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This reads as if it were written by AI.

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Now that you mention it, I do wonder a bit.

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Thanks for the link to Timothy Snyder on Putin.

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In "The West", we are in a current cultural battle for supremacy. Will we eventually be overwhelmed by this post-modernist, woke thinking? Or will we come back to our senses?

The US might be stepping back from the brink. We can only hope that it is. But I am cautious since I see so many forces bent on pushing us over the edge.

Parts of Europe seem more and more seduced by this "siren song", as does Canada and Australia and other places.

STEM R&D is one of the best hopes that humanity has for the future. If skillfully wielded, we can enter into an era of renewed human thriving. Or, we can stumble backwards into a new Dark Age. There are many collectivists and globalists and "degrowthers" and Luddites and so on who would favor a new Dark Age. And Dark Ages are not always so easy to emerge from; just look at human history. A large fraction of the population, even an overwhelming majority, is far more comfortable with mythology and irrationality.

I am not sure our current STEM institutions, and the way we are organized in STEM, are sufficient to combat these challenges. Long before the woke ideology emerged as a significant threat, I think STEM has been struggling.

Maybe we need to approach STEM R&D in a different way.

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A scientifically based study is based upon The Principles of Reasoning called "Entropy Minimax," as described by the late theoretical physicist Ronald Christensen in the seven volume treatise on this topic called "The Entropy Minimax Sourcebook." while an ideology based investigation is not based upon The Principles of Reasoning. These Principles are the solution to the ancient, previously unsikved Problem of Induction, where the problem is of how, in a logically permissible way, to selected the inferences that will be made by a model of a physical system from amongst a larger set of possibilities. The Principles of Reasoning are of recent vintage, having been discovered by Christensen circa 1975 while he was a PhD candidate in the theoretical physics program of the University of California, Berkeley. Shortly after his graduation, I hired Christensen for the purpose of building models of components of nuclear power reactors for consistency with The Principles of Reasoning. To do so, however, did not catch on. Instead, most builders of models of physical systems selected the inferences that would be made by these models for consistency with the intuitive rules of thumb that are called "heuristics." The resulting models express more than the available information about the conditional outcomes of the events of the future for the physical systems being modelled or less.

I am Terry Oldberg

Engineer/Scientist/Public Policy Researcher

Los Altos Hills, California

650-518-6636 ( mobile )

terry_oldberg@yahoo.com ( email )

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