My field appears to be dying..or at least unlikely to survive outside the private sector at this rate - in America anyway. Which was the leader in publicly funded hard science.

But I “predict” (that’s a popular thing these days..that stuff is everywhere now) an explosion of a type of brain science adjacent brand of behaviorism, of which at most a tiny amount could be of any interest or be called actual science. A lot of it would be the type of stuff the MIT Media Lab churns out. There’s a lot of that crap - nudge theory, behavioral economics, that Facebook emotion contagion study, a lot of the stuff Stanford does (Facedars, 100 years of AI), behaviorism in general, emotion AI, lie-detection, military psych stuff, Bschool studies, marketing psychology etc..

lol the death of real science along with the rise of social engineering and behaviorism, with vaguely spooky ties.
It’s depressing to watch.


And I bet it would be peddled as “checking disinfo” etc. Basically, sorry to be so mean but stuff that gets this land wide-eyed coverage where cynically the notion is that “people are interested in that stuff”. It’s like WWE or reality tv. It’s shocking to me as someone who knows how hard, low rewards, diminishing returns etc characterize real hard science and to see this crap..fiddling ineptly with people’s heads and thinking that the learned helplessness of the “subjects” connotates anything but despair.


It could be done well..but that would have to be seriously cool stuff..I was thinking of the people who do pretty cool work outside the hard sciences. It really can’t be mass produced with your brain switched off.
Typically such people would be unhappy with their jobs not embrace them..

The times I use the net anymore (disliking it very much..you sometimes want to say something in frustration) it’s out of a vague desire to attack that brainless crap.

The hard sciences are better for purely mechanical effort. Because by their very nature they lend themselves to work you can do while shutting off the parts of your brain that don’t require parsing your own bs outside a narrow range. It’s way narrower at least in the range of bs permissible versus hacking your way through human minds.

With this stuff it’s as though we’re something tacky/flashy to get attention from a series of morons it would be considered interesting and scientific rather than a clear sign of an overpopulated, dying society.

Possibly a slightly jaded take..