interesting article on the "ten warning signs" of a radical paradigm shift

Below, I quote only a portion of the article, and not from the beginning.

Headline:

The Ten Warning Signs (by Ted Gioia)
A huge change is coming

[ ... ]

We are experiencing a total shift—like the magnetic poles reversing. But it doesn’t even have a name—not yet.

So let’s give it one.

Let’s call it: The Collapse of the Knowledge System.

We could also define it as the emergence of a new knowledge system.

In this regard, it resembles other massive shifts in Western history—specifically the rebirth of humanistic thinking in the early Renaissance, or the rise of Romanticism in the nineteenth century.

In these volatile situations, the whole entrenched hierarchy of truth and authority gets totally reversed. The old experts and their systems are discredited, and completely new values take their place. The newcomers bring more than just a new attitude—they turn everything on its head.

That’s happening right now.

The knowledge structure that has dominated everything for our entire lifetime—and for our parents and grandparents—is collapsing. And it’s taking place everywhere, all at once.

If this were just an isolated situation—a problem in universities, or media, or politics—the current hierarchy could possibly survive. But that isn’t the case.

The crisis has spread into every sector of society which relies on clear knowledge and respected authority.

[ ... ]

Let me list ten signs of this collapse. You will recognize each of them individually. Each symptom is familiar.

But what does it mean when all these things happen at the same time?

1. Scientific studies don't replicate.
2. Public distrust of experts has reached an intensity never seen before.
3. The career path for knowledge workers is breaking down—and many only have unpaid student loans to show for their years of training and preparation.
4. Funding for science and tech research is disappearing in every sphere and sector.
5. Universities have lost their prestige, and have made enemies of their core constituencies.
6. Plagiarism is getting exposed at all levels from students to corporations—and all the way to Harvard's president. But the authorities just take it for granted.
7. AI is imposed everywhere as the new expert system. But when it hallucinates and generates ridiculous responses, the authorities (again) take this for granted.
8. Science and technology are increasingly used to manipulate and exploit, not serve.
9. Scandals are everywhere in the knowledge economy (Theranos, Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsing meme coins, COVID, etc).
10. We hear constant bickering about “fake science”—from all political and ideological stances. Nobody talks about “true science.”

I quoted the author's list of ten signs of a civilizational paradigm shift without quoting his explanations and elaborations for each one. I'm still digesting his words and should probably read his article through a second, third, and fourth time. I don't disagree that we have been living through Interesting Times, but it needs to be remembered that earth's human civilization isn't all evolving at the same pace and at the same time. Much of the world is still trapped in previous centuries and utterly unconcerned with our "modern" questions. Here's my admittedly superficial point-by-point reaction (and not all rebuttals, either). Consider this only the beginning of a dialogue that will eventually involve perspectives from many different angles—a continent-spanning conversation about humanity's future.

1. It was only this year that I first noticed people starting to say this. I didn't realize that the possibility and quality of replicability were becoming a problem. If true, this is a point in favor of the postmodernist idea that we live in a post-truth, or at least a post-objectivity, world. But if this is true, then how can structural engineers, weapons designers, transportation designers, etc. keep building better and better products and structures? 2 + 2 = 4 doesn't hold true everywhere and everywhen? Physics is physics—or so I thought—so the results from a pursuit of physics (and biology, etc.) must still be replicable.  How do drugs work across cultures otherwise? Whatever suspicions we may have developed about the too-hastily promoted COVID vaccine, vaccines in general are a good thing—scientifically proven through experimental replication all over the world. I'd have to dig deeper into this question of failure of replication (i.e., the inability of a totally different team of scientists to repeat the results of a previous team's experiments) before coming down on one side or another. If replicability has truly gone out the window, then the argument for a lack of objective truth goes out the window. My suspicion, though, is that objective truth is just fine: what's gone out the window are things like ethical integrity in science, consistent documentation of procedures and results, and too much reliance on biased interpretation and speculation instead of simply collecting data and reasoning in only the most basic way from those data.

2. No argument here! The "experts," in their desperate attempts at virtue-signaling during COVID, chose to tilt left no matter what objective reality told them, which is how the supposedly stupid hoi polloi ended up being right more often than the "experts" were (see also: predicted climate-change apocalypses). If anything, there's been a concomitant rediscovery of old, commonsense truths about health, family, science, and society. And it's true that today's post-COVID "expert" class seems a lot more practical and blue-collar in nature—plumbers, mechanics, carpenters, and other hands-on people. But what this shows me is not the death of expertise, but a return to the old Greek virtue of aretê, or excellence—a virtue we can all appreciate, each in our own way, because we know it when we see it. The appreciation and celebration of excellence hasn't changed at all. We just no longer accept the authority of some self-appointed priesthood. If anything, today's public (or sectors of it, anyway) is more scientific than ever: "Show us you're good, then we'll listen to you."

3. No argument here, either. I didn't take the career path of physical labor, and it shows in my weak body, overly indoctrinated mind, and fairly useless knowledge/skill set. As I've argued before: take all the city kids with their supposed "education," put them on farms, and see whether they can operate a tractor or figure out the rhythm of the seasons or of the farm animals. It's been interesting, meanwhile, to watch the AI discussion evolve from "AI robots are going to take all the simple, blue-collar jobs" to "AI is almost primed to take over the knowledge/creativity economy." I mean, the products of AI "creativity" are currently still slop, but with AI improving logarithmically, for how long will that remain the case?

4. When I was in high school and college, I heard impassioned pleas from art and music teachers to get parents to focus their kids—please, God—on creativity and the "softer" human pursuits. Back then, the boogeyman was sports: schools tended (and probably still tend) to overemphasize and overfund sports like football, baseball, track, and swimming, leaving band, orchestra, and fine arts scrambling after whatever budgetary table scraps remained. To hear that funding for STEM is dwindling is alarming, but maybe that's a natural consequence of normal people's skepticism about "experts." The sense of alarm does reveal an unresolved tension in us normies, too: we want STEM to be robust, but not if it's going to turn our newest generations of scientists into unscientific, ideology-driven Lysenkos (Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet-era geneticist who championed state-sponsored Lamarckian pseudoscience—acquired traits can be passed along—doing untold damage to his nation in the process as crops died and kept dying). STEM, yes; woke-ideology factories, no.

5. I don't think everyone has gotten the memo on this one. Rich sponsors of universities certainly haven't. While I personally would never let my kids go to an American college these days (nor to a public school), universities themselves don't see themselves as anything other than culturally essential bastions of knowledge and "higher education," still full of prestige. Maybe some of them still are, in fact, prestigious, incarnating old ideas and ideals of academia and inculcating notions of civitas. But by the look of universities today in America, they're little more than woke ideology factories—toilets of Marxism filled with screaming, perpetually furious, perpetually aggrieved, purple-haired, nose-pierced, tattooed idiots-by-choice and egged on by their out-of-touch professors. They love sex but hate reproduction. I keep thinking that if a conservative could be persuaded to sacrifice himself by purporting to speak on campus, we could lure all the campus idiots out since, along with their other lovely qualities, these metal-studded kids despise free speech and free thought, which means they'd converge on the speech venue to shout the speaker down and/or to cause violence and mayhem, making them easy to round up, at which point one could either transport them to a remote island or stick them in a pit to be flame-throwered. My feeling is that a university's prestige is a matter of perception, and while a great swath of the general public no longer respects universities, a great swath still does, including university staff themselves.

6. I was initially surprised to see how rampant the plagiarism problem was in the West: I had smugly assumed the problem was far more deeply entrenched in the uncreative* East, where plagiarism is common and still generally not considered a sin. When an East Asian learns traditional brush calligraphy, for example, early instruction stresses the importance of copying the masters, not on going one's own way self-expressively. There is, in traditional calligraphy, a right way and a wrong way to approach the craft—stroke order, amount to dip the brush in the inkwell, stroke pattern and speed, etc. Self-expression comes later, but the fundamentals all involve slavish imitation. Passing the old Chinese civil-service exam meant being able to regurgitate the Confucian classics. The exam had limited room for interpretation, creativity, and original thought, and this hesitancy to let the younger generation think freely on its own was considered a high virtue. With that as the cultural background of East Asia (of course it's more complex than what I just delineated), it's easy to see why plagiarism would come easily to East Asians in a Western-style university milieu. Despite all of this, though, I am now chastened. The West is just as bad as the East, with "scholarship" having become an empty, devalued thing. Education long ago stopped being about enrichment and became a mere means to an end: a mere piece of paper allowing one to say "I went to Harvard; here's the proof, and here are my connections." In that kind of environment, plagiarism is just a mean to an end, and today, education is little more than a joke. Maybe it always was, all over the world. Plagiarism, by that standard, is just a symptom.

7. I think the sentence beginning with "But" is more important than the first sentence, but the first part is arguably the cause of the second. At least we retain enough objectivity to be able to identify hallucinations, and once again, this requires adhering to a scientific standard of objectivity: humanity's not done with objectivity yet. Meanwhile, if we let AI keep wildly advancing without doing something about hallucinations and other profound AI problems, we really are setting ourselves up for disaster. As my buddy Charles rationally argues in both of his Mission: Impossible reviews, none of this is inevitable. This is the same criticism that demonstrates why the slippery-slope fallacy is a fallacy: slippery slopes do happen, but they are the result of a chained network of decisions by living, breathing people, any one (or group) of whom can cry "Stop!" and halt the slippage down the slope. Nothing about the slippage is inevitable. The reply to this criticism is that choices do build a certain momentum, and what started off as avoidable can indeed eventually become inevitable once the little wave has become a tsunami. How does this apply to AI? Will it ever be possible to program in a sort of "conscience" that keeps the AI devoted to truth, logic, and reality? Of course, as people will point out, there's a sort of "framing problem" at work, here: bias is inevitable when programmers try to keep AI truthful and objective. What topics should AI focus on? The chosen topics will reflect a bias. How long or short, how simple or detailed, should AI's explanations be? Explanatory length can also reflect biases. Maybe truth and objectivity need to be thought of as asymptotic: we can approach reality with AI, but we can never reach it. It's all in the striving, not the arriving: truth and objectivity aren't goals but horizons.

8. People no longer know what science even is. It is not religion, and it should always be self-questioning, with current hypotheses being replaced by better hypotheses in an attempt to align more closely with physical reality. People on my side of the aisle—the religious-studies side—often criticize science for not recognizing that it, too, rests on certain metaphysical assumptions, to wit: (1) there are causes and effects, and (2) reality is objectively existent (to deny this leads to solipsism and/or postmodernist absurdity or maybe even to a fruitless discussion of quantum mechanics). Political ideology has no place in scientific endeavor, but ideology has become a guiding force not only in determining what scientists will research but also in determining how and whether results are to be published and interpreted. If Big Tobacco doesn't like the scientifically established linkage between smoking and lung cancer, well, Big Tobacco will just hire its own scientists to do their own study that will miraculously show that the linkage is tenuous at best. In conflating science with religion, people come to see the "experts" as part of a priestly class trained to descry things that the rest of us can't, and this priestly class is worth blindly following. To some extent, of course, expertise can't be discounted, but because political ideology has become such an obfuscating factor in science these days, we can no longer even do simple things like define what a woman is.

9. The scandal problem is an effect of (1) through (8), I think. For a long time, the public blindly trusted many large institutions, and we're now in an age of radical distrust (well, that's true for half the country, anyway: the other half still naively trusts ideology-ridden scientific institutions like Moderna or unscientific institutions like the mainstream media). Let the scandals run rampant, I say; it's better for members of the public to learn to think for themselves and to draw their own conclusions.

10. The question, at least since postmodernism came on the scene, is whether reality is objective at all. Once you dismantle objectivity, you radicalize subjectivity, which means there's less and less reason to trust any authorities. It's all in your head. You're on your own. For the US political right, distrust in government and the media is one way in which this manifests itself. For the left, distrust in "totalizing metanarratives" of racial harmony, shared core values, and Western virtues is another way in which this suspicion of sacred cows manifests itself. "Fake science" is simply the recognition that so much "science" is ideologically driven these days. It's no longer about respecting physical reality but about achieving predetermined results that align with our political views.

I don't see these ten signs as heralding a radically new paradigm so much as they herald a return to an older paradigm—one based on objective truth, open dialogue, freedom of thought, and aretê—the old values of universitas. Competence is more important than skin color. Intelligence is more important than lip-service to an ideology. And in an environment of freedom of speech and thought, everyone, even the most offensive among us, gets a voice.

__________

*There are plenty of counterexamples of creativity and innovation in the East. It's not all "steal a Western idea, copy it, miniaturize it, then sell it back to the West." There's genuine innovation happening in Korean and Japanese robotics, for example. The East Asian world of food is in a state of creative ferment, partly because of continued interactions with Western and other world cuisine. So I don't deny that the East is a font of creativity, but even now, there's less cultural emphasis placed on originality than on copying merely to "keep up with the Joneses." China in particular is guilty of this.