Typist

I never said any such thing, didn't read the rest.

Characterizing a challenge is not meeting that challenge. Who said anything about being ignorant? I've argued only against an unexamined reckless accumulation of knowledge and power. Are you suggesting developing knowledge and power 100X faster would be great? How about 1000x faster? Shall we give every school kid the ability to create new life forms? If the Higgs discovery eventually allows us to dematerialize things, should we make that available to everyone? Do you want the North Koreans to have it? How will you stop them from having it? Oops, Seoul is missing, does anybody know what happened to it?

Perhaps we might agree to disagree on the Higgs for a bit, and try to examine a broader picture. Why do we not sell firearms to children? We realize they don't have the judgment to handle such power. Knowledge development gives us ever more power. How much power can we handle? Are we proposing that there is no limit to the power we can manage? I heard a story on NPR about genetic engineering. The story used this analogy. Computing used to be really expensive, required huge equipment, and was limited to big organizations. But now everybody has a computer on their desktop, or in their pocket. According to the story, the same process is unfolding in genetic engineering, and it will be increasingly available at a cheaper price to more and more people. Nuclear weapons started off being limited to a few big powers, and are now moving down the chain to smaller countries. We might guess that at some point non-state entities will join the game. One small nuke in Washington DC could decapitate the U.S. government and perhaps launch a global crisis. We all now know there are plenty of people who'd make that happen if they could. We like knowledge because it empowers us. That's great, but it also empowers the violent and insane. Generally we're staying on top of things so far. But the bad guys only need to win once big to bring everything crashing down. An engineered bio-war virus created by a single person in some obscure little lab might be enough. If you think we can handle the current challenges of this nature, how about the future? If our game plan is "more is better" when it comes to knowledge and power, we've only just begun on this journey. Can we manage an ever escalating range of issues of this nature? Are we that smart? Smart enough to develop power, yes? But smart enough to manage it? We created a technological civilization, but are we smart enough to prevent it's wastes from substantially changing the environment we depend on? So far the evidence suggests we're not.

Like I said, billions of dollars spent, for nothing in return except vague maybe someday promises. My proposal is that this is not rational on a planet currently experiencing very pressing challenges which have the potential to up end the entire show. If these pressing challenges are not managed successfully, there will never be an opportunity for the maybe someday promises to come true. If the ship is sinking, we bail water first, and worry about redecorating the dining room later.

I agree I don't know ahead of time. So educate us then. What would your response be in the circumstance offered in the example?

Characterizing an example is not meeting the challenge presented by that example. From your links above. More maybe someday stuff. Why should we choose a maybe someday benefit over a tangible defined benefit? Further, why should we not subject proposals coming from the creators of nuclear weapons to a high standard of rigorous skepticism?

That's nice, but you've yet to specify a specific benefit that comes from Higgs research. If we're going to spend billions, why not spend it on something with a defined benefit? What are the defined benefits of Higgs research please? More maybe someday stuff. If you wish try this. Imagine that I, user Typist, was the inventor of nuclear weapons. And now I've come back to the forum with an idea for new research, which costs billions, and has no defined benefit. My proposal, coming from the creator of a doomsday machine, is that instead of spending billions on constructive and much needed projects where the benefit is known, you should give the billions to me, and who knows, maybe someday there might be a benefit of some kind, but I really have no idea what the benefit might be. I can tell by the way you're writing that you would be among the first to rip me a new one. And you would be correct in doing so.

It's surely reasonable to question our ability to change something so fundamental. But... ...do we really have to change? You're right, learning has been how we've successfully adapted to all the previous challenges. And now we face a new challenge. Our knowledge poses a lethal threat to our existence. Why can't this be the new mystery we unravel, the new thing we learn how to overcome? If you think about it, this is an even bigger challenge than the previous ones, in that it requires us to learn something more fundamental than just the next piece of information. We could roll up our sleeves and bite off this challenge with the same sense of adventure we've always applied. Just a thought... Well, if somebody is going to propose spending billions on any research, they should be able to make a case for some specific defined benefit. If the benefit is compelling, and the dangers minimal, perhaps we should proceed. In the case of the Higgs, no real benefit has been identified, and the danger is that this big physics experiment could have the same outcome as the last one. So, on balance, I cast my vote against. Imho, the inventors of the nuclear death machine bear a unique special burden of proof. They will continue to bear this high burden unless and until they can clean up the last mess they brought us.

Hi, thanks for replying. Why can't the next frontier be breaking our addition to the next frontier? And... Do we really have a choice?

Hi guys, thanks for responding. Yes. I share this concern. This is half of my argument, so much money spent on such a poorly defined benefit, at a time when we have so much other pressing business. I have an even larger concern, which I tried to introduce above. It's a more sweeping concern, not limited to this recent discovery of the Higgs. Perhaps I could explain it this way. Wars have been an ongoing regular fact of human culture for thousands of years. It's not much of a stretch to predict we'll have more of them. Some of the wars will be serious confrontations between leading powers, as they have always been. Consider the history of military technology from say, the American Civil War through to the Cuban Missile Crisis a hundred years later. Now plot this line forward in to the future. Do you want to go there? If we blindly accept a premise of "more is better" when it comes to knowledge development, aren't we creating the conditions for future wars of Biblical proportions? How much knowledge is too much? Do we reach a point when the wise thing to say is, "We don't really need to know that, let's leave it alone." What made this jump out to me is that this discovery comes from the same folks that brought us nuclear weapons, which would seem to qualify their projects for serious scrutiny. Where is it?

Greetings all, My intention here is to challenge the celebration currently under way in regards to the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Although I'm using the Higgs as an example case, my purpose really is to ask larger questions about our relationship with knowledge. I hope you might find these questions interesting and engage them, whatever your position. The global celebration of the Higgs discovery, and the seeming lack of a counter view, seems to shine a light on a culture wide consensus that more knowledge is better, almost no matter what, even if the knowledge was very expensive to obtain, and seems to have little defined benefit. I propose that the most significant challenge facing humanity is the relationship between knowledge and wisdom, that is, the judgment required to use the power that flows from knowledge wisely. I propose that knowledge grows exponentially, while wisdom grows incrementally at best. Thus, over time, the relationship between the two becomes ever more distorted. We are increasingly like a troubled 14 year old kid who has just been given a case of scotch, the keys to a car, and a loaded hand gun. We are ever more powerful, without being ever more wise. So why complain about the Higgs discovery? Well, shouldn't the discipline that brought us nuclear weapons, a tool that allows us to erase human civilization in 30 minutes, be subjected to relentless scrutiny when it announces another major project? I find such scrutiny to be entirely lacking, and this seems remarkable indeed. I'll stop here for now to see if you are willing to take on this challenge together.