RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/02/the-impending

“Unless or until social science shows a more robust and successful track record, it should be left to theoretical musings of its adherents. Applied social science, of course, should be avoided at all costs. For it is little more than tyranny by another name.”

There were approximately 2.5 million scientific papers published last year. Think about that. A researcher would have to read nearly 300 papers an hour, non-stop, just to keep up. And that is not accounting for the more than 50 million scientific papers that have been published since the 17th century. If the researcher somehow managed to read 600 papers an hour (that’s 10 scientific papers each minute) in order to catch up with the established scientific literature, it would still take him 20 years to consume all the papers written. Once again, this is assuming that he didn’t eat or sleep, and was somehow able to read and absorb 10 technical papers each minute.

Needless to say, the readership of any particular paper is abysmally low.

Now imagine taking the time to test and reproduce the results of each paper. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that scientific inquiry has suffered from a “reproducibility crisis” over the past few years. Some surveys have suggested that more than 70 percent of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments. In one of the largest replication studies conducted, 60 percent of psychology studies examined failed the reproducibility test. A research project attempting to replicate social science experiments failed eight out of 21 times to obtain any observed effects consistent with the original findings. These findings deliver a devastating blow to the credibility of the current literature in both the natural and social sciences.

In theory, science has mechanisms in place to safeguard the knowledge it cultivates. But an overly bureaucratic and esoterically compartmentalized academia with perverse funding incentives will doom the practice of science no matter the methodological guardrails. These theoretical guardrails mean very little if they are not practically enforced. After all, the Soviet Union’s constitution had some beautiful, yet ignored, language about freedom of expression and the press.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/02/does-make-x-great-again

The short answer: Sometimes.

Here’s one example. By 527 A.D., the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople seemed fated to collapse like the West had a near century prior. The Persian Sassanids were gobbling up Byzantine lands in the east. Almost all of old Rome west of Greece had already been lost.

A growing and unsustainable administrative state exercised near control of Constantinople. Christianity was splintering into irrelevant factionalism. The law was a selective mess.

Justinian was certainly an unlikely emperor: an outsider of peasant stock from the northern frontier, an Eastern Latin rather than Greek speaker (and likely the last native Latin-speaking emperor), who would marry an infamous but shrewd courtesan, Theodora.

Yet in some 38 years of sometimes brutal rule, Justinian through the leadership of his brilliant generals, Belisarius and Narses, stabilized the eastern borders. He reclaimed for eastern Rome North Africa, Sicily, much of Italy, and some of Spain, often through small, well-organized armies and prudent alliances. He reformed the bureaucracy, systematized Roman law (Codex Justinianus), and built the magnificent Christian cathedral of Hagia Sophia—the largest church in the world for a thousand years.

Justinian might have done even far more had not a devastating three-year epidemic of bubonic plague spiked and wiped out a quarter of the empire’s population. The millions of losses created a permanent manpower shortage that left the Byzantines vulnerable to relentless Gothic enemies in Western Europe—and ultimately, a century and a half later, the conquests of new Islamic armies in the Middle East and North Africa.

The outsider Justinian’s agendas were those of many past reformers and restorers: apply the law equally and rationally, control government finances, restore the value of the currency, unite and inspire the population with iconic buildings and new infrastructure, reform and enhance religious practice, and offer predictable and steady rule.