Science is Under Attack
In yesterday's Daily Links we included a particular link about how MElon wages a war not only on (or against) NASA but on Western entrepreneurship/leadership in space. Privatisation fails us all.
Similarly, in Computer Science, what they teach nowadays is Computer Science Skills. By which they mean... stuff like GUIs. They help people memorise menus and call it "education". Who needs concepts anyway? Just teach the "BRANDS"! Train people for companies; call it "education".
Computer Security has become Computer Security back-dooring (because we're meant to think that kill switches exist to protect us). Even software engineering skills are nowadays being belittled; they've recently told us - via corrupt (bribed) media - that we should instead just prompt LLMs for arbitrary, un-vetted, untested slop or follow the "Google (or stackexchange.com) is your friend" mindset, i.e. copypasta or poorly generated 'code'. Instead of saving time and increasing reliability we get systems that are less reliable, harder to maintain, and therefore take longer to build and test. People go to college for 3-4 years not to learn something like "just Google it".
Science used to mean something. Now? Look who's in charge. Science to them is an "insult"; they signal to their supporters that they hate "The Science", vaccines are a scam, and "Brexit" is right because it 'feels' right (irrespective of the data).
Oligarchy prefers a dumbed-down population. Slop helps ensure that information/knowledge becomes less accessible, easier to manipulate, and censorship is done at the whims of "some algorithm", which cannot be held accountable (it's controlled from up above, e.g. the Communist Party in TikTok's case).
Society cannot regain balance without appreciation of facts and science.
Larry Ellison did not graduate from college. Bill Epsteingate did not graduate from college. Mark Kapo-berg did not graduate from college. A lot of the world's richest men aren't smart; they just live on top of oil (extracted from under the ground) or exploit special connections to climb up the ladder. So we live in a kakistocracy. █