Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
The quote is indeed imperfect, but I think the sentiment it conveys is accurate.
After all, in a thousand years or so, Russian revolution and the USSR will be as important as the Mongol invasion and the Khanate of the Golden Horde are today. If we didn't get to the moon fifty years ago, there would have been some other conflict pushing some other line of advancement.
It is also, for the actual point of the quote, irrelevant who made the discoveries. The point is that in long range, the importance of those discoveries will always overshadow ephemeral political events.
Which is to say: pretty important. Not that it's important what exacly some boundary was, or who did what to whom...but all these things are part of the overall development of our current state of affairs, from the development of paper money to credit systems, from Chinese approach to Tibet to the extent of distribution of Islam.
I think it's risky to assume that "science", while more... (read more)