Good point Eliezer. Now think about how that applies to *conserving*, *conservation*, and *conservationists*. And lookee here, conservationists aka eco-zealots are indeed mean sons of bitches and lying screeching zealots to boot. And the fact they happen to be right sometimes hardly makes them any less distasteful.

> So that could explain why Guardians fear too many non-believers: they feel threatened by what they perceive as the power of other people's consciousness. They fear that if there are too many non-believers that it might change the truth somehow.

Now that's a good point too. Magical thinkers with no access to truth, because they have no ability to reason abstractly and thus no grasp on logic, overwhelmingly tend to think that truth is a random product of human minds. Or divine minds anyways.

It's a self-protective belief really. Very few of them have the balls to admit that their brains just aren't up to snuff. I grudgingly respect those that do admit to their own flaws but they are very few and far between.

So yeah, they find the idea that YOU can seek out and find truth to be very threatening to their beliefs and their egos. Because they can't.

> If major shakeups don't arrive often enough to regularly promote young scientists based on merit rather than conformity, the field stops resisting the standard degeneration into authority. When there's not many discoveries being made, there's nothing left to do all day but witch-hunt the heretics

This is arguably NOT true since physics in the 20th century has been extremely rigid and unbending. Ridiculous notions such as Vitalism took many decades to die out. Gibberish such as non-determinism is still routinely referred to without a sneer on one's face.

The problem with your model is that scientific communities are quite capable of insulating themselves from new discoveries and innoculating against new ways of thinking in order to seal their authority. And they're even capable of ossifying into rigid authoritarian hierarchies during periods of active ferment.

In fact, I'm sorry to say this Eliezer but your model is STUPID. That's because your model is linear. And just about NOTHING in human societies, human nature, or just plain nature, is simple enough to be linear. As soon as you recognize that feedback effects occur and that active resistance against new discoveries can be mounted, you begin to suspect that the inversion of your model (that authority dissolves during calm periods when people don't have to so actively cling to The One True Bullshit) makes as much sense as your model. Only empirical data can settle the matter, and that's something neither of us has.