Science™

Some thoughts on science that deeply conflict me:

• Science largely does not exist at the scale it does today without capital. Science is funded. There is always a money trail. Take away the capital, and the only science being conducted is in high school chemistry classes.
• Medicinal science is largely built on the homicidal tenet of when “the benefit outweighs the risk.” The risk is presented (but most times not) to you as a percentage: 1% of people who take this drug may experience a serious, non-reversible reaction. When you are afflicted with a condition, do you take the drug, in spite of the risk? The answer is: this frame has not yet been rendered.
• No single process inside or outside of this universe knows what is going to happen next. Predictions may be made, some with high statistical ground, but they remain predictions. The only way to figure out what the next frame looks like, or next ten frames will look like, is to render them, in order. (This concept is known as computational irreducibility, and pervades a large part of our universe.)
• Science is two things to two different camps of people: to people who have never experienced adverse reactions to pharmaceutical products or procedures, science is wondrous, and must be pushed forward so long as the benefit to risk ratio is at least 51/49. To the people whom the tail end of pharmaceutical commercials apply to (“talk to your doctor if you experience…”), health science is a con based on manipulating/marketing people to believe that their for-profit pill or procedure can save their life.
• Science in most cases must be brute-forced to make progress. Progress is made on behalf of the human whole, but often at the expense of individuals. To develop a pill that can save the life of 10,000, you necessarily have to test it on 100 people, 10 of whom will probably die or develop irreversible diseases. To develop a self-driving car technology, some folks are going to have to get run over.
• There is inhumane non-compassion felt by those largely on a certain side of the political spectrum that do the bidding of pharmaceutical for-profit companies masquerading as Science™. These people hold that for-profit products developed hastily which lead to some number of humans developing cruel conditions must continue to roll out, because the benefit outweighs the risk, while simultaneously holding that even a single life’s suffering is too much.
• Science is largely at odds with the doctrine of individual liberty. You cannot simultaneously be pro-science and pro-liberty. Science is necessarily authoritarian, or at least very persuasive. You can’t choose what’s in your water, food, and medicine, and any feeling of control is largely an illusion.
• There is likely no case in any societal setup where you matter above the average health of the population. You are expendable, because this is what it takes to organize large populations. Case in point: vaccine rollouts don’t stop when one or more people experience an adverse reaction. The show must go on. Likewise, most pharmaceutical products are not removed from market when participants experience fatal reactions. Instead, another comma is simply added to the list of reactions.
• Medicinal products and procedures largely thrive in environments of information asymmetry: you know infinitely less about what is being sold to you than the creators of the product. If you truly knew what a procedure or product did to your body, you probably wouldn’t take it. So euphemisms are developed to make taking out your credit card easier. Case in point: when you get an MRI, they often inject you with a serum meant to help make the scan images clearer. When you ask the technicians what the product is, they give it really cutesy names like “dye” or “contrast”, and tell you that just drinking a lot of water over the next few days will be sufficient to flush it from your system. The truth? Contrasts are injections of the toxic heavy metal Gadolinium in your body. This gadolinium is retained for the rest of your life in your skull, bones, and bloodstream, even from just 1 administration. Some patients experience permanent adverse reactions to the ever-presence of this heavy metal in their body.
• I believe there is no turning back at this point. Science is necessarily cruel, but it can likely be said that when you zoom out and inspect the stats on a wide enough timespan, the number of lives saved is greater than the number of deaths caused. On the scale of our own individual lives however, science can fuck you up, no matter how careful you are. And what does a world without science really look like anyway? It may very well be that sciencing is the primary “purpose” of this simulation.
• Science is cruel, because ultimately aging, disease, maladaptive mutations, and death all fall in the realm of science, before we were ever present to write any of it down. This can’t be changed, but there is one thing that can be: the feigning of compassion by those who champion science relentlessly while simultaneously holding that even one life’s suffering is too much. Science and compassion cannot be on the same side of any spectrum. To those who have been on the bloody edge of science’s sword, there is nothing more painful than seeing it championed as an infallible pro-human enterprise, when in most cases it is nothing more than a profit maximizing scheme. So long as the profit is greater than the threshold of discernible unrest and distrust, the show goes on. The existence of for-profit pharmaceutical companies is not an evil. The emergent evil is the conflation of privately funded science as Science proper, and the championing of this for-profit science by the majority-share impressionables who repeat corporate talking points, euphemisms, and studies as gospel, and decry anyone who dare explore any other interpretation as blasphemous and dangerous. The real danger is feigned compassion.