Science is literally ox entrails and failed exactly the same way.
Free speech is bad. Worth at most what you pay for it. The theory behind gutting a goat and reading its organs goes thusly: goats are expensive, and if you're willing to [[sacrifice]] a goat before saying what you have to say, you must really believe it. If goats are $2000, you're willing to stake at least $2000 on this tweet, see? At first, such auguries were in fact reliable, because only the responsible had livestock they could afford to sacrifice, and only the wise and authoritative were willing to pay the price for authenticating their speeches.
Basically, imagine before making a speech, a politician had to put their car through a shredder and compactor. Cuts down on superfluous speeches eh? If someone tries to pass of a lemony junker as their car, then they're saying they don't really believe what they're saying, now doesn't it?
What is also expensive? Grant applications. Academic political posturing. If you're willing to submit yourself to all this aggravation, and nobody is allowed to buy their way out, then not only must you really want to say whatever you have to say, it's not scaled by inheritance size or trust funds or anything like that.
The problem is that the theory is a scam. Paying to speak is only half the equation - the other half is going back and punishing those who were wrong. Imagine you go to all the trouble to butcher your largest hog, so you can take your turn at the bully pulpit, and then you're fired anyway because you were lying. Yes, now the system works.
Except, if there were some reliable, objective method for determining who is wrong and revoking their speech rights, even retrospectively, then we wouldn't need to futz around with the goat guts, now would we? Revenge is Sour. Ritual sacrifice works only if we assume liars aren't persuasive, but if liars aren't convincing, we don't need ritual sacrifice to thresh the truth from falsehood. (Reminder: need poly-Popes.)
Goat guts were considered a signal of reliability, and authority corrupts authority.* It merely meant liars and parasites were that more motivated to slaughter a sow. Liars got someone else to buy livestock for them. Whoops. They said what they were paid to say.
*(This has been a rep of set 1.)
The more authority a signal has, the more strongly it incentivizes flooding the signal with noise. Truthspeakers have god on their side. Parasites and traitors are the ones who desperately need the boost from seals of quality. Noise indeed flooded the signal, because that was the point of the whole plan. It's a recipe for shilling because it was intended to empower shills. Now goat guts have the reputation they do because lies have a shelf-life and that one has expired.
Thus they repeated the plan with a different form of [[sacrifice]]. The 99% (at least) were too stupid to see the similarity, and it's worked great.
Ultimately, they want to be lied to. Supply is meeting demand. Retribution still ascerbic.
The core problem isn't that lies are persuasive. The problem is that lies are valued and sought-after, while the truth is despised. However, they can't bring themselves to fall for any old lie. They have minimum lie quality standards.
Lies still have a shelf-life, whoops. Inherently limited in supply. Unsustainable. Evil is self-destructive, because evil is self-hatred. If you don't hate yourself, you're not evil. (Another rep.)
Truth is as unlimited as time.
Science can't be possible, because Revenge is Sour. How do you get a good scientific study? Use a good scientist, because personnel is policy. If a wise man authors a study, it will argue for the truth. Why can nobody write down the scientific method? Because the method is already knowing the right answer. The condition of being able to produce a good study is having no need to produce a study.
NSF grants grant authority. Authority still corrupts authority. The more authority it has, the less reliability a scientific paper can offer. It is beyond obvious that millions of fraudulent papers get produced every year. Nobody loses their career. Essentially nobody minds if you have to retract a paper. Journals are not cancelled if they publish too many papers they have to retract. Science is not scientific.
It's nothing more than the ox entrails scam all over again.
Stuff was indeed highly truthspeaky between 1600s royal society and the nationalization of science in 1945. The difference between Michael Faraday and black science man is at least a species difference, possibly even genus.
Although true, it is mysterious. It clearly had nothing to do with the scientific method. Perhaps it was a powerful spiritual event, and has no meaningful material explanation whatsoever. Physically it happened because it was, technically, possible, and kept happening, despite being ever more unlikely, until the motivating force behind it was exhausted.
Demand for truth became nontrivial for a while. Eccentric virtues were lionized instead of demonized, in a limited fashion. For a while there, Socrates stopped being forced to drink the hemlock. Truly bizarre. There's no reason to think it's remotely feasible, and yet it occurred. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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