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hyporational comments on Publication: the "anti-science" trope is culturally polarizing and makes people distrust scientists - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (76)
Historical scientists had the disadvantages of flammable libraries, centralized knowledge and centralized political power.
We don't have centralized political power now?
If you look at the feat that Julian Assange pulled by understanding the political system and playing it, power isn't as centralized as it was in the past.
On the other hand Julian Assange did lose his ability to move freely so, it's not like the state lost all it's power. http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2014/02/update-on-one-man-vs-the-world.html is a nice blog that covers how the size of superempowered individuals that do have power in a decentralised way that wasn't there in the past.
If your science gets censored in France because of France latest idea that censorship is the way to go you are free to move to a different country and there are plenty to choose where you are relatively free to express science.
I try to use language economically, there's a precision trade-off. On a spectrum from centralized to decentralized, do you think it's more centralized now than it was in the middle ages?
In a sense, most certainly yes! In the middle ages, each fiefdom was a small city-state, controlling in its own right not all that much territory. There certainly wasn't the concept of nationalism as we know it today. And even if some duke was technically subservient to a king, that king wasn't issuing laws that directly impacted the duke's land on a day to day basis.
This is unlike what we have today: We have countries that span vast areas of land, with all authority reporting back to a central government. Think of how large the US is, and think of the fact that the government in Washington DC has power over it all. That is a centralized government.
It is true that there are state governments, but they are weak. Too weak, in fact. In the US today, the federal government is the final source of authority. The president of the US has far more power over what happens in a given state than a king in the middle ages had over what happened in any feudal dukedom.
And a digital network is potentially more instable than a physical one. If it is easier to replicate data it is also easier to replicate destructors.