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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   28982 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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One of the nice things about hard sciences like math and physics (and, if I had to guess, one of the reasons the Soviets performed so well in it - aside, of course, from having a good pool of genuine talent) is that you can run standardized objective tests for it pretty easily...and you can maintain oversight of it pretty easily, I would guess, relative to softer sciences.

Biology is somewhat softer than physics, but not enough that the totalitarian system that did Lysenkoism or lied about the death of Laika couldn't have done Arische Physik if it wanted to. The CPSU leadership made a deliberate decision to give physicists in general, and nuclear physicists in particular, a level of intellectual freedom it denied to everyone else.

That and a handful of soft sciences; military history and theory was uncensored, for example.

To be fair the very recent history of getting your shit pushed in right after you purged your generals probably had a lot to do with it.

I think it's an anomaly, selecting generals on political loyalty (among other things) is quite widespread.

My point isn't that a totalitarian system couldn't have decided to do fake physics. My point is that if you, Supreme Dictator For Life decide to do real physics it's probably just a bit easier to stick your head in from time to time and figure out if they are doing real or fake physics, because you can see if people are landing on the moon and making ballistic missiles that hit their targets and so forth.

The softer the discipline, the harder it becomes for people without specialized training to articulate the problems with the discipline when it goes off the rails (for instance you don't need literary training to complain about modern literature, but it helps – whereas if someone's rocket misses the moon, it missed the moon and you don't need to understand rocket science at all to notice that.)

Now, arguably today physics has advanced to the point where it's less tangible at the cutting edges! But I think you see my suggestion.

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