Using your logic one is a guinea pig on *every* flight, new design or old, fresh off the manufacturing line or in the fleet for a while.
He said nothing of the kind. A sensible reading of his comment is that until there has been at least one failure there is a significant risk that there are undetected problems with the aircraft. Given the novelty of the design this is not unreasonable at all.
I know/. no longer has many actual technical people on it, but any technical person should know that the first million hours of 787 flights have a very high probability of revealing more and more significant issues than the second million hours, and so on.
Philosophers and other innumerate people who have no grasp of Bayesian epistemology won't understand this, of course, and so will continue to draw bizarrely unjustified conclusions from otherwise unproblematic statements.
Or rather, it would prove that there are discoveries in our Universe that can be made that are impossible to arrive at via the Scientific Method.
How, exactly?
I'm not sure what you mean by the "scientific method", but science is nothing but the discipline of testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment. As a discipline it has unlimited applicability, and insofar as anything can be known, it can be known scientifically.
Neutrinos have been observed coming from supernovae from light years away. There would have been a very noticeable time difference between the neutrinos and the light at that distance if this were true. (Any astrophysicists about to verify this?)
SN1987A results were consistent with neutrinos moving at c, although the precise detection time of the optical signal was some hours after the neutrino signal (which was found in subsequent analysis.) John Simpson tried to use an argument about times and average energies to argue for a slightly later than expected arrival time, to support his 17 keV neutrino.
These results are 60 ns in about 2 ms, or a factor of 0.00003. The LMC (home of SN1987A) is 160,000 light years away, so this would have the neutrino signal arriving several years ahead of the optical signal.
Ergo, your skepticism is justified. Good call on the comparison measure.
I just wonder who is going to buy all those goods and services when we are all replaced by robots.
Other robots.
Fredrick Pohl solved this one in "The Midas Plague" back in the '50's.
Although since TFA is full of gems like "30% of most households may have a robot by 2024" I'm not too worried about their prognostications. After all, 90% of some articles may have statistics that are just made up, then hedged with ridiculous language to flag precisely how meaningless they are.
I tend to agree that we need to do something to help the middle class, and that wealth distribution is going the wrong way. But this class warfare talk is getting ridiculous. There will always be people living better than you - learn not to be so envious, and realize that you need them as much as they need you.
The secret to a happy life is to individualize your standards such that no one is living better than you by those standards. Life is a trade-off full of interesting optima. Find the one that suits you best and stop pretending that there's a single metric of success. Envy is the stuff of humanity, and we can't just turn it off. But we can pretty easily subvert it.
I agree that class warfare is spectacularly stupid, especially now that we have a deep and detailed understanding of both the economics and psychology of war. War-model responses to problems of scarcity always create more scarcity. Sometimes they result in an ultimately more equitable distribution of that scarcity, but solutions that reduce scarcity are the ones people not driven by out-of-control emotions prefer.
Water vapor increases the temperature, since it's also a greenhouse gas. You may be thinking about clouds, which have more complicated (but also smaller effect).
Sigh. No, I'm thinking about thermodynamics, not clouds, and not radiative effects.
Heat content and temperature are only simply positively correlated in simple substances. The atmosphere is not a simple substance: it is an admixture of two radically different substances. Increasing the heat content of the atmosphere can result in increased evaporation which increases the heat capacity of the atmosphere which can cause the temperature to down even as the heat content goes up. Anyone who is not aware of this is not qualified to hold an opinion on global warming: it's first year thermodynamics.
This is also, by the way, why measure of ocean temperature (which are increasing) are so important to understanding global heat content, because sea water is a thermodynamically simple substance in precisely the way the atmosphere is not.
Luckily, climate is not weather. Average temperatures over a large area are much more reliable to predict than short-time local noise. In general, if you add more energy to the system, average temperatures will go up. It's pretty simple.
The atmosphere can be considered a mix of two quite different gases: "air" and water vapour. They have radically different properties, particularly heat capacity.
Specifically, it means adding heat to the system can make the temperature go down by adding more water vapour to the atmosphere.
Unmitigated climate change, will, at best conservative estimates [wikipedia.org], cost us 20% of the worlds output, plunging the world economy into depression - as well causing an unprecedented extinction event, and causing millions of people to become refugees. In contrast, taking action now will cost us much less - maybe 3-5% of the worlds GDP for a few years while we upgrade our infrastructure and transport strategies.
Wow, you must be a huge booster for absolute free trade everywhere, and radical globalization! Because there is a consensus amongst economists that would make a much bigger positive difference to the world GDP than the cost of GW you cite. And that consensus is based on computer models of a much simpler system (the world economy, which involves only 10^10 actors) than the Earth's climate.
So, given you are so profoundly concerned about the future of the global GDP, could you please post some links on your vigorous advocacy of globalization and global free trade? Thanks!
The success of post-War Capitalism was in no small part due to the embedding of what could only be called socialist principles. Yes, we would allow free enterprise, but with controls...
You seem to be saying that that differed from pre-War capitalism. Corporate capitalism, which isn't necessarily what Marx was talking about, has almost nothing to do with free enterprise: it exists solely due to state interference, by statute, with the workings of the free market. In particular, the limited liability corporation cannot exist without state protections.
The article itself is mostly nonsense, as witnessed by this caveat late on: "if we're prepared to think subtly." That is, "Marx was kinda sorta right about a few things if we redefine terms, move the goalposts and are generally willing to make things up, which we'll try to hide by calling it 'thinking subtly' instead of 'making stuff up'."
Marx was wrong. He was wrong in his analysis of economic behaviour. He was wrong in his labour theory of value. He was wrong in his prognostications as to the inevitable evolution of capitalist systems. He holds an interesting place in history of the last of the pre-Modern philosophers, but outside of narrow scholarly contexts his entire approach to the world has been discredited. Not by the Soviet Union, China or Cambodia or anywhere else power-hungry psychopaths used his ideas to advance themselves against all others, but by the way the historical development of capitalist societies actually happened, from unions and social welfare in the early 1900's to the massive corporate-state kleptocracy of the present day.
Marcuse' used to say, "not every problem you have with your girlfriend is a consequence of the capitalist mode of production." Likewise, not every problem with the capitalist mode of production is any kind of vindication of Marx's thinking. And indeed, none of the problems we are actually having with capitalism look anything like what Marx actually predicted, if you read his work in the context of the time it was written. Doing otherwise is like people reading the Bible in a modern light, as opposed to what it is: a collection of mostly bronze-age documents written by people who thought women were chattel, slavery was part of the natural order of things, and genocide was OK so long as it was us doing it.
Watching a movie on TV while you talk to a girl watching the same movie on TV is the most pathetic date I can imagine.
It depends on the girl. The reality is that some of us are living a long way from our loved ones for a few months or years and this kind of thing is the best we can do for now. An idiot would say, "Well your reasons for being apart must be stupid!" but who cares what an idiot says?
There's no stars in the photos! Obiously they're fake and the moon landing was a hoax!
Worse yet, I can see the lunar surface! Since I am repeatedly told by lunar hoax sites that there is no source of light on the Moon other than direct sunlight it must be the case that the lunar regolith is totally non-reflective. Otherwise it would be a source of light and all those not-perfectly-black-shadows wouldn't be proof it was all faked by people who didn't have the deep insights into the lunar surface that the hoaxers do.
The thing I'm looking forward to is a decade or three from now when we have a clear leveling off or even fall of world population and there are BOTH malthusians screaming we're all gonna die from overpopulation AND anti-malthusians screaming we're all gonna die from under-population.
The bottom line is that almost everyone is a conservative: they see any change from the present conditions as the end of the world (which is why climate change is going to result in the weather getting worse everywhere).
Right, because there is no better response to the problems of scarcity than systematically dedicating your entire productive capacity to creating more scarcity...
I expect that it would be possible to write an OS in COBOL
Sure it is. But if you write one, people will question the wisdom of your choices. And if you say, "THEY SAID IT COULDN'T BE DONE!" people will call you a moron, or a/. editor...
No, it's not. The article references some mysterious group of "naysayers" who are supposed to think an OS without C is impossible or something insane like that. No one who knows anything about OSs or languages thinks that.
What people do think is that writing a C# OS would be a slog, and unlikely to provide any major benefits over alternatives. The world is full of problems that are clearly solvable, clearly tedious, and clearly boring. This one falls into that category because there's nothing in particular about a C#-based OS that makes it remotely useful or interesting for anything. If the language had some interesting features that gave the OS using is novel properties, that would be interesting. But that's not the case.
they are already dying in places like Africa, but we can ignore that
Really? So you think climate models--which show very low impact in tropical zones--are all false?
There is plausible evidence of climate change (anthropogenic or otherwise) at high latitudes. In the tropics, the picture is much muddier, but that's ok because the models don't predict big changes there this century.
Your comments are precisely what is wrong with your side of the climate change debate: you're claiming on the one hand that climate models are true, and on the other that they're false. Make up your mind and argue consistently.
I'm a skeptic about climate models (I'm a computational physicist, and so professionally qualified to judge them) but aware that ocean heat content does suggest that the Earth is warming.
Everything you are suggesting is already underway, although we could be more aggressive about understanding and protecting the ocean. Deforestation stopped in North America a long time ago, and as farmland goes fallow the number of woodland acres is increasing. Birthrates are dropping due to world-wide urbanization and empowerment of women, although religiously dominated states like the US and the Islamic world are behind the curve on that. Alternative energy is now an industry, and I'm seeing new solar installations all over the place, including a couple in my neighbourhood. A decade of that and I think people will be astonished at how much solar capacity we have. Energy efficiency will continue to improve, particularly as we embed intelligence into more and more machines.
So we're actually doing not too badly, if we can keep the wheels turning for another couple of decades and convince the religious nuts to leave off their insanity.
you have to know that "unintended consequences" is the touchstone of modern government action of any kind
Right, because nature KNOWS when its a group of humans calling themselves a "government" as opposed to exactly the same humans calling themselves a "corporation"!
The Left and Right are defined by what they discount, not by what they advocate: the Left discounts failures by humans calling themselves governments, the Right discounts failures by humans calling themselves corporations. Sane people recognize that it's humans all the way down.
You nailed it, sort of, the scientists who agree with me, being 99% of them actually go towards forming my opinion. I tend to trust them.
How many have you actually sat down to talk with over a beer?
I'm a computational physicist, and every computational physicist I've talked to has fairly serious concerns about the quality of climate models. They are good science, no doubt, but people who actually do this stuff professionally, for a living, know how misleading even a good model can be.
Every climate model I've looked at in any detail is significantly unphysical. They do things like conserve energy by hand (by redistributing temperatures at the end of each time step) rather than ensuring it is natively conserved down to the ground. Anyone who has ever done serious modelling of any simple physical system will tell you that the results from such a model are not to be trusted: the errors from apparently benign adjustments can and do result in outputs that look sensible, but which are nonsense.
one easy example is that it may help create better artificial legs/etc, such as for wounded soldiers.
It may also create sufficient prosperity that irrational nutjobs think that the best solution to perceived scarcity is to destroy things and kill people are finally laughed at when they proclaim their idiotic "solutions" to problems no one actually has.
Re:There are several factors at play here
on
The Post-Idea World
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· Score: 1
The innovations and achievements of the past 60 years blow any other 60 year period in history into oblivion
1951 - 2011 saw spaceflight, micro-electronics, computers and the Internet, and cell phones.
1891 - 1951 saw aircraft, movies, vacuum tube technology, radio, television, universal electrification, the shift from coal to oil, anti-biotics, insulin, universal vaccination, nuclear reactors, nuclear weapons, rocketry, the automobile...
The pace of change in the latter half of the 20th century was much, much slower the first half. It merely looks faster because it is closer.
My impression is that the pace is picking up again, but that could just be getting old.
These articles are silly. They are nostalgic for a time that never was. They don't understand that history is a highlight reel.
He actually does have a point, although manages to miss it. He isn't lamenting the decline of big ideas. He's lamenting the loss of freedom to make shit up like Freud and Marx did. The "big ideas" he's talking about are mostly false, or so widely misunderstood and misapplied (relativity) they may as well be false.
He's saying, "I'm sad that the world is no longer routinely gripped by a mania for the latest plausible bullshit." He specifically dismisses the deeper understanding of the world coming out of the sciences because it isn't "big" enough for him, where "bigness" is apparently measured by the number of facts it ignores.
It isn't social networking that has created this situation, but the Internet generally and Wikipedia specifically: people can now easily check facts and determine that some idiot promoting the labour theory of value or the collective unconscious has been thoroughly debunked by mere empiricism many times. The plethora of easily available factual information is what kills off the "big speculations", leaving behind only the niche nutjobs, who predictably cling ever more fervently to their increasingly untenable claims via the usual selection effect observed in these cases.
As a doctrinaire capitalist leaning person you should be aware that limited liability corporations are a pure product of the nanny state's interference with the free market. Corporations are created by statute (the various Company's Acts and their successors) to serve the public good. The exist entirely at the pleasure of the state, and as such are properly subject to any regulations the state deems appropriate for them to achieve their intended goal, which has something to do with wide-spread prosperity, not rabid accumulation of wealth at the top (although that's fun too...)
Slashdot Mirror
Using your logic one is a guinea pig on *every* flight, new design or old, fresh off the manufacturing line or in the fleet for a while.
He said nothing of the kind. A sensible reading of his comment is that until there has been at least one failure there is a significant risk that there are undetected problems with the aircraft. Given the novelty of the design this is not unreasonable at all.
I know /. no longer has many actual technical people on it, but any technical person should know that the first million hours of 787 flights have a very high probability of revealing more and more significant issues than the second million hours, and so on.
Philosophers and other innumerate people who have no grasp of Bayesian epistemology won't understand this, of course, and so will continue to draw bizarrely unjustified conclusions from otherwise unproblematic statements.
OPERA has just found that either neutrinos travel 0.03% faster than photons we've measured, or their equipment has an unknown systematic error.
Or they screwed up the data analysis, which is my bet: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=543
Or rather, it would prove that there are discoveries in our Universe that can be made that are impossible to arrive at via the Scientific Method.
How, exactly?
I'm not sure what you mean by the "scientific method", but science is nothing but the discipline of testing ideas by systematic observation and controlled experiment. As a discipline it has unlimited applicability, and insofar as anything can be known, it can be known scientifically.
What you are saying is gibberish.
Neutrinos have been observed coming from supernovae from light years away. There would have been a very noticeable time difference between the neutrinos and the light at that distance if this were true. (Any astrophysicists about to verify this?)
SN1987A results were consistent with neutrinos moving at c, although the precise detection time of the optical signal was some hours after the neutrino signal (which was found in subsequent analysis.) John Simpson tried to use an argument about times and average energies to argue for a slightly later than expected arrival time, to support his 17 keV neutrino.
These results are 60 ns in about 2 ms, or a factor of 0.00003. The LMC (home of SN1987A) is 160,000 light years away, so this would have the neutrino signal arriving several years ahead of the optical signal.
Ergo, your skepticism is justified. Good call on the comparison measure.
I just wonder who is going to buy all those goods and services when we are all replaced by robots.
Other robots.
Fredrick Pohl solved this one in "The Midas Plague" back in the '50's.
Although since TFA is full of gems like "30% of most households may have a robot by 2024" I'm not too worried about their prognostications. After all, 90% of some articles may have statistics that are just made up, then hedged with ridiculous language to flag precisely how meaningless they are.
I tend to agree that we need to do something to help the middle class, and that wealth distribution is going the wrong way. But this class warfare talk is getting ridiculous. There will always be people living better than you - learn not to be so envious, and realize that you need them as much as they need you.
The secret to a happy life is to individualize your standards such that no one is living better than you by those standards. Life is a trade-off full of interesting optima. Find the one that suits you best and stop pretending that there's a single metric of success. Envy is the stuff of humanity, and we can't just turn it off. But we can pretty easily subvert it.
I agree that class warfare is spectacularly stupid, especially now that we have a deep and detailed understanding of both the economics and psychology of war. War-model responses to problems of scarcity always create more scarcity. Sometimes they result in an ultimately more equitable distribution of that scarcity, but solutions that reduce scarcity are the ones people not driven by out-of-control emotions prefer.
Water vapor increases the temperature, since it's also a greenhouse gas. You may be thinking about clouds, which have more complicated (but also smaller effect).
Sigh. No, I'm thinking about thermodynamics, not clouds, and not radiative effects.
Heat content and temperature are only simply positively correlated in simple substances. The atmosphere is not a simple substance: it is an admixture of two radically different substances. Increasing the heat content of the atmosphere can result in increased evaporation which increases the heat capacity of the atmosphere which can cause the temperature to down even as the heat content goes up. Anyone who is not aware of this is not qualified to hold an opinion on global warming: it's first year thermodynamics.
This is also, by the way, why measure of ocean temperature (which are increasing) are so important to understanding global heat content, because sea water is a thermodynamically simple substance in precisely the way the atmosphere is not.
Luckily, climate is not weather. Average temperatures over a large area are much more reliable to predict than short-time local noise. In general, if you add more energy to the system, average temperatures will go up. It's pretty simple.
The atmosphere can be considered a mix of two quite different gases: "air" and water vapour. They have radically different properties, particularly heat capacity.
Specifically, it means adding heat to the system can make the temperature go down by adding more water vapour to the atmosphere.
It's really quite complicated.
Unmitigated climate change, will, at best conservative estimates [wikipedia.org], cost us 20% of the worlds output, plunging the world economy into depression - as well causing an unprecedented extinction event, and causing millions of people to become refugees. In contrast, taking action now will cost us much less - maybe 3-5% of the worlds GDP for a few years while we upgrade our infrastructure and transport strategies.
Wow, you must be a huge booster for absolute free trade everywhere, and radical globalization! Because there is a consensus amongst economists that would make a much bigger positive difference to the world GDP than the cost of GW you cite. And that consensus is based on computer models of a much simpler system (the world economy, which involves only 10^10 actors) than the Earth's climate.
So, given you are so profoundly concerned about the future of the global GDP, could you please post some links on your vigorous advocacy of globalization and global free trade? Thanks!
The success of post-War Capitalism was in no small part due to the embedding of what could only be called socialist principles. Yes, we would allow free enterprise, but with controls...
You seem to be saying that that differed from pre-War capitalism. Corporate capitalism, which isn't necessarily what Marx was talking about, has almost nothing to do with free enterprise: it exists solely due to state interference, by statute, with the workings of the free market. In particular, the limited liability corporation cannot exist without state protections.
The article itself is mostly nonsense, as witnessed by this caveat late on: "if we're prepared to think subtly." That is, "Marx was kinda sorta right about a few things if we redefine terms, move the goalposts and are generally willing to make things up, which we'll try to hide by calling it 'thinking subtly' instead of 'making stuff up'."
Marx was wrong. He was wrong in his analysis of economic behaviour. He was wrong in his labour theory of value. He was wrong in his prognostications as to the inevitable evolution of capitalist systems. He holds an interesting place in history of the last of the pre-Modern philosophers, but outside of narrow scholarly contexts his entire approach to the world has been discredited. Not by the Soviet Union, China or Cambodia or anywhere else power-hungry psychopaths used his ideas to advance themselves against all others, but by the way the historical development of capitalist societies actually happened, from unions and social welfare in the early 1900's to the massive corporate-state kleptocracy of the present day.
Marcuse' used to say, "not every problem you have with your girlfriend is a consequence of the capitalist mode of production." Likewise, not every problem with the capitalist mode of production is any kind of vindication of Marx's thinking. And indeed, none of the problems we are actually having with capitalism look anything like what Marx actually predicted, if you read his work in the context of the time it was written. Doing otherwise is like people reading the Bible in a modern light, as opposed to what it is: a collection of mostly bronze-age documents written by people who thought women were chattel, slavery was part of the natural order of things, and genocide was OK so long as it was us doing it.
Watching a movie on TV while you talk to a girl watching the same movie on TV is the most pathetic date I can imagine.
It depends on the girl. The reality is that some of us are living a long way from our loved ones for a few months or years and this kind of thing is the best we can do for now. An idiot would say, "Well your reasons for being apart must be stupid!" but who cares what an idiot says?
There's no stars in the photos! Obiously they're fake and the moon landing was a hoax!
Worse yet, I can see the lunar surface! Since I am repeatedly told by lunar hoax sites that there is no source of light on the Moon other than direct sunlight it must be the case that the lunar regolith is totally non-reflective. Otherwise it would be a source of light and all those not-perfectly-black-shadows wouldn't be proof it was all faked by people who didn't have the deep insights into the lunar surface that the hoaxers do.
Neo-malthusianism is like a millennarian cult
The thing I'm looking forward to is a decade or three from now when we have a clear leveling off or even fall of world population and there are BOTH malthusians screaming we're all gonna die from overpopulation AND anti-malthusians screaming we're all gonna die from under-population.
The bottom line is that almost everyone is a conservative: they see any change from the present conditions as the end of the world (which is why climate change is going to result in the weather getting worse everywhere).
War
Right, because there is no better response to the problems of scarcity than systematically dedicating your entire productive capacity to creating more scarcity...
I expect that it would be possible to write an OS in COBOL
Sure it is. But if you write one, people will question the wisdom of your choices. And if you say, "THEY SAID IT COULDN'T BE DONE!" people will call you a moron, or a /. editor...
This is an interesting achievement.
No, it's not. The article references some mysterious group of "naysayers" who are supposed to think an OS without C is impossible or something insane like that. No one who knows anything about OSs or languages thinks that.
What people do think is that writing a C# OS would be a slog, and unlikely to provide any major benefits over alternatives. The world is full of problems that are clearly solvable, clearly tedious, and clearly boring. This one falls into that category because there's nothing in particular about a C#-based OS that makes it remotely useful or interesting for anything. If the language had some interesting features that gave the OS using is novel properties, that would be interesting. But that's not the case.
they are already dying in places like Africa, but we can ignore that
Really? So you think climate models--which show very low impact in tropical zones--are all false?
There is plausible evidence of climate change (anthropogenic or otherwise) at high latitudes. In the tropics, the picture is much muddier, but that's ok because the models don't predict big changes there this century.
Your comments are precisely what is wrong with your side of the climate change debate: you're claiming on the one hand that climate models are true, and on the other that they're false. Make up your mind and argue consistently.
I'm a skeptic about climate models (I'm a computational physicist, and so professionally qualified to judge them) but aware that ocean heat content does suggest that the Earth is warming.
Everything you are suggesting is already underway, although we could be more aggressive about understanding and protecting the ocean. Deforestation stopped in North America a long time ago, and as farmland goes fallow the number of woodland acres is increasing. Birthrates are dropping due to world-wide urbanization and empowerment of women, although religiously dominated states like the US and the Islamic world are behind the curve on that. Alternative energy is now an industry, and I'm seeing new solar installations all over the place, including a couple in my neighbourhood. A decade of that and I think people will be astonished at how much solar capacity we have. Energy efficiency will continue to improve, particularly as we embed intelligence into more and more machines.
So we're actually doing not too badly, if we can keep the wheels turning for another couple of decades and convince the religious nuts to leave off their insanity.
We are already doing several forms of environmental engineering
It isn't engineering until you can weaponize it.
Although digging through memory and a quick search on "cloud seeding warfare" reveals has actually been done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye
you have to know that "unintended consequences" is the touchstone of modern government action of any kind
Right, because nature KNOWS when its a group of humans calling themselves a "government" as opposed to exactly the same humans calling themselves a "corporation"!
The Left and Right are defined by what they discount, not by what they advocate: the Left discounts failures by humans calling themselves governments, the Right discounts failures by humans calling themselves corporations. Sane people recognize that it's humans all the way down.
You nailed it, sort of, the scientists who agree with me, being 99% of them actually go towards forming my opinion. I tend to trust them.
How many have you actually sat down to talk with over a beer?
I'm a computational physicist, and every computational physicist I've talked to has fairly serious concerns about the quality of climate models. They are good science, no doubt, but people who actually do this stuff professionally, for a living, know how misleading even a good model can be.
Every climate model I've looked at in any detail is significantly unphysical. They do things like conserve energy by hand (by redistributing temperatures at the end of each time step) rather than ensuring it is natively conserved down to the ground. Anyone who has ever done serious modelling of any simple physical system will tell you that the results from such a model are not to be trusted: the errors from apparently benign adjustments can and do result in outputs that look sensible, but which are nonsense.
one easy example is that it may help create better artificial legs/etc, such as for wounded soldiers.
It may also create sufficient prosperity that irrational nutjobs think that the best solution to perceived scarcity is to destroy things and kill people are finally laughed at when they proclaim their idiotic "solutions" to problems no one actually has.
The innovations and achievements of the past 60 years blow any other 60 year period in history into oblivion
1951 - 2011 saw spaceflight, micro-electronics, computers and the Internet, and cell phones.
1891 - 1951 saw aircraft, movies, vacuum tube technology, radio, television, universal electrification, the shift from coal to oil, anti-biotics, insulin, universal vaccination, nuclear reactors, nuclear weapons, rocketry, the automobile...
The pace of change in the latter half of the 20th century was much, much slower the first half. It merely looks faster because it is closer.
My impression is that the pace is picking up again, but that could just be getting old.
These articles are silly. They are nostalgic for a time that never was. They don't understand that history is a highlight reel.
He actually does have a point, although manages to miss it. He isn't lamenting the decline of big ideas. He's lamenting the loss of freedom to make shit up like Freud and Marx did. The "big ideas" he's talking about are mostly false, or so widely misunderstood and misapplied (relativity) they may as well be false.
He's saying, "I'm sad that the world is no longer routinely gripped by a mania for the latest plausible bullshit." He specifically dismisses the deeper understanding of the world coming out of the sciences because it isn't "big" enough for him, where "bigness" is apparently measured by the number of facts it ignores.
It isn't social networking that has created this situation, but the Internet generally and Wikipedia specifically: people can now easily check facts and determine that some idiot promoting the labour theory of value or the collective unconscious has been thoroughly debunked by mere empiricism many times. The plethora of easily available factual information is what kills off the "big speculations", leaving behind only the niche nutjobs, who predictably cling ever more fervently to their increasingly untenable claims via the usual selection effect observed in these cases.
doctrinaire capitalism
As a doctrinaire capitalist leaning person you should be aware that limited liability corporations are a pure product of the nanny state's interference with the free market. Corporations are created by statute (the various Company's Acts and their successors) to serve the public good. The exist entirely at the pleasure of the state, and as such are properly subject to any regulations the state deems appropriate for them to achieve their intended goal, which has something to do with wide-spread prosperity, not rabid accumulation of wealth at the top (although that's fun too...)