More Evidence of the Hollowness of Western Civilization

Barnhardt ^ | March 7, 2014 | Ann Barnhardt

[exDemMom]

Wow—over 900,000 articles generated on that site so far!

I generated an article, “Why Nations Fail,” which contained a bunch of platitudes about education. It is like much of the literature in the social sciences—full of talk about how people should reach out and communicate with each other, no concrete workable or testable ideas anywhere.

Then I generated another article, “Namibia and its Own Arab Awakening.” Again, a lot of soft platitudes and little concrete information.

Amazing. It’s kind of scary that a random generator program should be able to capture so well the bulk and style of social sciences/liberal arts type writing.

[DBrow]

“A million articles per year? How can this be digested?”

Science articles are divided up by field. Currently I read space weather papers, cosmic ray effects on microprocessor papers, and total ionizing dose on MOSFET papers because that’s the contract I have.

I don’t need to read paleozoology papers or stuff on mycorhizal fungi ecology in boreal forests papers, stuff from CERN or RHIC (unless people use the accelerators to blast holmium ions into flash memory chips). There are millions of papers that are not relevant to me right now. A previous contract had me looking at and writing stuff on medical lasers including LASIK and prostate surgical lasers, but I don’t look at that now.

Nobody tries to take it ALL in, though I can see how it would be fun to devise some process to do that, sort of a meta meta study of “all science knowledge”.

[DBrow]

“You cannot look at me in they eye and tell me there are 1.2 million “discoveries” per year.”

Yes I can. There are some incremental papers that report on progress of a line of research, but there are many many discoveries every year. Go to a library and read Nature, Science, and any science journals thy have (best to go to a university library).

When I was working in infrared astronomy detectors and the related defense applications of that tech (a relatively small area of science), there were hundreds of relevant papers per year, sometimes more, multiply that by 10,000 science or engineering fields and you get a LOT of articles and papers.

Genetics and genomics generates several thousand relevant papers annually. I get Journal Of Forensic Sciences, there are fifty or sixty relevant “discoveries” per month, like new ways to get latent prints off of rifle brass or ways to determine the age of a skeleton left out in the elements for six years.