I was also surprised when I first saw a huge Roman fresco in person. It seems that the medieval times were indeed the dark times. I get the historical reasons and all that but it's almost laughable looking at this art in museums.
The latest craze for 2021 kids is "pop it" game. We are just too old to be amazed by that. Do you think these kids will prefer living in 2050, working in a cubicle, facing midlife crisis, even though they are living through a pandemic now?
As for your view on technology, while many of us here share it, let's not forget how small HN crowd in general population is. Like you said, people shrugged, but most probably never even thought about it.
You were a kid, everything seems magical then. As we get older the magic disappears. Happens to every generation. See for example how many people are nostalgic of (objectively worse) 80s, in countries that were much poorer than are today and had much worse living conditions.
What is the goal of this campain to re-introduce aliens into the public discourse? Interestingly, it seems that the "smart" people are now falling for it (washington post, hn, certain subreddits and podcasts...).
It's better but not great. Not everyone can afford tesla. Western goverments and big companies are to blame for lack of incentives and infrastructure. People buy what makes the most sense, and petrol is better for many people. This can be changed.
I think that everyone would instantly switch to EV if it had the same properties but had a battery instead of a tank. They are faster, silent, cleaner, but it's up to leaders to bridge the gap making them economically viable.
Is there some resource that compares all the vaccines, an article or a blog post? I would guess that a vast majority of people don't have time/knowledge to look into official reports. One big table with different companies, number of people in trials, results etc. would be nice. For example, what I just found out is that Moderna is actually not 95% effective on all age groups but on 18-65 [1].
Back to J&J. How old were the 15% that did develop the most serious symptoms? The article says that "more than 40 per cent had other illnesses [...] including obesity, diabetes and HIV." Isn't the base rate for obesity in a population something like that or higher? Finally, if we just look at the numbers (if they are even comparable), can we objectively rank these vaccines by how good they are? No ones feelings should be hurt if we can conclude that their vaccine is close to useless (think of how vaccinated population will demand loose measures although 40% of them are still at risk).
The amount of unknown and disagreement after all this time and money spent is a big failure of science. Laymen have a unique peak into how science works day to day, which might be good or bad depending on how you see it.
In the current shape this can definitely be used on social media. But I would ask someone about their life, where they live etc. GPT-3 will fail that, the next model might succeed. This model would be even better for social farming so maybe these tests are not useless after all. The question is what are we building these models for. At this point it's getting immoral to continue research in this direction, as is the case in some computer vision tasks.
I made an argument to challenge the parent comment's argument. It is obvious that nor physics nor population size led to advancements alone. There are many confounders.
What I wanted to point out is: there is a trade-off in allocating budgets which are finite to different parts of society. If science gets a certain budget, I argue (like the original author) that new collider takes away a part of the cake from others. However you frame the sources of the money, the budget is obviously limited and can be directed in other experiments and ideas as well.
What prompted my response is defending physics through listing inventions. Ironically, the proposed experiment might never give any practical application, and it shouldn't in my opinion. The search for knowledge, especially as fundamental as this is enough. But this part of physics already appeals to wide audience and has great PR. There might be other parts that could use billions but are not as sexy to general public.
Well educated people who can work on this problem are not minorities, i.e. they have access to education, higher social status, better starting point. While their color of skin might be different, they don't need to be aware of all the issues their race/sex faces. Example can be difference between treatment of certain minorities in US (where most of the science is developed) and the rest of the world. A scientist at Facebook/Google will develop something for the whole world having US centric view, without access to views from other cultures and their reqiurements for fairness.