DocWatts

No, they won't. At least most of them won't, until it's too late. Waiting for a mass exodus of Trump voters to grow a conscience is a fool's errand, when they've had countless opportunities to do so over the better part of a decade. Most will continue to believe that it's undocumented immigrants and the Democrats who are ruining their lives when Trump is taking away their Social Security and Veteran's benefits. Or they'll still consider Trump the 'lesser of two evils' when he starts a war with Canada or abandons NATO to ally the US with Putin. The vast majority of people who collaborated with the Nazis never took any personal responsibility for their political choices. It was the next generation after the war who began the painful process of grappling with Germany's past. By and large these 'little Nazis' were okay with what Hitler was doing, right up until they were the ones who were paying for it with their lives. But by then it was too late. It won't be any different with most MAGAs. First they came for the undocumented immigrants. And I did not speak out because I was not an immigrant. Then they came for trans people. And I did not speak out because I was not trans. Then they came for federal workers. And I did not speak out because I was not a federal worker. Then they came for me. And there was no one left to speak out for me.

Public pushback is having its intended effect in making it slower and more difficult for Trump to fulfill his fascist agenda - so KEEP FIGHTING! Public pressure was never going to completely stop Trump's fascist agenda, but it can gum up the gears and buy us more time. Even authoritarian regimes need some level of public support in order to carry out their plans - not because they give a shit about the public, but because logistically their agenda requires cooperation from state and local governments and agencies. But we need to be doing more - encourage everyone you know who's not a MAGAt to flood their reps with phone calls, and tell them not to cooperate with Trump's regime in any way shape or form. Pressure your local reps to hold a town hall. Attend protests. Withhold your money from corporations such as Amazon and Target that are collaborating with Trump's fascist regime. Stay informed by following organizations like 50501 and Indivisible, and be willing to have uncomfortable conversations with friends and acquaintances who don't normally follow politics. In short - stop doomscrolling and find a way to integrate civic participation into your life. The Orange Shit Stain had the gall to think dismantling our democracy would be effortless, that we'd just sit back and allow him to destroy our lives without a fight - let's show him how wrong he is.

Getting a lot of 'Nazi Germany had to invade Poland to defend itself' vibes from the people here defending Trump's fascist regime. I'd say it was disappointing if that wasn't the reason I took a long hiatus from the Politics subforum in the first place. I'd encourage everyone else to find a sustainable form of civic engagement beyond just posting on Forums and social media in the upcoming weeks and months. (Note that doom scrolling is not a valid form of civic engagement). Find a group like 50501 or a local chapter or Indivisible to connect with. Don't waste your time trying to 'save' MAGA Cultists from their delusions - all the 'reasonable' ones have left by this point. Now's the time where we build the infrastructure for when conditions get much worse, and the streets become flooded with angry, desperate people. Should that happen, it would be much better if there's an organized nonviolent civil resistance to absorb these folks, and keep the resistance nonviolent. (Note that nonviolent doesn't mean 'nonconfrontational'. It means leveraging the fact that nonviolent civil resistance is much more strategically effective in resisting authoritarianism than violent insurrection).

My sense is that the Post I linked is using strategic steelmanning / a Motte-and-bailey reversal, in order to reach people who are incapable of arriving at this incredibly fucking obvious point otherwise. I don't have a problem with offering an olive branch to conservatives to dump America's Hitler, if that's a building blocking in saving us from fascism. (I've shouting from the rooftops about the Orange Shit Stain for the better part of a decade, and I hate that I've consistently been proven correct). But otherwise I completely agree with your point.

Proud of my home state for showing up to the state capital yesterday. The fact that Trump is threatening protesters is indicative to me that they're getting under his skin.

Hit the nail on the fucking head with this take. Trump is what happens when you give someone with the ego development and impulse control of an immature child the keys to the country.

Germany has much better parade floats than we do - my fellow Americans, we need to step up our game.

In regards to Vaush, he's not a tankie like Hasan Piker, is more pragmatic with his takes than much of the online Left, is willing to speak to men's issues - but otherwise I'd agree with this take. Just know you're getting some insightful political analysis mixed with overt bias and a healthy dose of hyperbole.

If you live in the United States - CALL YOUR SENATORS AND REPS ABOUT THIS!!!! The more public pushback that Trump's regime gets from the public, the more difficult and costly it will be for him to fulfill his fascistic foreign policy goals. Trump may not give a shit if the United States loses all its credibility in the eyes of the rest of the world and becomes a pariah state ala Nazi Germany or Apartheid South Africa, but his pillars of support (Republican legislators in vulnerable seats, multinational corporations) will care if public outrage over these disgraceful actions begins to affects them. Here's a sample script you can use (or modify and personalize from): Hi, my name is [Your Name], and I’m a constituent from [Your City/Zip Code]. I’m calling to urge Senator [name] to loudly and boldly condemn Donald Trump’s disgraceful betrayal of Ukraine and his alignment with Vladimir Putin. His recent summit with President Zelensky — where Trump and JD Vance tried to humiliate and threaten Zelensky, while pushing pro-Russian propaganda that Ukraine started this war — was an absolute disgrace and an embarrassment to the United States. This is mob boss behavior, not presidential leadership. Watching this unfold feels like watching the U.S. abandon its democratic allies during World War II and align itself with Nazi Germany. I urge the Senator to denounce Trump’s actions loudly and clearly, rally opposition to his pro-Putin agenda, and use every tool available to prevent him from undermining Ukraine and our democratic allies. The Democratic Party must act like a true opposition party before it's too late, and Ukraine is abandoned to its destruction. This is a defining moment. The world is watching, and history will remember who stood up to authoritarianism. Please do everything in your power to stop this. Thank you for your time.

@Elliott Insiders are saying that Republican Senators and reps are scared shitless of threats of violence from MAGA extremists if they break ranks with Trump. Lest we forget, MAGA has already tried to kill several of our elected representives, including Mike Pence and the Governor of my home state. Moreover, thanks to the hostile takeover and subsequent politicization of the FBI by MAGA extremists, they won't be trying to stop these attacks on our elected officials (or the public, for that matter). https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-congress-political-violence

Given how ham-fisted and blatant these moves are, you may be right, but the only way that happens is by a sustained public pressure campaign on these legislators from members of the public. In short - call your senators, even your Republican ones, tell them that you expect them to uphold the Rule of Law, and not cede their constitutional authority to Elon Musk and Donald Trump. (Ie, "Senator [name], I voted for you to represent me, not Elon Musk"). Musk is the weakest link in Trump's coalition, I'd recommend pushing that angle if your representatives are Republicans.

I don't know if you live in the States, but I do. We're that fucked up - or getting there at any rate. We're in the early stages of what is known as a 'legitimacy crisis', where key political players and a sizeable minority of the country have dropped the pretense that they care about the Rule Of Law. I'm not saying this to be alarmist, no particular outcome to this crisis is inevitable, but it doesn't help anyone to pretend that any of this is normal.

Speak out loudly and boldly that a coup is happening. Grind all congressional work to a halt. Filibuster every bill that comes to the floor, refuse to nominate cabinet picks. Obstruct legislative committees. Participate in protests. In short, abandon 'business as usual' without major concessions from this regime to restore oversight and accountability. Use their legislative authority to make every action that this regime wants to take as slow and frustratingly difficult as possible.

I wish that were true - but at the end of the day Laws are ultimately just social agreements, not worth the piece of paper they're written on without enforcement. If people with the power to enforce these agreements decide that Trump's whims rather than the US Constitution is the 'law', then that becomes the lived reality, regardless of what's on the books. This is the explicit long term goal of Project 2025, by the way

This is true. But of all the federal agencies affected by this Executive Order, this is the one I'm the most concerned about. If Trump does manage to federalize elections, democracy is effectively finished, in a fairly unambiguous way. Of course this would be highly illegal and unconstitutional, but Laws only matter if there are people with power willing to enforce them. If Trump and Elon raid the Federal Elections Commission like they did the US Treasury, who is going to stop them? For all we know, Trump will issue a decree that State level election results are illegitimate if not run through his federalized FEC - what then?

We also need to demand much more from our elected officials - more of this, speaking out boldly and making it plain that they refuse to comply with fascism - and less complaints and excuses that they lack the power to stop Trump's coup because they don't have a majority in the legislature.

Thought I'd give an additional bump for Behind The Bastards podcast. Robert Evans in one of the best in the biz for deconstructing fascism in an accessible and engaging way. Also a good source for finding source material to seek out and read on your own (the book he's referencing here is 'They Thought They Were Free' by Milton Mayer).

There's wisdom in this - but I'd like to suggest that there's a middle ground between reacting to every unhinged thing that Trump's regime says and does, and sticking one's head in the sand only to be caught off guard when the economy crashes or you're unable to renew your passport. Find a way to be active and engaged, but don't let fear rule your life. On the contrary, in my experience civil resistance participation has been very empowering for staving off feelings of despair at large societal events beyond my direct control. You can explore spiritually, write philosophy, or pursue an education / career while also calling your senators, jumping onto a weekly zoom meeting with a group like Indivisible, or attending a local protest on the weekend. In other words, integrate civic participation into the rest of your life. (Doomscrolling does not count as civic participation). Take small, reasonable steps to prepare for possible civil unrest, but don't blow your life savings on prepping supplies, and don't forget to live your life in the meantime. As an aside, feel free to shoot me a message if you have any questions that you'd feel more comfortable airing in a private message rather than an open forum. I'll just reiterate that I'm advocating for sustained, legal and NONVIOLENT civic resistance - unsexy stuff like attending town halls, calling legislators, memorizing your constitutional rights, combating disinformation, attending planning and strategy meetings with groups like 50501 and Indivisible.

I recently turned an expanded version of this post into a Substack article, if folks would prefer sharing that over a forum post. Please do your part to help get this information out there, since as of Thursday at least, legacy media is largely NOT COVERING this. https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/a-dictatorial-coup-is-taking-place

@Leo Gura I imagine that a poll would be more precise - but I do not have kids (I'm 37 if that's at all relevant or helpful). As an aside, I'm genuinely baffled as to how anyone in the United States who's not in the top quarter or so of the income bracket can afford to have kids. Not an antinatalist by any means, but I would pause to consider the ethics of bringing a kid into the social upheaval we're likely to experience over the next few decades - between a collapsing middle class, a global resurgence of fascism, and the chaos of accelerating climate change, my expectation is for things to get much worse before they get better.

Thanks! This is actually a subsection from a book chapter that explores the epistemology of science (and conceptual knowledge more broadly) - how science helps us discern relevance patterns beyond everyday observational reasoning, the role and purpose of conceptual models, the constructed nature of subject-object dualism, our evolving archetypes of 'realness' and our emotional attachment to an absolute ground for knowledge, and the performative contradiction Scientific Realism. I've been posting little snippets here and there. This is part of a chapter called 'Categories Are Always Contextual.' Been an interesting challenge to try to present somewhat self-contained snippets from a more cohesive work that builds to advanced epistemological insights - I imagine you've run into some of that as well with your content.

Greetings and happy holidays! Thought that I might share a write-up for my philosophy book, the explores the metaphysical assumptions behind Scientific Realism. _______________________________________________________________________ Parting The Veil Of Scientific Realism In the Los Angeles County Museum of Art hangs a deliciously subversive 1929 painting called ‘The Treachery Of Images’ by René Magritte. At a glance, the piece is unassuming enough - just an ordinary tobacco pipe set against an empty beige background - hardly the type of composition to turn heads when set against the museum’s masterworks. So why did this piece cause a fuss among art critics when it first appeared? And how does it continue to rub people the wrong way a century later? Well, there's one other detail about this painting we've yet to mention. Just below the pipe is a meticulously lettered declaration, written in French: 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe' - 'This is not a pipe.’ Thus does the aforementioned ‘treachery’ fall into place. Little wonder that critics bristled at the provocation, which had all the subtlety of a slap to the face. No one likes admitting they’ve been deceived, especially by something that feels like a joke at our expense. Nor do we appreciate being disabused of our comfortable illusions - all the more when the rug puller seems to take pleasure in the act. While ‘Treachery’ is more brazen about it than most, such fourth-wall breaks have a long history. Like Cerventes stepping into the tale of Don Quixote to remind us that we’re not living out grand adventures but reading a book, the medium is the message here. In an age where metatextual commentary is a well-worn trope of popular media - from stand-up comedy to comic book films to memes - we might be tempted to write off this century-old painting as the equivalent of an internet shitpost and leave it at that. Yet beneath its banal presentation, 'The Treachery Of Images' is deceptively simple - a philosophical sleight of hand that cuts to an epistemic truth that’s as fundamental as it’s easy to miss. Much like the parable of the fish who’s oblivious to the water he swims in, we’re habitually oblivious to the constructed nature of our abstractions. Over time, we forget that they’re abstractions at all, and our scientific models are no exception to this. And here we arrive at the heart of the matter, which brings us full circle to our orienting metaphor: the model is not the manifestation. Like a plastic airplane on our desk, models serve us best when we remember that they’re impressions of Reality, created for a specific purpose - not Reality itself. Would you try to eat a picture of an apple? Drive a blueprint? Travel to a simulated city? This isn’t mere wordplay - it cuts to the category error inherent to Scientific Realism. A category error is a logical fallacy that occurs when we mistake one kind of thing (a model or representation) for something altogether different in kind (the reality it represents). When Margitte states that ‘this is not a pipe’, it’s exactly this distinction that he’s highlighting. The fallacy of Scientific Realism isn’t intrinsic to scientific inquiry itself - it stems from how we overextend its successes. Our habitual grasping for an absolute ground upon which our knowledge can safely rest can lead us to extend these models into ontological domains that lie beyond their explanatory reach. Science constructs predictive models of natural phenomena, but it’s not a shortcut for the embodied familiarity with the world that makes those models meaningful. It excels at precise mechanistic investigation, but raw data isn’t a replacement for the interpretive lens through which we transform information into understanding. It can tell us how things behave, but it’s not the arbiter of what things ultimately are - since ‘things’ are constructed distinctions, not fixed features of a mind-independent Reality. The takeaway? In spite of its considerable explanatory power, science doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Its usefulness comes from its integration with the Life-World - that shared, experiential world which serves as our primary ‘Reality’, long before we start theorizing about it. It’s this Life-World, in all of its visceral immediacy - with its pleasures and sorrows, its mysteries and mundanity, its straightforwardness and complexity - that science is downstream from. By this point, an astute reader may have picked up on a seeming contradiction, stemming from our account that knowledge lacks an absolute ground. By emphasizing the primacy of this Life-World, aren't we falling into the same performative contradiction that we criticized earlier, substituting one absolute ground for another? The distinction here is subtle but decisive. The difference lies in how the Life-World isn't some hidden metaphysical domain behind appearances - this isn't Plato's Realm of Forms repackaged or 'The Matrix' with a fresh coat of paint. Rather, the Life-World and the material reality that science investigates are mutually constitutive - like how hot and cold aren’t isolated properties, but give meaning to one another. The Life-World is the canvas for our lived experience, yet this canvas itself is shaped by the material reality it presents. There is no absolute ground here - trying to find one would be like searching for the ‘true’ pole of temperature in either hot or cold. So why even bring it up then if the Life-World isn’t some privileged vantage point for what’s ultimately ‘real’? Because when we neglect our access point to Reality, we stumble into the fallacy of treating our constructed distinctions as ‘more real’ than the embodied experience they’re meant to illuminate. Thus does the veil of Scientific Realism blind us to the lived context that gives our models meaning. A vivid case study for how these two poles - the Life-World and material reality - arise together and give meaning to one another can be found in how color is disclosed to us. Here we find a powerful demonstration of the folly inherent to Scientific Realism, in treating physical properties as the ‘true reality’ behind appearances. When we treat ‘mind’ and ‘world’ or ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ as absolutes rather than constructed abstractions, we tend to miss how our everyday world is seamlessly given before our distinctions divide it. The sweeping tango between these two poles is central for how our minds construct color - yes, color is constructed, it’s not an inherent property of objects. At a glance this might seem counterintuitive, but recall our earlier point that ‘constructed’ does not mean imaginary! Just as a concert emerges from the resonance of performer, venue, and audience, color emerges from the interplay of mind, body, and environment. Color isn’t ‘out there’ in some mind-independent Reality, but neither is it an independent fabrication of the mind. Is color a property? Yes, but not in the way that mass and charge are properties of atoms. So if color isn’t a physical property and it’s not purely mental, then what is this taken-for-granted chimera? It’s an interactional property that we enact through our embeddedness in the world. This brings us back to our earlier discussion of relevance realization - how living minds filter and prioritize information from their environment, based on what matters for their survival and flourishing. Crucially, the bulk of relevance realization isn’t a conscious ‘choice’. When we make a conscious decision to prioritize one thing over another, this is but the tip of a much larger iceberg that’s largely hidden from view. Instead, the bulk of relevance realization is largely pre-reflective and automatic - a consequence of how the world is disclosed to us due to our physiology and past experiences, long before conceptual awareness enters into the picture. When it comes to our perception of color, we can see how this process shapes our construction of categories in a fundamental way. We don’t perceive the electromagnetic spectrum in its raw form - this would be overwhelming and largely useless to us. Color perception interacts with only a small portion, which science has termed ‘visible light’. And even within this minute slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, color vision isn’t a replication of this territory. It’s more akin to a highly involved form of curation, that’s tightly coupled to our needs and capacities. Our perceptual system doesn’t retrieve pre-existing boundaries in nature - it actively creates those boundaries through the dynamic coupling of mind, body, and world. To understand this interplay between mind, body, and world, let's look at what science tells us about color - and where it leaves holes that can’t be fully probed by its methodological tools alone. Consider the color ‘red’ - science can precisely model the wavelengths of light that evoke this perceptual experience. Through mechanistic investigation, it can describe how light enters our eye through our cornea, is focused by our lens, and reaches specialized photoreceptors in our retina. From here, it can tell us how these cone cells convert light into electrical signals that travel via the optic nerve to our brain, and map out the neural pathways that process this information. While these investigative insights are hard-won and essential for an understanding of color, an ‘outside-in’ vantage point can only get us so far. No amount of scientific data can fully capture what it’s like to see a ripe strawberry that’s very, very red. If we’re describing this experience to someone without vision, we can explain its mechanics, we can try analogizing it to other senses - but something essential about seeing red remains stubbornly ineffable. Just as something is lost when we transcribe a song to lyrics on a page, or when we have to explain the punchline of a joke, color must be experienced to be understood. In sum, while lived experience is irreducible to mechanistic explanation, science has an prominent role to play in how we reflect upon this experience. Science and the Life-World aren’t opposed to one another - they’re two sides of the same coin, standing in a relationship of mutual illumination. Just as it’s nonsensical to ask whether our coin is ‘really’ heads or tails, neither science nor the Life-World should be treated as an absolute ground. Which of these two sides we choose to prioritize in our attempts to make sense of the world has everything to do with what we’re trying to understand. Moreover, both halves of the coin have much to gain by being in dialogue with one another. Scientific inquiry benefits from the knowledge that its theoretical constructs aren’t an approximation of a ‘view from nowhere’, but are a reflection of our embodied experience within the Life-World. On the flip side, our navigation of the Life-World is enriched by how science grounds our assumptions in verifiable realities and extends our understanding beyond the immediacy of our direct experience. This brings us to a deeper truth about the nature of understanding itself. Every perspective, whether scientific or experiential, both reveals certain aspects of Reality while necessarily obscuring others. Consider the parable of blindfolded people touching different parts of an elephant - its trunk, its tusk, its ear, and its tail - and coming to widely different conclusions about what they’re examining. Like these blindfolded observers, each of our vantage points comes with its own insights and limitations. As we’ll discover in the next chapter, this isn’t a ‘flaw’ of human reasoning that can be neatly excised by adopting progressively larger viewpoints. So-called ‘theories of everything’, while useful for getting a rough lay of the land, aren’t a shortcut around this limitation. As we zoom out to a larger field-of-view, we take in more of the territory but also lose essential detail. And as we’ve just seen, recourse to an absolute ground is another dead-end - for there’s no final arbiter for what’s ultimately ‘real’ that can transcend our human perspective within Reality. The path forward isn’t to chase an impossible ‘view from nowhere’, but to understand how these different vantage points can complement and enrich one another. Just as the blindfolded observers would gain a fuller picture by sharing their experiences rather than arguing about whose view is ‘really real’, we make progress by bringing our diverse perspectives into good-faith dialogue. Yet this openness to multiple viewpoints must also come with the recognition that not every perspective deserves a seat at the table. Some perspectives are grounded in bad faith, intellectual dishonesty, or the willful denial of verifiable realities. We need not lose sleep over excluding Nazis from weighing in on public discussions about the Holocaust, nor do fossil fuel companies need to be given additional opportunities to spread climate change denial. Learning how to parse this difference between legitimate disagreement and willful distortion will be crucial as we navigate the challenges ahead. Moving forward, we’ll examine how the inherent partiality of perspectives isn’t a bug but an essential feature of our sensemaking frameworks. Coming to grips with this partiality will help us thread a more constructive course between rigid absolutism and inconsistent relativism. Rather than seeing this partiality as a problem to be solved, we’ll discover how to leverage it to develop more nuanced and adaptable ways of understanding.

Haven't heard of it, thanks for the recommendation though!

Howdy! Thought I might share this write-up I did on the origins of modern science, which delves into how our intuitions about relevance (what is and isn't considered important for a particular problem) inform our problem solving frameworks. This write up is prelude to a deconstruction of scientific realism for the philosophy book I've been writing, 7 Provisional Truths. Enjoy! _______________________________________________________________ Horizons Of Relevance The crux of empiricism's staying power, in both its early and scientific incarnations, stems from its broad applicability to a wide range of practical problems. The key to this versatility? It’s tied to why our problem-solving frameworks are useful to us in the first place. Just as tools empower us to shape raw materials into desired forms, methodologies such as empiricism equip us to steer events towards desired outcomes. Put simply, a methodology is a structured, replicable practice for guiding actions towards an intended purpose. When working as intended, the guidance that these frameworks provide isn’t arrived at by happenstance. It instead follows from successfully pinpointing what’s relevant for a particular problem. While pinning down what’s pertinent to a given goal may sound straightforward, it can be deceptively complex. Our lifetime of experience with everyday tasks tends to mask the formidable challenge of discerning relevance in situations where we lack this expertise. The process of determining what's salient - that is, what stands out as important - for a given purpose is known within cognitive science as relevance realization. While it’s yet to become a household term, relevance realization exposes a pivotal aspect of our problem-solving that's easily overlooked in folk-epistemology. The development of germ theory aptly exemplifies many of these challenges. It shines a spotlight on how our intuitions of salience can be highly misleading, while revealing the ease with which outcome-determinative factors can elude the untrained eye. While it’s become common sense that diseases are transmitted by germs spread through bodily fluids and contaminated material, this wasn’t evident to anyone just a few centuries ago. The existence of microorganisms, not to mention their power to disrupt our bodily processes, isn’t an inference that’s readily drawn from surface-level observation. The barrier to connecting these dots can be traced back to the environmental context that our perceptual abilities are adapted to. In essence, our sensory systems are evolutionarily calibrated to an intuitive, human-centric scale. Think of this perceptual baseline as the person-sized ‘factory setting’ to which our experience of both space and time is instinctively attuned. To borrow and extend a term from meteorology, let’s call this anthropocentric frame of reference the mesoscale (from the ancient Greek words for 'middle' and 'size'). So what’s the link between the mesoscale and our intuitions about relevance? The connection is that it’s our perceptual canvas for drawing inferences from our embodied experience. Though our intuitions of relevance are formed at the mesoscale, this anthropocentric realm is just a tiny slice of Reality. Venturing beyond this familiar domain poses a number of unique challenges, beyond the fact that phenomena become difficult to observe and manipulate as the scale shifts away from our day-to-day perspective. At extremely small and large scales, everyday phenomena can behave in very counterintuitive ways. Take water, for instance. While its behavior is well accounted for at the mesoscale, from an ant’s point of view water becomes a sticky, globule-like substance with significant surface tension. And from a planetary vantage point, its currents shape the climates of entire continents as it circumnavigates the globe. Moreover, we often fail to grasp how day-to-day phenomena are intrinsically linked to processes operating at temporal and spatial realms vastly smaller or larger than our habitual frame of reference. Returning to our water example, for most of human history it would have taken a feat of imagination to connect the ocean tides to the invisible pull of the distant moon and sun. That is, until Newton's field guide to universal gravitation upended our cosmic perspective. By the same token, attributing the air that we breathe to the waste products of tiny, invisible creatures in the oceans would have seemed equally far-fetched. Then imagine Leeuwenhoek’s surprise at his chance encounter with microbes from tinkering with glass lenses - and how this discovery would go on to change the world. The basic takeaway is that our habitual intuitions about relevance are tightly bound to the mesoscale that serves as our stage for daily life. While early empiricism probed the limits of this human-sized backdrop, venturing beyond its comfortable boundaries requires highly specialized techniques. Which brings us to the innovations that the scientific method brought to empiricism - and how its transformation of daily life propelled this methodological toolkit into a bona fide folk-theory of Reality. But before we part the veil of scientific realism, it will be instructive to touch upon the historical contingencies that gave birth to modern science. Lest we forget, the scientific method wasn’t an inevitability, and its successes were far from guaranteed. Instead, the achievements that would propel the popular image of science from a specialized mode of inquiry into a de facto ‘theory of everything’ weren’t preordained. Far from mythological depictions of science as a universal cipher to ‘life, the universe, and everything’, it’s important to keep in mind that the science method was invented - not ‘discovered’. In keeping with our theme that our human perspective within Reality is an essential feature of our problem solving frameworks, the story of science can be traced to a specific time and place that was ripe for an epistemological revolution. The Historical Foundations Of Modern Science The iterative toolkit that would become modern science found its initial foothold in 16th and 17th century Europe, amidst a convergence of highly contingent social factors. A Pandora’s Box of socially disruptive forces was busy uprooting European civilization from feudalism, which had taken root in the ruins of the Western Roman Empire. The prevailing social order, consisting of subsistence farmers bound in hereditary service to a military aristocracy, had been devastated by the Black Death - a civilizational apocalypse that wiped out a third of Europe’s population. Carried by flea-infested rats who’d made themselves at home amidst the open-sewers and waste-filled streets of European towns and cities, the fetid conditions of daily life were ripe for this plague to spread its tendrils into every corner of society. Sparing neither cities nor countryside, Europe experienced rapid depopulation over just a handful of years, shattering the demographic foundations that had sustained feudalism for centuries. With laborers now worth their weight in gold, centuries of feudal bondage began to crumble, sowing the seeds of a transformative zeitgeist which would go on to change the world. From feudalism's ashes, a new social order was coalescing around a form of economic activity that historians would later term mercantilism. Driven by commercial interests and secured by maritime power, cosmopolitan exchange was the lifeblood of this new order, flowing into Europe from the New World. Of course, this early form of globalization bore little resemblance to ‘peaceful exchange’ - it was enforced with brutal systematicity through guns, germs, and steel. Alongside these developments, the Protestant Reformation had loosened the Catholic Church’s iron grip over European thought, undermining its ability to suppress knowledge perceived as a threat to its authority. This decentralization of knowledge was accelerated by the printing press, which opened the doors to a dissemination of information on an unprecedented scale. Ancient Greek empiricism, preserved as an incidental byproduct of European monastic transcription and Islamic scholarship, was finding a new audience amongst an emerging stratum of society eager for practical knowledge. An ascendant entrepreneurial class, unshackled from centuries of feudal constraints, found its interests increasingly served by empirical proofs over appeals to authority. To that end, military competition amongst rival European powers had created a practical need for what we would now call ‘Research and Development’, entailing a far more rigorous approach for how ideas are tested against reality. In sum: it would be a mistake to think of the development of science as inevitable. Quite the contrary: it was driven by practical problems which emerged due to a convergence of historical contingencies. The impetus behind the invention of science can be traced to limitations of early empiricism, which was proving inadequate as the problems it was applied to became increasingly complex. The crux of these shortcomings is that pre-scientific empiricism was calibrated to search for patterns of relevance within our person-sized mesoscale. In itself, there’s nothing surprising in this limitation, since the mesoscale is the obvious place to begin probing for clues in lieu of additional information that points elsewhere. But lest we paint a misleading picture, let’s make sure to give early-empiricism its due before moving forward; for it was able to accomplish quite a lot within this narrow, person-sized slice of reality. Beyond setting the stage for modern science, its success in probing this everyday domain brought us the principles behind many ideas and technologies that we still rely upon today. Agriculture, mathematics, navigation, and wheeled transport are testaments to this legacy. These noteworthy achievements notwithstanding, compared to its later scientific variant, the scope of problems that early empiricism was effective for was reaching a perceptual ceiling. The crux of the matter is that there’s nothing inherently special about the mesoscale, beyond the fact that it’s what our perceptual system and intuitions are calibrated for. And as we’ve seen, what affects us on the mesoscale can have explanations that are invisible to us from this perceptual default. And with that, we wrap this lightning tour of the historically contingent origins of modern science. As we’ve seen, empiricism was a notable expansion in our problem-solving repertoire, applicable to a host of day-to-day domains. But it would pale in comparison to the profound shift that occurred as the scientific method emerged. As we’ll see, its unprecedented operational success in transforming virtually every aspect of daily life would inadvertently birth a strange metamorphosis. What began as a more rigorous iteration of empiricism would be gobbled up, bit by bit, by tacit Transcendental assumptions that are outside of what science itself can provide evidence for. In our next section, we'll pull back this veil of scientific realism to reveal the more nuanced relationship between our models and the Reality they approximate.

Follow up section on the disruptive power of the scientific method, which touches upon the ease with which its successes tempt us into mistaking the map for the territory, while hinting at how science can play a constructive role in our search for meaning. Enjoy! No Going Back - Science Unleashed Like opening Pandora’s Box, scientific understanding unleashed a tidal wave of disruptive forces that would go on to reshape our material reality. While propelling us to new heights of prosperity and potential, these advancements left a cascade of mounting externalities in their wake. The stakes of these mounting costs? Catastrophe, if humanity continues to kick the can down the road until it's too late to change course. If scientific advancement has courted unforeseen existential risks, then why pursue it? Because its gifts have been an existential boon for mankind. The cumulative scope of scientific progress goes far beyond the laboratory - of the 8 billion people in the world today, as much as 75% wouldn't be alive without the agricultural and medical advances that modern science has unlocked. In four centuries the average global life expectancy has more than doubled - ballooning from an estimated 30-35 to 73 - owing to sharp decreases in infant mortality and drastic improvements in disease prevention and treatment. A host of deadly, debilitating illnesses that have been the scourge of mankind since the dawn of civilization - from smallpox to polio to malaria - have been eradicated or significantly controlled thanks to scientific medicine. The global literacy rate skyrocketed from a paltry 10% to a remarkable 86% in the last four centuries, thanks to a confluence of scientific advancements in printing technology, public health, and education. In sum: the cumulative impact of these developments extends far beyond any single breakthrough or invention. Contrary to its bastardized image as a technological Santa Claus, peddled by commercial interests who would reduce it to mere gadget-making, science has been the catalyst for an unprecedented transformation of daily life on a global scale. As the Grinch discovered, perhaps science means just a little bit more. With such profound achievements, it's a legacy that advocates for science proudly defend - and rightly so. This is especially important at a time when science is under sustained assault by bad actors with a vested interest in undermining its hard-won credibility. At the same time, the mere existence of bad-faith criticism shouldn't prevent nuanced examinations of science's strengths and limitations. Allowing these politically motivated attacks to create a chilling effect where all critical examination of science is viewed with suspicion is to cede the narrative to those who don’t deserve a seat at the table. The takeaway? Critical examination - when mindful and informed - serves a vital purpose. Far from undermining science, this honest self-reflection is necessary if it’s to play a constructive role in humanity’s search for meaning. While it might be objected that science can't tell us what to value - as Hume observed, we can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is' - its ability to ground our ideas in verifiable realities makes it an essential voice in these discussions. This grounding role points to how we should understand science - not as a mere accumulation of facts and theories that mirror a fixed, perspectiveless Reality, but as an activity that must be interpreted and integrated with other forms of human understanding. At its core, the story of science is the story of humanity. This human story, however, isn't a simple tale of progress. From the American Revolution to works of fiction such as Star Wars, the folk-image of revolutions often leans towards romantic oversimplification. In the real world however, revolutions tend to be messy, complicated affairs with mixed outcomes - and scientific revolutions are no exception to this. Case in point: the same principles that electrified our cities can also be used to burn them to the ground. The advancements which brought us our global, interconnected society have also given autocrats the ability to consolidate power and resources on a scale that would have been envied by ancient God-emperors. The very technologies that turbocharged our productive capacity also enable pervasive surveillance, hyper-targeted propaganda that exploits precise psychological vulnerabilities, and an industrial-scale dehumanization of labor - creating new levers of power far beyond what was possible in previous eras. In other words, science has given institutions more effective tools to monitor, influence, and control - not just variables in an experiment, but living, thinking human beings as well. An entrenched elite, whose short-term interests are at odds with our civilization’s long-term survival, have channeled considerable resources into stonewalling efforts to address mounting technological externalities. Centuries of fossil fuel dependence have created a crushing ecological debt that will be paid one way or another - either through selective changes to how we organize our society, or through a cataclysmic change that’s forced on us. Meanwhile, the advent of artificial intelligence threatens to amplify these power imbalances even further - giving those with a vested interest in resisting change more powerful tools to maintain their grip on our collective future. So how do we respond to these challenges? While it might be tempting to retreat to the comforting myth of a romanticized past, the stark reality is that science has become too deeply woven into the fabric of modern life to simply abandon. In spite of protracted hostility from vested interests who are working to undermine its credibility, science remains the voice of authority in our culture - evidenced by how even propaganda that denies climate change comes cloaked in faux-scientific arguments. Whether we're grappling with the Meaning Crisis or confronting existential threats, we must do so in dialogue with science's authority and credibility. Since the genie can’t be put back in the bottle, the only path forward lies in understanding both the power and limitations of scientific thinking. Given its unparalleled success in demystifying problems that have bedeviled our best and brightest for thousands of years, it can be quite tempting to see science as a literal mirror of Reality. As if the scientific method is the key to a universal cipher with ready-made answers for all aspects of our existence. This presupposes that Reality itself is a problem to be solved - which leaves aside the possibility that existence is also a mystery to be experienced. But this isn't a lament that science is ‘unweaving the rainbow’ by demystifying natural phenomena. Quite the contrary - we’d be fools to throw away the explanatory power of science out of nostalgic longing for a simpler world. With this in mind, there’s little doubt that science has a central role to play in our search for meaning - its importance in keeping our ideas grounded in verifiable realities is beyond doubt. Instead, the more interesting question is whether there are important aspects of ourselves that can’t be fully captured by its models. If so, how do we synthesize scientific models with other methodologies that deal more directly with our lived perspective within Reality - and what might that dialogue look like? As we approach the finish line for this chapter, our target becomes clear: the perceived significance of our scientific models. Even as these models allow us to develop increasingly precise approximations of Reality, we should be extraordinarily careful about confusing the model for the manifestation. Without epistemological rigor it becomes all too easy to confuse our abstractions about Reality for Reality itself. In our conclusion, we’ll see how the extraordinary success of science has perpetuated a type of Scientific Realism, which makes sweeping metaphysical claims that go well beyond what these methods can actually justify.