. It's made me weaker, not stronger.
And although I'm doing the clinical trial primarily because I don't want my wife to be lonely after I'm gone, I'm also doing it in the hopes that the data I help generate will mean that fewer people have to go through hell I've been through. In other words, I'm doing some of it so others won't have to.
Everything I read then indicated that, given the speed and aggression of the cancer, I'd be dead pretty quickly. Now it looks conceivable that the number and variety of drugs could mean that I'll get a couple of years during which the cancer is essentially a managed condition.
Sorry to hear about your disease - I hope that good things come out of the drug you're on.
I have MS, which isn't life-threatening in the common use of the term, but which threatens the long term prospects of the life you thought you'd have because it all but assures disability given enough time. While you can find strength, conviction and resilience in battling with an incurable disease, I must agree that I'd rather be strong and fight other (fairer) battles in my life.
I ended up finding out about stem cell transplantation (high dose chemo + reinfusion of your own pre-harvested stem cells) as a treatment option, and decided to go for it. I'm now in remission after having highly active disease for 4 years. I am trying to raise awareness of this treatment as most MS patients don't know about it, and the neurologists in the west all but SHUN the treatment as too dangerous. My hope is that I can also change some people's lives, as there are people who are in remission now more than 15 years, and can be considered to be functionally "cured".
There is no honour in suffering from health problems. You can find purpose in it, but I'd rather the MS sufferers in the world find their purpose elsewhere - I've had enough of it that I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
Such unselfish sentiment is rare. The world needs more people of your character. For this reason, I hope you spend many more years on the planet, setting a good example for those who
This reminds me of conversations friends would have around bullying. They would typically say that bullying is good as it builds character. I don’t have any stats on this whatever but I would bargain that the overwhelming majority of bullying is developmentally detrimental. It doesn’t allow mean people to soften their guilt and doesn’t fit in with the “hard times, hard men” paradigm.
It's nigh impossible to develop and practice resiliency without adversity, and a childhood without adversity is not one that developmental psychologists would recommend.
Being a victim of childhood bullying is one avenue to experience adversity. And for those who did and overcame, I can see why they would attribute that experience to being a resilient adult.
There are many other avenues to experience adversity, and so while we can understand that bullying can have a silver lining, experiencing bullying is hardly essential, as long as other forms of adversity endure.
You can introduce challenge and adversity with things like intramural sports, where you end up playing against teams that are just _better_ than you, and you have to strive to improve. Maybe some of them are even ungracious winners.
Bullying, with the strong doing what they can and the weak suffering what they must, is psychologically damaging, and I think it's clearly a positive social development that younger folks today seem to be better at banding together to tell bullies that what they're doing is _not OK_, rather than just being silent bystanders.
I don't think sports are much of a substitute, because they're optional. But I agree wholeheartedly that reducing bullying is a good thing. I work with young people, and there has been a sea change in real-life bullying the last 3 decades, one of the most hopeful improvements of our modern era in my opinion. Unfortunately, online bullying has grown into a plague.
Experiencing bullying may toughen you up but learning how to treat each other with respect is even more valuable. I just had a thought: maybe our current political atmosphere is partly due to the toleration of bullying in schools in past decades.
Yeah, part of the authoritarian mindset (which is now manifesting as MAGA / Trump-ism, but we've seen it in plenty of other forms) is that people believe that the In-Group dominating the Out-Group is fundamental to the natural order, and actively _virtuous_. They get super angry when there are consequences imposed on them for being assholes to those they deem beneath themselves. Beating up nerds is good, why should they be stopped from doing that? It'll toughen him up, teach him how the world REALLY works. And maybe if the queer kid gets whupped enough it'll straighten him out, like G*d intended.
interesting thought! “might is right.” i think its also an attitude of “i went through it, so you should be able to, too.” i remember this scene from a memoir, i think it might have been tara westover’s EDUCATED , where she confronts a coworker about being blase and offensive about sexual assault, and he reveals that it happened to him, and he didnt think it was a big deal because he was able to cope and “get over” it.
i think a lot of conservative attitude is about “the world sucks, everyone suffers, you have to stop complaining and find out how to live with it” instead of, “the world sucks, let’s change it together.”
The most disturbing instance I've seen of the "I got through it, you should be able to too" thing is the way that in cultures that practice female circumcision, it's often older _women_ that enforce it on girls, and the idea of a woman NOT going through it elicits an extreme version of the pattern we have in the west as slut-shaming. "We can't possibly imagine _not_ torturing and mutilating our daughters, then they'd grow up to be sex-craving monsters, instead of proper wives and mothers!" Like I know there's a whole thing on the left of saying you're not supposed to judge other cultures, but you have to draw a line somewhere... If the integrity of your identity group requires torturing children, then your identity group _is bad_ and should be extinguished. If you want to adapt and accept that you can still be tribe / religious-variant X while _not_ torturing children, that's great.
I never liked the statement "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger". In my experience, what nearly kills one often maims one permanently. That might make one wiser but not stronger.
Bullying notoriously is self-reproducing. "Hurt people hurt people." Many bullies were, themselves, bullied. Abusive fathers abuse their sons, who grow up to replicate the abuse, because that assertion of dominance (over a weak target who couldn't possibly fight back) is both showing what a strong man he is, and teaching the son to be a strong man. All of it is stupid macho bullshit. Stamping out this practice is clearly good.
Bullying itself is a pure negative. But then again, there's if and how you respond to the bullying, a different matter entirely. That says something about you and can shape who you become in a positive way.
I suspect the cycle is something like "hard men create hard times, hard times create hard men, hard men create hard times" in a loop until something intervenes.
Most people only really romantasize the suffering of others. It's mostly a version of selfishness (no I don't want to die of AIDS but I'm glad you did so I could enjoy this art).
Or, when they themselves know they will suffer and can't avoid it, it's a way of making the unavailable suffering feel somehow worthwhile (I gained wisdom).
I get that they don't intend it this way, but I think that's what it usually amounts to.
It couldn't possibly be, I lived through this and gained something deeper from it and was able to make art that expressed that deeper something? That somehow, the effort, the pain, the worrying at created a breakthrough beyond the mere surface? It's not like surfaces only show a two dimensional representation of a 3 dimensional object. I mean, why on earth would we want anything deeper?
I think Noah's premise is specious and insulting. I met Keith once, long ago. He was deeply interested in "tribe," I never thought "every one of his [Keith's] paintings was pointless." That's.both a pretty bold statement about someone I loved and was loved by his community and about art in general. I love how "serious" people consistently denigrate art, which takes effort, pain, long hours of learning, imagination they don't have and the willingness to be denigrated and poo-pooed about how much you're "contributing" and then they lose their shit when Covid hits and spend much of their time contemplating art in the form of paintings, movies and music. But sure, whatever, art is useless and only the surface of it counts, nothing more can be found in it besides pretty decorative things. Because they can't access anything further. It's like they get on the elevator without the card key and decide that the building only consists of a lobby.
Life is fractal. From a physics vantage things like "death" are just a feature. Eliminating all friction from life leads to this weird, and I think insane, place we call a "utopia" that looks an awful lot like the Mormon Church, or Auschwitz or THX1139 to me. You guys are welcome to it but I'm not interested. Where do most of our inventions come from? War or harsh/deadly environments and challenges (space, underwater, caves). Why is satisfaction a reason to live? It's where you stop the project or enjoy a respite but the journey itself doesn't stop at the point of satisfaction with something. It's just a brief reward. And how aren't you Maslow's dog living only for treats? The truth is NO ONE can avoid suffering or if they do they become a dull vapid credit card receipt of a person. Not an artist.
Part of the background problem here is that we let elites whose interest is to demonstrate they can appreciate art you can't dictate what counts as good art and have been sold this idea that good art needs to be like medicine or homework.
If we just understand good art to be the sort of thing that people consume and find makes their life richer and better (at least when freed from the pressure to say something that shows how cultured they are) I think you'd find that plenty of really good art is made by quite happy people. Look at how many people really enjoy and invest in works like LOTR, star trek or the Simpsons. Sure, some artists are deeply troubled and maybe more than in other professions but mostly for practical (it's more flexible) reasons and because producing the art is a way of emotionally coping (ie the suffering isn't needed to make art...it's that making art helps some people process their suffering).
So, ultimately, no I just don't think it's true that in general the artist's suffering is particularly necessary to make great art. Sure, you may need something interesting to write about and often interesting and tragic experiences are correlated but I just don't see any evidence for the claim that the artist actually undergoing suffering makes their works particularly better -- indeed unusually bad suffering probably makes communication with those who haven't undergone it harder.
LOTR is simultaneously kind of a bad example here--Tolkien fought in WWI and the books are heavily informed by that suffering--and a great example, because Frodo is made weaker rather than stronger by his experiences, and the series ends with him going off to elf paradise to recover.
Also, your broader point about appeal to art critic types vs appeal to people who just want to enjoy the art is excellent.
There is nothing wrong with just enjoying art. But if all you can see is JUST "enjoyment" then just realize that the problem is not with "shallow" art, it's with shallow you.
I'd distinguish horror and suffering. My understanding is that it's not particularly informed by Tolkien having suffered a huge amount but absolutely by his horror at war.
Yes, obviously, art can benefit from observations of major events and even horrific ones (though if people stop suffering a certain way it's not so important to depict it) but that's different than the author themselves suffering (not that the war was pleasant but I don't think his work depended on personal pain).
The claim that art requires suffering isn't the boring claim that documentaries often present dramatic situations that involve loss and that fiction can be inspired by the same, it's the claim that **personal** agony propels the author to greater artistic heights unreachable without it (as if a good artist couldn't just be empathetic for others).
Part of the background here is seeing art only as a series of social cues or decorative objects not as a physical way to access a deeper philosophy or understanding of the universe and our place in it. If art only means wealth, privilege or social status to you then that's a shame.
And honestly, my emotional reaction to your comment is exactly the same as yours is to Noah. You trash ways of looking at the world and thinking about it I value highly -- so if Noah's comments are offensive so are yours.
Ultimately I tend to believe the value is all in the observer's experience and that its the production of joy that in that observer that matters. IMO that can be often done more effectively by works that are regularly demeaned and looked down on by those who want to push this idea of great art as needing to have this serious value and explore deep topics etc etc. If you like it great but don't try to insist that it's better than what other people want to read/consume as is implicit in ideas like great art needs to come from suffering as it derides all the 'low brow' shit that improves many people's lives.
You sound like someone who has no idea or has forgotten or just failed to mention the actual effort that goes into "low brow" (or literally any other "type") work. So perhaps we're struggling with conflation or differing definitions. I don't consider any art "low brow." That's something someone who has never worked on art would say. Even mass production art involves pain if by no one else but the thousands of unsung "technicians" (really artists) mind-numbingly painting exactly the same leaf on the exactly the same object again and again. But just because something is shiny or accessible or simple doesn't mean it's not also deep in some way. Art is art because if draws you down, it connects you in some way to a lower or higher energy state. Unless you consider the inside of the elevator (some mirrors infinitely reflecting perhaps?) "enough" as far as art goes. I'm sorry you'll never see the rest of the building that way but In a sense I'm also glad you're confining yourself to the lobby. If that's your jam, go with it.
Sorry if I was a bit impolite in my response. While I think it's perfectly reasonable (tho I disagree) for you to think Noah is wrong in his claims, I was kinda triggered by your suggestion that his attitude towards art was insulting.
I understand why you feel it is degrading something of value to you and I should have been more sympathetic. However, the kind of argument and analysis Noah engages in here is something that's of great value to me (probably much like you feel about what you felt was critisized).
And my experience over my life has been people repeatedly trying to impose their artistic judgement of what was good or meaningful or worthwhile onto others and using hurtful dismals (well if you don't agree you must be unsophisticated, uneducated etc etc) to block any attempt to question or critisize. Often while pretending they were doing no such thing.
I don't want to tell people what they need to like but yah I guess I'm a bit overly sensitive about other people trying to suggest that I need to appreciate the value they perceive in art especially when it's linked with denigrating the very idea of raising analytic questions about that judgement.
I appreciate this, thank you. I too was triggered when Noah basically dismissed all artists as unimportant or at least that's how it was phrased. I hope he didn't mean it like that but whatever he did mean should be clarified. I generally think Noah's modelling is interesting and often picks up bits I'd missed or see at a slightly different angle. I do often disagree with his overall conclusions though. He seems perhaps too hopeful, less grounded than some others. Still, I do like to hear differing opinions they're edifying.
William James' seminal speech "The Moral Equivalent of War" (https://www.projectchangemaryland.org/where-did-national-service-come-from/), which was the original call for national service, was about challenging young people to develop the same qualities of service, sacrifice, excellence, and fellowship, that we associate with war, but without the violence and death.
Except I fear that human nature means it would still end up a kind of horrific (full metal jacket style) torture for a sizeable minority.
The problem is that there are a sizeable minority of people who really struggle (ADHD, depression, forgetfulness etc etc) with things like following directions, not getting distracted, getting places on time etc etc fitting in socially and so forth. In the job market they just end up finding a job (perhaps with a pay cut) that accommodates their strengths and weaknesses.
But in national service you have a big problem. You must pay everyone roughly the same and there are other people who are totally happy to just slack off and not show up whenever they can get away with it and now you can't fire them. So either there is official or unofficial punishment for skiving off and the people who just aren't good with regimentation and organization are fucked or the equilibrium is everyone just sitting on their asses.
While I would agree there is a challenge here Peter, I think the experience of Americorps programs today suggests it is one that can be successfully addressed.
- Partly it's a function of developing or placing young people in programs with strong mission driven cultures that inspire and get the most out of participants (while recognizing that getting the most of out folks will mean different things for different people).
- And partly it's a function of just helping participants understand the truth: that people who slack off and don't give it their all ultimately just cheat themselves more than anyone else. While it certainly would be ideal if we got 100% effort from everyone (and we want to strive toward that), the fact that we won't doesn't mean it has to undermine the experience of those who do give it their best. Ultimately, each person controls their own experience in life. In some ways understanding and acting on that is part of becoming an adult.
While I agree with all of this, it also seems like we're desperately struggling to find the route to meaning in a world where all our basic needs have been met and aren't at risk. Social media and polarization are cul-de-sac where many have gotten themselves stuck but it's a dead end.
So true! The good part of EA does provide one answer: we should cure infectious diseases that still kill millions, especially in developing countries. But people aren't embracing that fast enough to fill their need for meaning, and your theory seems a good one: the need for meaning comes because our needs and the needs of those around us are so often met.
Effective altruists should heed the warning of biologists and medical researchers that eradication of infectious diseases involves tradeoffs. Not economic, but biologic trade-offs.
By conditioning the body to withstand pathogens, it opens up the same body to roughly an equal probability of cancer, autoimmune disorder or dementia.
Alright, then, once we get to a point where the problems accumulating from that issue look worse than whatever (presumably quite benign) natural pathogens remain, we'll brew some synthetic pseudo-pathogens which give the immune system a suitable workout for long-term stability, but have minimal inconvenient symptoms.
And it was all of industrial society that allowed antibiotics and other effective interventions to be delivered reliably and systematically, in high-quality hospitals distributed widely and accessibly throughout the country!
Maternal deaths were also greatly reduced in the nineteenth century by the adoption of antiseptic practices during labor. Ignaz Semmelweis more-or-less gave his life to that cause.
Fantastic post as usual---I think there is a very negative tendency to associate mundane as the great evil of our time, when in fact worrying about mundanity is one of the greatest achievements of mankind and your post reminds me of that. Struggling for struggling's sake is not a virtue---working to create a better world for ourselves, our loved ones, and our descendants is.
Struggling for struggling's sake is also how fascism crosses the wires of morality.
In Umberto Eco's 1995 "Ur-Fascism," he gave the reasons of what has been distilled to those "14 points of fascism" memes that are spread regularly. The meme comes from Eco, who does give reasonings for his 14 points. (The essay was written 50 years after the end of World War II, and Eco was asked to share what the Mussolini era looked like through a child's eyes.)
In one point, he noted that under fascism, everyone is taught to be a hero. For a hero, life is not only a struggle, but a hero also lives their life for the struggle. A hero living their life for the struggle must also view a heroic death as reward for a heroic life.
This likely stems from war as seen from a history book vs. war seen from the firing line. War in a history book, no matter fidelity to factuality or accuracy, has a narrative arc not unlike comic books. There's a good guy and bad guy, and the history we learn follows the principle that we are the heroes in our own narratives. War from those who witnessed it is likely why after World War II we pursued international institutions and greater military and economic occupation to stave off a World War III and IV.
This gets at something that has always bugged me about the (wonderful) movie WALL-E. Humanity has created a perma-cruise where everybody seems pretty happy. This is made out to be a dystopian outcome rather than an awesome triumph of technology.
The implication is that the humans are wasting their lives by living pleasant lives of leisure. It relies pretty heavily on fat-phobia. If the human characters were all super fit it would come across very differently.
My take is that the message is not "technology is bad", but "the use of technology for social control is bad". The humans in WALL-E have every conceivable material comfort, but no agency. The first part is good, but the second part very much isn't; and they are right to rebel against the totalitarian corporatocracy at the end of the film.
I think that's fair. I think there are a lot of problems with the future that's presented in WALL-E (for one, that ship doesn't seem to have billions of people on it...).
I think it uses the fat-phobia as a crutch though. Another way to put it is that if all the human characters had superhero bodies, it would seem much more utopian even though all those other problems would still be present.
They are obese as a way of making them more dependent on the machines; I don't think it's fat-phobic to observe that obesity reduces your independence. If they weren't obese then you couldn't have the scene of them breaking out of their chairs and walking.
I think that in practice, in a post-scarcity society we'd all be thin (assuming being thin remained fashionable), not because we'd all be gym bros but because weight-loss pills and plastic surgery would be trivially obtainable. But the humans being obese makes more sense thematically. It is even possible, I suppose, that Buy 'n' Large would artificially restrict weight loss methods in order to control its populace. It's not unheard of for social diseases to be used this way; various Russian regimes, across its tsarist, communist and kleptocratic phases, have pacified rebellion by getting fit young men addicted to vodka, for example.
I don't disagree. I really love the movie. I just think it's interesting to think of how it would come across very differently (and less negatively) if the people weren't overweight holding everything else equal.
The scene of them getting out of their chairs would definitely not work in that case.
But I agree with you, it's a flaw in that mostly great film. It's not like nothing is wrong there: the planet is trashed, and the cruise passengers are not exercising and eating appropriately. But it's not really tied together at all well. The film flies only because the core story of WALL E is so great, especially act 1.
Seems worth noting, though it's definitely not emphasized... if you look at the number of captains, and the dates, they must have some pretty impressive longevity tech.
Every time I read about people like your grandfather, who risked so much to save democracy, it fills me with rage that their children, when faced with so much easier tasks, did less than nothing to protect the same.
Oh, and don't forget that boomers pretend they actually fought in WWII, thinking that young people are too stupid to realise the difference between them and the silent generation.
A funny thing about the world - my entire generation (I was born in 1980) was terrified of HIV/AIDS. It was The Great Pandemic.
And... they cured it.
And nobody really cared. Magic Johnson announced his HIV+ status 32 years ago - longer than Keith Haring lived in total. Ryan White died less than 6 years after contracting HIV.
One of the best pieces I've read of yours Noah and I read just about every post you put out each week
Captured a lot of what was going on in my head especially around how older generations think of the younger generations as being "soft" and the advice they give.
As the upper-middle-class son of a working-class man, this essay, and your grandfather's words in particular, resonate with me. I worked with my father on construction sites when I was young, to make some extra spending money. Little things, sweeping and light hauling, but enough to appreciate the job. Between that and his stories, I learned: middle-class ennui and boredom are privileges, and they beat the hell out of aching muscles and the stress of not knowing if you'll be able to pay the bills next month.
So here's to the sacrifices he made so I could be here, sitting in a comfortable home office in a suburb. I won't demean them by fetishizing the world he left behind.
Soft Millennial here 👋 This is a beautiful, sensitive post. I played scientist Robert Wilson in a play about Oppenheimer here in the UK in 2015. In researching the man, I came across his testimony to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy when justifying the next tranche of funding for the Fermilab. Rather than jump through the usual hoops of saying it would eventually lead to better weapons for the USA, he instead said: ‘It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture... It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things that we really venerate and honor in our country and are patriotic about. In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.‘ He got the funding.
As a physicist at Fermilab, this quote always makes me feel ashamed.
I got into Science because I thought it was going to generate technology that improves the lives of Americans and people around the world. But what if all we are doing is celebrating our own intellects and decorating American with nationalistic vanity projects? What, in the absence of demonstrable economic and technological benefits for the American people we retreat into self-important mysticism? I am sorry, but I feel that high energy physics has a moral obligation to think a little harder about what we are for, rather than taking it for granted we deserve it just because we are all such mega-geniuses.
That's so interesting - from my point of view, as an actor, I was moved by this quote when I found it because it seemed romantically akin to 'art for art's sake'. i.e. art shouldn't have to *do* anything. Its existence is enough. But, when it comes to high energy physics, I can quite see why this quote is not only disappointing, but also self-aggrandising. I think all of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project came away with an ego-and-a-half.
Would you say that Fermilab and particle physics in general *has* improved the lives of people around the world yet/at all with all the resource it's received?
Actually I should say that I am quite open to "Science for science's sake", but I think not only works when grounded in concrete objectives. So I would say Science makes human existence more meaningful when it expands our knowledge - to put it poetically, the universe reflecting on itself.
It's hard to weigh that against something practical like alleviating poverty or sickness, but there is something to the idea that "man cannot live on bread alone". In terms of revealed preferences, people will often chose a more meaningful path over a greater quality of life. Examples include choosing to have children or dying for a cause.
In Wilson's quote it's the emphasis on human achievement and national glory that makes me feel that the whole thing is a bit too Nietzschean and also a bit too convenient for a scientist to say. To say anything done in pursuit of science is self-justifying, is to be insensitive to actual progress in science.
I would on the whole that Fermilab and particle physics has made the world a better place. We can point to things like proton cancer therapy or MRIs or monitoring nuclear weapons or quantum computers or fusion reactors. In Oppenheimer's time (and to be fair Wilson's time) we had a situation where Science and Technology automatically came together. It's not widely appeciated that now as science has become more specialized and the projects have become larger, we actually have significant trade-offs between Science and Technology.
If I say the point of science is to generate technology, then anchoring everything in science is backwards. I should do a technology R&D industrial policy (with a side-effect of making science easier), not set ambitious scientific goals (with a side-effect of technology development). Maybe when industrial policy was a taboo economic intervention, this indirect means of technological subsidy was the best we could do. But now we should ask the question, which do we really want - Science or Technology?
So for me personally, I think I am a relentless practical and pro-social person. I'd rather refocus most of our national scientific efforts on technology in the forseeable future. We can leave some scientific question (especially the most expensive ones) until such a time that employment becomes more a matter of meaning-making and not a matter of solving problems for society. And I think there will be such a time. When we are past climate change, past the threat of authoritarianism, and past global poverty. Then we will be glad we kept a small torch for developing a fundamental understanding of the nature of the universe, and then we can dedicate an ever-increasing fraction of our society to it.
I'm "liking" your comment because it is well thought out, but I think I'd push back on your closing lines, "We can leave some scientific question (especially the most expensive ones) until such a time that employment becomes more a matter of meaning-making and not a matter of solving problems for society."
I mean we're already sort of there aren't we? I say this as someone firmly routed in aerospace and defense. The number of astronomy PhDs doing the same thing I am with just a bachelors is pretty high. I'd like to be spending my time doing research on orbit propagation, interstellar starwisps design, beamed energy, closed-loop ecologies, soil regeneration, simple robotics. Instead I make Powerpoints to explain basic business systems to Ivy League MBAs that only have one job - finding ways to make staff cuts to keep shareholders happy. Occasionally this system spits out a few new technologies.
We NEED some breakthroughs in basic research. Energy especially. If we don't, a lot of supply chains and this whole AI revolution will take a 20 year slowdown and risk an even longer collapse, maybe even enabling a world of neo-feudalism where its like 60%+ of residents pay their bills directly to Black Rock...
I'd wager there probably have been breakthroughs, but they will never see the light of day, and there is a trail of blood we'll never be able to follow.
This seems like a class of problem which Georgist LVT and UBI could solve. You need to justify yourself to MBAs who need to justify themselves to shareholders because those shareholders (or predecessors) won some big speculative bets a long time ago, and were accordingly allotted enormous power over who gets a cushy position, and who sleeps under a bridge. https://gameofrent.com/ Universal basic income would mean you could afford... maybe not everything, but probably most of what you really need for all that research without having to justify it to anybody. At the same time, GDP would be increasing by like 25%, and of course everyone else is getting UBI as well, so if there's anyone at all out there who you can justify a given project to, they're a lot more likely to be able to afford to chip in.
"After uttering something unprintable, he said: 'I did that [stuff] so you wouldn’t have to.'"
I'm dying of squamous cell carcinoma, although that dying has been arrested slightly and temporarily by a clinical trial drug: https://jakeseliger.com/2023/11/20/finally-some-good-tumor-news-but-also-is-that-blood-i-just-spit-up/, and a lot of well-meaning people have said or implied that medical suffering builds character or makes me stronger or grants me wisdom or something. Maybe they're right, but I doubt it, and the word "cope" comes to mind.
I'd have preferred to have had effective drugs that prevented the recurrence and metastases to this kind of adversity. It's made me weaker, not stronger.
And although I'm doing the clinical trial primarily because I don't want my wife to be lonely after I'm gone, I'm also doing it in the hopes that the data I help generate will mean that fewer people have to go through hell I've been through. In other words, I'm doing some of it so others won't have to.
I hope you stay with us, Jake.
Working on it! Apologies for linking to myself again, but there are a bunch of promising treatments in phase 1b and 2 clinical trials that weren't obvious on July 21, when I got news of the first metastases and second recurrence: https://jakeseliger.com/2023/12/07/tentative-fluttering-optimism-the-surprising-hot-r-d-ferment-in-head-and-neck-cancer-treatment/.
Everything I read then indicated that, given the speed and aggression of the cancer, I'd be dead pretty quickly. Now it looks conceivable that the number and variety of drugs could mean that I'll get a couple of years during which the cancer is essentially a managed condition.
Science and progress are good!
IMO, we should have the freedom to choose medicine: https://cbuck.substack.com/p/the-freedom-to-choose-medicine-is
Sorry to hear about your disease - I hope that good things come out of the drug you're on.
I have MS, which isn't life-threatening in the common use of the term, but which threatens the long term prospects of the life you thought you'd have because it all but assures disability given enough time. While you can find strength, conviction and resilience in battling with an incurable disease, I must agree that I'd rather be strong and fight other (fairer) battles in my life.
I ended up finding out about stem cell transplantation (high dose chemo + reinfusion of your own pre-harvested stem cells) as a treatment option, and decided to go for it. I'm now in remission after having highly active disease for 4 years. I am trying to raise awareness of this treatment as most MS patients don't know about it, and the neurologists in the west all but SHUN the treatment as too dangerous. My hope is that I can also change some people's lives, as there are people who are in remission now more than 15 years, and can be considered to be functionally "cured".
There is no honour in suffering from health problems. You can find purpose in it, but I'd rather the MS sufferers in the world find their purpose elsewhere - I've had enough of it that I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
Thank you.
Such unselfish sentiment is rare. The world needs more people of your character. For this reason, I hope you spend many more years on the planet, setting a good example for those who
haven’t physically suffered.
This reminds me of conversations friends would have around bullying. They would typically say that bullying is good as it builds character. I don’t have any stats on this whatever but I would bargain that the overwhelming majority of bullying is developmentally detrimental. It doesn’t allow mean people to soften their guilt and doesn’t fit in with the “hard times, hard men” paradigm.
It's nigh impossible to develop and practice resiliency without adversity, and a childhood without adversity is not one that developmental psychologists would recommend.
Being a victim of childhood bullying is one avenue to experience adversity. And for those who did and overcame, I can see why they would attribute that experience to being a resilient adult.
There are many other avenues to experience adversity, and so while we can understand that bullying can have a silver lining, experiencing bullying is hardly essential, as long as other forms of adversity endure.
You can introduce challenge and adversity with things like intramural sports, where you end up playing against teams that are just _better_ than you, and you have to strive to improve. Maybe some of them are even ungracious winners.
Bullying, with the strong doing what they can and the weak suffering what they must, is psychologically damaging, and I think it's clearly a positive social development that younger folks today seem to be better at banding together to tell bullies that what they're doing is _not OK_, rather than just being silent bystanders.
I don't think sports are much of a substitute, because they're optional. But I agree wholeheartedly that reducing bullying is a good thing. I work with young people, and there has been a sea change in real-life bullying the last 3 decades, one of the most hopeful improvements of our modern era in my opinion. Unfortunately, online bullying has grown into a plague.
Experiencing bullying may toughen you up but learning how to treat each other with respect is even more valuable. I just had a thought: maybe our current political atmosphere is partly due to the toleration of bullying in schools in past decades.
Yeah, part of the authoritarian mindset (which is now manifesting as MAGA / Trump-ism, but we've seen it in plenty of other forms) is that people believe that the In-Group dominating the Out-Group is fundamental to the natural order, and actively _virtuous_. They get super angry when there are consequences imposed on them for being assholes to those they deem beneath themselves. Beating up nerds is good, why should they be stopped from doing that? It'll toughen him up, teach him how the world REALLY works. And maybe if the queer kid gets whupped enough it'll straighten him out, like G*d intended.
interesting thought! “might is right.” i think its also an attitude of “i went through it, so you should be able to, too.” i remember this scene from a memoir, i think it might have been tara westover’s EDUCATED , where she confronts a coworker about being blase and offensive about sexual assault, and he reveals that it happened to him, and he didnt think it was a big deal because he was able to cope and “get over” it.
i think a lot of conservative attitude is about “the world sucks, everyone suffers, you have to stop complaining and find out how to live with it” instead of, “the world sucks, let’s change it together.”
Yeah. The ills of the world aren't something you can do anything about, you just have to tolerate it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yts2F44RqFw
The most disturbing instance I've seen of the "I got through it, you should be able to too" thing is the way that in cultures that practice female circumcision, it's often older _women_ that enforce it on girls, and the idea of a woman NOT going through it elicits an extreme version of the pattern we have in the west as slut-shaming. "We can't possibly imagine _not_ torturing and mutilating our daughters, then they'd grow up to be sex-craving monsters, instead of proper wives and mothers!" Like I know there's a whole thing on the left of saying you're not supposed to judge other cultures, but you have to draw a line somewhere... If the integrity of your identity group requires torturing children, then your identity group _is bad_ and should be extinguished. If you want to adapt and accept that you can still be tribe / religious-variant X while _not_ torturing children, that's great.
Adversity in moderation, of course.
I never liked the statement "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger". In my experience, what nearly kills one often maims one permanently. That might make one wiser but not stronger.
What doesn't kill me ... messes me up for a long time. Sorry, Fritz! 😃
Bullying notoriously is self-reproducing. "Hurt people hurt people." Many bullies were, themselves, bullied. Abusive fathers abuse their sons, who grow up to replicate the abuse, because that assertion of dominance (over a weak target who couldn't possibly fight back) is both showing what a strong man he is, and teaching the son to be a strong man. All of it is stupid macho bullshit. Stamping out this practice is clearly good.
Is that why hazing was/is tolerated in fraternities and military academies?
1. Formation of in-group loyalty through shared experience.
2. Social pyramid scheme
Trauma bonding at scale
Bullying itself is a pure negative. But then again, there's if and how you respond to the bullying, a different matter entirely. That says something about you and can shape who you become in a positive way.
I suspect the cycle is something like "hard men create hard times, hard times create hard men, hard men create hard times" in a loop until something intervenes.
Most people only really romantasize the suffering of others. It's mostly a version of selfishness (no I don't want to die of AIDS but I'm glad you did so I could enjoy this art).
Or, when they themselves know they will suffer and can't avoid it, it's a way of making the unavailable suffering feel somehow worthwhile (I gained wisdom).
I get that they don't intend it this way, but I think that's what it usually amounts to.
It couldn't possibly be, I lived through this and gained something deeper from it and was able to make art that expressed that deeper something? That somehow, the effort, the pain, the worrying at created a breakthrough beyond the mere surface? It's not like surfaces only show a two dimensional representation of a 3 dimensional object. I mean, why on earth would we want anything deeper?
I think Noah's premise is specious and insulting. I met Keith once, long ago. He was deeply interested in "tribe," I never thought "every one of his [Keith's] paintings was pointless." That's.both a pretty bold statement about someone I loved and was loved by his community and about art in general. I love how "serious" people consistently denigrate art, which takes effort, pain, long hours of learning, imagination they don't have and the willingness to be denigrated and poo-pooed about how much you're "contributing" and then they lose their shit when Covid hits and spend much of their time contemplating art in the form of paintings, movies and music. But sure, whatever, art is useless and only the surface of it counts, nothing more can be found in it besides pretty decorative things. Because they can't access anything further. It's like they get on the elevator without the card key and decide that the building only consists of a lobby.
Life is fractal. From a physics vantage things like "death" are just a feature. Eliminating all friction from life leads to this weird, and I think insane, place we call a "utopia" that looks an awful lot like the Mormon Church, or Auschwitz or THX1139 to me. You guys are welcome to it but I'm not interested. Where do most of our inventions come from? War or harsh/deadly environments and challenges (space, underwater, caves). Why is satisfaction a reason to live? It's where you stop the project or enjoy a respite but the journey itself doesn't stop at the point of satisfaction with something. It's just a brief reward. And how aren't you Maslow's dog living only for treats? The truth is NO ONE can avoid suffering or if they do they become a dull vapid credit card receipt of a person. Not an artist.
Part of the background problem here is that we let elites whose interest is to demonstrate they can appreciate art you can't dictate what counts as good art and have been sold this idea that good art needs to be like medicine or homework.
If we just understand good art to be the sort of thing that people consume and find makes their life richer and better (at least when freed from the pressure to say something that shows how cultured they are) I think you'd find that plenty of really good art is made by quite happy people. Look at how many people really enjoy and invest in works like LOTR, star trek or the Simpsons. Sure, some artists are deeply troubled and maybe more than in other professions but mostly for practical (it's more flexible) reasons and because producing the art is a way of emotionally coping (ie the suffering isn't needed to make art...it's that making art helps some people process their suffering).
So, ultimately, no I just don't think it's true that in general the artist's suffering is particularly necessary to make great art. Sure, you may need something interesting to write about and often interesting and tragic experiences are correlated but I just don't see any evidence for the claim that the artist actually undergoing suffering makes their works particularly better -- indeed unusually bad suffering probably makes communication with those who haven't undergone it harder.
LOTR is simultaneously kind of a bad example here--Tolkien fought in WWI and the books are heavily informed by that suffering--and a great example, because Frodo is made weaker rather than stronger by his experiences, and the series ends with him going off to elf paradise to recover.
Also, your broader point about appeal to art critic types vs appeal to people who just want to enjoy the art is excellent.
There is nothing wrong with just enjoying art. But if all you can see is JUST "enjoyment" then just realize that the problem is not with "shallow" art, it's with shallow you.
I'd distinguish horror and suffering. My understanding is that it's not particularly informed by Tolkien having suffered a huge amount but absolutely by his horror at war.
Yes, obviously, art can benefit from observations of major events and even horrific ones (though if people stop suffering a certain way it's not so important to depict it) but that's different than the author themselves suffering (not that the war was pleasant but I don't think his work depended on personal pain).
The claim that art requires suffering isn't the boring claim that documentaries often present dramatic situations that involve loss and that fiction can be inspired by the same, it's the claim that **personal** agony propels the author to greater artistic heights unreachable without it (as if a good artist couldn't just be empathetic for others).
Part of the background here is seeing art only as a series of social cues or decorative objects not as a physical way to access a deeper philosophy or understanding of the universe and our place in it. If art only means wealth, privilege or social status to you then that's a shame.
And honestly, my emotional reaction to your comment is exactly the same as yours is to Noah. You trash ways of looking at the world and thinking about it I value highly -- so if Noah's comments are offensive so are yours.
Ultimately I tend to believe the value is all in the observer's experience and that its the production of joy that in that observer that matters. IMO that can be often done more effectively by works that are regularly demeaned and looked down on by those who want to push this idea of great art as needing to have this serious value and explore deep topics etc etc. If you like it great but don't try to insist that it's better than what other people want to read/consume as is implicit in ideas like great art needs to come from suffering as it derides all the 'low brow' shit that improves many people's lives.
You sound like someone who has no idea or has forgotten or just failed to mention the actual effort that goes into "low brow" (or literally any other "type") work. So perhaps we're struggling with conflation or differing definitions. I don't consider any art "low brow." That's something someone who has never worked on art would say. Even mass production art involves pain if by no one else but the thousands of unsung "technicians" (really artists) mind-numbingly painting exactly the same leaf on the exactly the same object again and again. But just because something is shiny or accessible or simple doesn't mean it's not also deep in some way. Art is art because if draws you down, it connects you in some way to a lower or higher energy state. Unless you consider the inside of the elevator (some mirrors infinitely reflecting perhaps?) "enough" as far as art goes. I'm sorry you'll never see the rest of the building that way but In a sense I'm also glad you're confining yourself to the lobby. If that's your jam, go with it.
Sorry if I was a bit impolite in my response. While I think it's perfectly reasonable (tho I disagree) for you to think Noah is wrong in his claims, I was kinda triggered by your suggestion that his attitude towards art was insulting.
I understand why you feel it is degrading something of value to you and I should have been more sympathetic. However, the kind of argument and analysis Noah engages in here is something that's of great value to me (probably much like you feel about what you felt was critisized).
And my experience over my life has been people repeatedly trying to impose their artistic judgement of what was good or meaningful or worthwhile onto others and using hurtful dismals (well if you don't agree you must be unsophisticated, uneducated etc etc) to block any attempt to question or critisize. Often while pretending they were doing no such thing.
I don't want to tell people what they need to like but yah I guess I'm a bit overly sensitive about other people trying to suggest that I need to appreciate the value they perceive in art especially when it's linked with denigrating the very idea of raising analytic questions about that judgement.
Anyway sorry for projecting that all onto you.
I appreciate this, thank you. I too was triggered when Noah basically dismissed all artists as unimportant or at least that's how it was phrased. I hope he didn't mean it like that but whatever he did mean should be clarified. I generally think Noah's modelling is interesting and often picks up bits I'd missed or see at a slightly different angle. I do often disagree with his overall conclusions though. He seems perhaps too hopeful, less grounded than some others. Still, I do like to hear differing opinions they're edifying.
William James' seminal speech "The Moral Equivalent of War" (https://www.projectchangemaryland.org/where-did-national-service-come-from/), which was the original call for national service, was about challenging young people to develop the same qualities of service, sacrifice, excellence, and fellowship, that we associate with war, but without the violence and death.
Except I fear that human nature means it would still end up a kind of horrific (full metal jacket style) torture for a sizeable minority.
The problem is that there are a sizeable minority of people who really struggle (ADHD, depression, forgetfulness etc etc) with things like following directions, not getting distracted, getting places on time etc etc fitting in socially and so forth. In the job market they just end up finding a job (perhaps with a pay cut) that accommodates their strengths and weaknesses.
But in national service you have a big problem. You must pay everyone roughly the same and there are other people who are totally happy to just slack off and not show up whenever they can get away with it and now you can't fire them. So either there is official or unofficial punishment for skiving off and the people who just aren't good with regimentation and organization are fucked or the equilibrium is everyone just sitting on their asses.
While I would agree there is a challenge here Peter, I think the experience of Americorps programs today suggests it is one that can be successfully addressed.
- Partly it's a function of developing or placing young people in programs with strong mission driven cultures that inspire and get the most out of participants (while recognizing that getting the most of out folks will mean different things for different people).
- And partly it's a function of just helping participants understand the truth: that people who slack off and don't give it their all ultimately just cheat themselves more than anyone else. While it certainly would be ideal if we got 100% effort from everyone (and we want to strive toward that), the fact that we won't doesn't mean it has to undermine the experience of those who do give it their best. Ultimately, each person controls their own experience in life. In some ways understanding and acting on that is part of becoming an adult.
> things like following directions, not getting distracted, getting places on time etc etc fitting in socially and so forth
I’m drawing a blank on what jobs these might be?
Founding Father John Adams was just one generation off: his great grandson Henry Adams became a leading historian, memoirist, novelist, and poet.
And his great grandson was a kind of those romanticists saying that progress degrades humanity...
Actually, I have no idea what kind of writer he was—I just knew he was a writer.
While I agree with all of this, it also seems like we're desperately struggling to find the route to meaning in a world where all our basic needs have been met and aren't at risk. Social media and polarization are cul-de-sac where many have gotten themselves stuck but it's a dead end.
So true! The good part of EA does provide one answer: we should cure infectious diseases that still kill millions, especially in developing countries. But people aren't embracing that fast enough to fill their need for meaning, and your theory seems a good one: the need for meaning comes because our needs and the needs of those around us are so often met.
Effective altruists should heed the warning of biologists and medical researchers that eradication of infectious diseases involves tradeoffs. Not economic, but biologic trade-offs.
By conditioning the body to withstand pathogens, it opens up the same body to roughly an equal probability of cancer, autoimmune disorder or dementia.
Alright, then, once we get to a point where the problems accumulating from that issue look worse than whatever (presumably quite benign) natural pathogens remain, we'll brew some synthetic pseudo-pathogens which give the immune system a suitable workout for long-term stability, but have minimal inconvenient symptoms.
It wasn’t just antibiotics that brought the deaths down. It was also women organizing to complain of the high death rates and to get targeted action.
And it was all of industrial society that allowed antibiotics and other effective interventions to be delivered reliably and systematically, in high-quality hospitals distributed widely and accessibly throughout the country!
Maternal deaths were also greatly reduced in the nineteenth century by the adoption of antiseptic practices during labor. Ignaz Semmelweis more-or-less gave his life to that cause.
Hand-washing in particular saved many women's lives.
Yeah sure, women complaining saved their lies...
Even today, most test subjects for medical research are men, because women "introduce extra variables" and are therefore "too complicated".
Fantastic post as usual---I think there is a very negative tendency to associate mundane as the great evil of our time, when in fact worrying about mundanity is one of the greatest achievements of mankind and your post reminds me of that. Struggling for struggling's sake is not a virtue---working to create a better world for ourselves, our loved ones, and our descendants is.
Struggling for struggling's sake is also how fascism crosses the wires of morality.
In Umberto Eco's 1995 "Ur-Fascism," he gave the reasons of what has been distilled to those "14 points of fascism" memes that are spread regularly. The meme comes from Eco, who does give reasonings for his 14 points. (The essay was written 50 years after the end of World War II, and Eco was asked to share what the Mussolini era looked like through a child's eyes.)
In one point, he noted that under fascism, everyone is taught to be a hero. For a hero, life is not only a struggle, but a hero also lives their life for the struggle. A hero living their life for the struggle must also view a heroic death as reward for a heroic life.
This likely stems from war as seen from a history book vs. war seen from the firing line. War in a history book, no matter fidelity to factuality or accuracy, has a narrative arc not unlike comic books. There's a good guy and bad guy, and the history we learn follows the principle that we are the heroes in our own narratives. War from those who witnessed it is likely why after World War II we pursued international institutions and greater military and economic occupation to stave off a World War III and IV.
This gets at something that has always bugged me about the (wonderful) movie WALL-E. Humanity has created a perma-cruise where everybody seems pretty happy. This is made out to be a dystopian outcome rather than an awesome triumph of technology.
The implication is that the humans are wasting their lives by living pleasant lives of leisure. It relies pretty heavily on fat-phobia. If the human characters were all super fit it would come across very differently.
My take is that the message is not "technology is bad", but "the use of technology for social control is bad". The humans in WALL-E have every conceivable material comfort, but no agency. The first part is good, but the second part very much isn't; and they are right to rebel against the totalitarian corporatocracy at the end of the film.
I think that's fair. I think there are a lot of problems with the future that's presented in WALL-E (for one, that ship doesn't seem to have billions of people on it...).
I think it uses the fat-phobia as a crutch though. Another way to put it is that if all the human characters had superhero bodies, it would seem much more utopian even though all those other problems would still be present.
They are obese as a way of making them more dependent on the machines; I don't think it's fat-phobic to observe that obesity reduces your independence. If they weren't obese then you couldn't have the scene of them breaking out of their chairs and walking.
I think that in practice, in a post-scarcity society we'd all be thin (assuming being thin remained fashionable), not because we'd all be gym bros but because weight-loss pills and plastic surgery would be trivially obtainable. But the humans being obese makes more sense thematically. It is even possible, I suppose, that Buy 'n' Large would artificially restrict weight loss methods in order to control its populace. It's not unheard of for social diseases to be used this way; various Russian regimes, across its tsarist, communist and kleptocratic phases, have pacified rebellion by getting fit young men addicted to vodka, for example.
I don't disagree. I really love the movie. I just think it's interesting to think of how it would come across very differently (and less negatively) if the people weren't overweight holding everything else equal.
The scene of them getting out of their chairs would definitely not work in that case.
Then it might have seemed like Logan's Run.
But I agree with you, it's a flaw in that mostly great film. It's not like nothing is wrong there: the planet is trashed, and the cruise passengers are not exercising and eating appropriately. But it's not really tied together at all well. The film flies only because the core story of WALL E is so great, especially act 1.
I agree about the fat-phobia. I think the real dystopian outcome is about social isolation, not idleness.
I thought the idea was that they were supposed to resemble babies?
Seems worth noting, though it's definitely not emphasized... if you look at the number of captains, and the dates, they must have some pretty impressive longevity tech.
Love this piece Noah.
Every time I read about people like your grandfather, who risked so much to save democracy, it fills me with rage that their children, when faced with so much easier tasks, did less than nothing to protect the same.
Oh, and don't forget that boomers pretend they actually fought in WWII, thinking that young people are too stupid to realise the difference between them and the silent generation.
A funny thing about the world - my entire generation (I was born in 1980) was terrified of HIV/AIDS. It was The Great Pandemic.
And... they cured it.
And nobody really cared. Magic Johnson announced his HIV+ status 32 years ago - longer than Keith Haring lived in total. Ryan White died less than 6 years after contracting HIV.
Queen fan here. Still pissed off that the cure came a little too late to spare Freddie Mercury.
But you're right. For many AIDS is a thing of the past just as much as polio.
One of the best pieces I've read of yours Noah and I read just about every post you put out each week
Captured a lot of what was going on in my head especially around how older generations think of the younger generations as being "soft" and the advice they give.
You've given me much to think on.
As the upper-middle-class son of a working-class man, this essay, and your grandfather's words in particular, resonate with me. I worked with my father on construction sites when I was young, to make some extra spending money. Little things, sweeping and light hauling, but enough to appreciate the job. Between that and his stories, I learned: middle-class ennui and boredom are privileges, and they beat the hell out of aching muscles and the stress of not knowing if you'll be able to pay the bills next month.
So here's to the sacrifices he made so I could be here, sitting in a comfortable home office in a suburb. I won't demean them by fetishizing the world he left behind.
Bret Devereaux did a great set of posts on how real history treats the "hard times make strong men" claim. In these days of Cold War 2, you might enjoy checking it out: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
I was also about to post this.
Beautiful and wise. Thank you. 🙏🏽
Soft Millennial here 👋 This is a beautiful, sensitive post. I played scientist Robert Wilson in a play about Oppenheimer here in the UK in 2015. In researching the man, I came across his testimony to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy when justifying the next tranche of funding for the Fermilab. Rather than jump through the usual hoops of saying it would eventually lead to better weapons for the USA, he instead said: ‘It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture... It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things that we really venerate and honor in our country and are patriotic about. In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.‘ He got the funding.
As a physicist at Fermilab, this quote always makes me feel ashamed.
I got into Science because I thought it was going to generate technology that improves the lives of Americans and people around the world. But what if all we are doing is celebrating our own intellects and decorating American with nationalistic vanity projects? What, in the absence of demonstrable economic and technological benefits for the American people we retreat into self-important mysticism? I am sorry, but I feel that high energy physics has a moral obligation to think a little harder about what we are for, rather than taking it for granted we deserve it just because we are all such mega-geniuses.
That's so interesting - from my point of view, as an actor, I was moved by this quote when I found it because it seemed romantically akin to 'art for art's sake'. i.e. art shouldn't have to *do* anything. Its existence is enough. But, when it comes to high energy physics, I can quite see why this quote is not only disappointing, but also self-aggrandising. I think all of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project came away with an ego-and-a-half.
Would you say that Fermilab and particle physics in general *has* improved the lives of people around the world yet/at all with all the resource it's received?
Actually I should say that I am quite open to "Science for science's sake", but I think not only works when grounded in concrete objectives. So I would say Science makes human existence more meaningful when it expands our knowledge - to put it poetically, the universe reflecting on itself.
It's hard to weigh that against something practical like alleviating poverty or sickness, but there is something to the idea that "man cannot live on bread alone". In terms of revealed preferences, people will often chose a more meaningful path over a greater quality of life. Examples include choosing to have children or dying for a cause.
In Wilson's quote it's the emphasis on human achievement and national glory that makes me feel that the whole thing is a bit too Nietzschean and also a bit too convenient for a scientist to say. To say anything done in pursuit of science is self-justifying, is to be insensitive to actual progress in science.
I would on the whole that Fermilab and particle physics has made the world a better place. We can point to things like proton cancer therapy or MRIs or monitoring nuclear weapons or quantum computers or fusion reactors. In Oppenheimer's time (and to be fair Wilson's time) we had a situation where Science and Technology automatically came together. It's not widely appeciated that now as science has become more specialized and the projects have become larger, we actually have significant trade-offs between Science and Technology.
If I say the point of science is to generate technology, then anchoring everything in science is backwards. I should do a technology R&D industrial policy (with a side-effect of making science easier), not set ambitious scientific goals (with a side-effect of technology development). Maybe when industrial policy was a taboo economic intervention, this indirect means of technological subsidy was the best we could do. But now we should ask the question, which do we really want - Science or Technology?
So for me personally, I think I am a relentless practical and pro-social person. I'd rather refocus most of our national scientific efforts on technology in the forseeable future. We can leave some scientific question (especially the most expensive ones) until such a time that employment becomes more a matter of meaning-making and not a matter of solving problems for society. And I think there will be such a time. When we are past climate change, past the threat of authoritarianism, and past global poverty. Then we will be glad we kept a small torch for developing a fundamental understanding of the nature of the universe, and then we can dedicate an ever-increasing fraction of our society to it.
I'm "liking" your comment because it is well thought out, but I think I'd push back on your closing lines, "We can leave some scientific question (especially the most expensive ones) until such a time that employment becomes more a matter of meaning-making and not a matter of solving problems for society."
I mean we're already sort of there aren't we? I say this as someone firmly routed in aerospace and defense. The number of astronomy PhDs doing the same thing I am with just a bachelors is pretty high. I'd like to be spending my time doing research on orbit propagation, interstellar starwisps design, beamed energy, closed-loop ecologies, soil regeneration, simple robotics. Instead I make Powerpoints to explain basic business systems to Ivy League MBAs that only have one job - finding ways to make staff cuts to keep shareholders happy. Occasionally this system spits out a few new technologies.
We NEED some breakthroughs in basic research. Energy especially. If we don't, a lot of supply chains and this whole AI revolution will take a 20 year slowdown and risk an even longer collapse, maybe even enabling a world of neo-feudalism where its like 60%+ of residents pay their bills directly to Black Rock...
I'd wager there probably have been breakthroughs, but they will never see the light of day, and there is a trail of blood we'll never be able to follow.
This seems like a class of problem which Georgist LVT and UBI could solve. You need to justify yourself to MBAs who need to justify themselves to shareholders because those shareholders (or predecessors) won some big speculative bets a long time ago, and were accordingly allotted enormous power over who gets a cushy position, and who sleeps under a bridge. https://gameofrent.com/ Universal basic income would mean you could afford... maybe not everything, but probably most of what you really need for all that research without having to justify it to anybody. At the same time, GDP would be increasing by like 25%, and of course everyone else is getting UBI as well, so if there's anyone at all out there who you can justify a given project to, they're a lot more likely to be able to afford to chip in.