The utilification of science

[pataphor]

No, that is not a typo in the title, at least it's not the one I think
you think it is. Maybe this first sentence is indicative of my current
mood, this morning I woke with some kind of feeling that I almost
wasn't able to concentrate or make decisive plans at all, and the few
times I did, my preliminary attempts were halted by a sense of je ne
sais quois before I managed to get out of the door.

In retrospect this kind of mood may have already started the evening
before, when I left some group of people enthusiastically sharing links
because a few of them seemed low quality and repetitive. This morning
though I discovered I had thrown away the baby with the bathing water,
so to speak, but luckily I had kept logs of the conversation, which was
the way I made this discovery, that it was not all bad, maybe even not
bad at all.

However this didn't prevent me from experiencing the same thing all
over again as I rejoined my conversation communities, after trying to
self medicate myself with iron pills, creatine, and an unexpectedly
successful self made tomato soup ( I had 'concluded' that it would be
best to abstain from carbs for a while), into some kind of state where
I could just start my regular exercise regimen.

After all, nothing seemed wrong with my body physically, I am in
optimal state, for all I know to continue my uninterrupted line of
progress that has been going on for weeks. It seems strange that for a
change no physical limitations stand in my way, and yet continuing
seems to make no sense, since the moment I try, an infinite amount of
alternative options or more fundamental reparations that would have to
take precedence come up, in the end making me just give up on starting
anything.

But maybe this is a good thing in disguise. I can't deny that most of
what I have been doing for the time that my cognitive horizon is
allowing me to see, and sometimes even for flashes farther back, when
the veil of time is lifted and I descend into idle reminiscence, has
been without plan or rhyme or reason, even when that little improvement
path I have started was so successful.

So it is with extreme apprehension that I am writing this post, unsure
of whether my cognitive facilities have actually improved enough to now
be able to tackle this subject that came up, or that they actually have
diminished to the point that, unaware to the difficulty of the task, I
am trying to climb the mount everest unaided.

Anyway, what I am seeing now is a tendency where people try to hold a
discussion by not reacting to the points their opponents are making,
but instead ignoring what they say in order to make additional
statements that would solidify their own position. It would be easy to
say this is Trumpification or the result of diminishing solar spot
activity, no, instead I would like to create some other kind of
explanatory framework, which I would call, as the title of this post,
finally revealed, would be the shorthand for.

I could have said 'commodification of science' instead of using the
word 'utilification', to avoid creating yet another buzzword and to
align myself with existing terminology. However in that case the flag
would not describe the cargo, if you'll pardon me my dunglish.

The thing is, I feel like we are in a kind of time period where
different social initiatives are progressing from their start as
hobbies or commercial undertakings to the point where they are
ubiquitous but also very strongly regulated by the state and the law.
In many cases this is very unfortunate since basically any activity, no
matter how ill suited for the purpose the initial founder is, can become
some kind of inescapable reality that this person or organization still
controls, after having arrived at that crucial position via some
capital or luck or social connections.

So we're seeing many dragons like this, and also many attempts at
becoming such a dragon.

If the foregoing analysis is correct, we can also try and look for
institutions that currently have become almost invisible, because of
merging with the background fabric of social reality. They may have
become like the water supply, where some government controlled entity
is responsible for delivering a high quality good at low cost to
everyone, mind, there probably are still some controllers profiting
heavily from the existing choke points, but they are few and slowly
going away or dying out.

However not in all cases things may have gone so smoothly, either
because the product is more easily differentiated and kept
distinguishable enough to warrant commercial exploitation, or else
because we're in some intermediate phase (but I don't even know if the
water supply situation is in an intermediate phase, we might as well see
that change too, when for example people start extracting or purifying
water from the atmosphere or rainfall or surrounding properties by some
not yet discovered technology or method that will become available
because of ongoing progress).

And I am afraid one such thing where things have gone wrong or where we
haven't arrived yet at some acceptable state of affairs is science
itself, where we see some group of elite people determining what reality
even is and who can work to expand our knowledge about it. It may be so
that on the surface our tenured professors and their loyal workforce
are currently fighting against commercial parasites that gobble up a
lot of funding because they control where and what research is
published, but at the same time there is a lot of complicity in this
inside our scientific establishment because it makes their titles or
social positions into a rare and therefore exploitable commodity.

What we see is not unlike some social networking site, or a media
production company, if we go back a bit farther in time, that has
somehow grabbed the reins of our social organization and that is now
claiming it is all thanks to them that we're making all this progress,
and, would anyone complain, they can just pull the reins in some
direction of their choice to prove their point.

The masses don't see how this is not real, they are roped into the
narrative and think that this cultural appropriation of the basis of
our reality itself is some natural state of affairs, like water flowing
downhill.

Instead I would like to suggest that often the experiments that
'belong' to some group of scientists, with their hold over that
explanatory territory fiercely guarded with terminology like "woo" or
"snake oil salesmen", "medical mispractice" to name a few at random, do
not have a convincing reason to be claimed by that group and would
benefit extraordinarily from having the community as a whole look at
the existing practices and theories, especially since it would enable a
kind of interdisciplinary basis that would facilitate comparatively
very short explanations for the different phenomena, which currently
require years and years of studying in an elite, and tightly secluded
from the general population, sort of environment before one is even
allowed (or even able) to say a word about it without being ridiculed
or burned on a stake.

P.

"maybe it was the iron pills"