For the last fifteen years, I’ve been researching a wide range of subjects. Full-time for the last seven years. I’ve traveled the world to interview intellectuals for my podcast, but most of my research has been in private. After careful examination, I have come to the conclusion that we’ve been living in a dark age since at least the early 20th century.
Our present dark age encompasses all domains, from philosophy to political theory, to biology, statistics, psychology, medicine, physics, and even the sacred domain of mathematics. Low-quality ideas have become common knowledge, situated within fuzzy paradigms. Innumerable ideas which are assumed to be rigorous are often embarrassingly wrong and utilize concepts that an intelligent teenager could recognize as dubious. For example, the Copenhagen interpretation in physics is not only wrong, it’s aggressively irrational—enough to damn its supporters throughout the 20th century.
Whether it’s the Copenhagen interpretation, Cantor’s diagonal argument, or modern medical practices, the story looks the same: shockingly bad ideas become orthodoxy, and once established, the social and psychological costs of questioning the orthodoxy are sufficiently high to dissuade most people from re-examination.
This article is the first of an indefinite series that will examine the breadth and depth of our present dark age. For years, I have been planning on writing a book on this topic, but the more I study, the more examples I find. The scandals have become a never-ending list. So, rather than indefinitely accumulate more information, I’ve decided to start writing now.
Darkness Everywhere
By a “dark age”, I do not mean that all modern beliefs are false. The earth is indeed round. Instead, I mean that all of our structures of knowledge are plagued by errors, at all levels, from the trivial to the profound, periphery to the fundamental. Nothing that you’ve been taught can be believed because you were taught it. Nothing can be believed because others believe it. No idea is trustworthy because it’s written in a textbook.
The process that results in the production of knowledge in textbooks is flawed, because the methodology employed by intellectuals is not sufficiently rigorous to generate high-quality ideas. The epistemic standards of the 20th century were not high enough to overcome social, psychological, and political entropy. Our academy has failed.
At present, I have more than sixty-five specific examples that vary in complexity. Some ideas, like the Copenhagen interpretation, have entire books written about them, and researchers could spend decades understanding their full history and significance. The global reaction to COVID-19 is another example that will be written about for centuries. Other ideas, like specific medical practices, are less complex, though the level of error still suggests a dark age.
Of course, I cannot claim this is true in literally every domain, since I have not researched every domain. However, my studies have been quite broad, and the patterns are undeniable. Now when I research a new field, I am able to accurately predict where the scandalous assumptions lie within a short period of time, due to recognizable patterns of argument and predictable social dynamics.
Occasionally, I will find a scholar that has done enough critical thinking and historical research to discover that the ideas he was taught in school are wrong. Usually, these people end up thinking they have discovered uniquely scandalous errors in the history of science. The rogue medical researcher that examines the origins of the lipid hypothesis, or the mathematician that wonders about set theory, or the biologist that investigates fundamental problems with lab rats—they’ll discover critical errors in their discipline but think they are isolated events. I’m sorry to say, they are not isolated events. They are the norm, no matter how basic the conceptual error.
Despite the ubiquity of our dark age, there have been bright spots. The progress of engineers cannot be denied, though it’s a mistake to conflate the progress of scientists with the progress of engineers. There have been high-quality dissenters. Despite being dismissed as crackpots and crazies by their contemporaries, their arguments are often superior to the orthodoxies they criticize, and I suspect history will be kind to these skeptics.
Due to recent events and the proliferation of alternative information channels, I believe we are exiting the dark age into a new Renaissance. Eventually, enough individuals will realize the severity of the problems with existing orthodoxies and the systemic problems with the academy, and they will embark on their own intellectual adventures. The internet has made possible a new life of the mind, and it’s unleashing pent-up intellectual energies around the world that will bring illumination to our present situation, in addition to creating the new paradigms that we desperately need.
Why Did This Happen?
It will take years to go through all of the examples, but before examining the specifics, it’s helpful to see the big picture. Here’s my best explanation for why we ended up in a dark age, summarized into six points:
1. Intellectuals have greatly underestimated the complexity of the world.
The success of early science gave us false hope that the world is simple. Laboratory experiments are great for identifying simple structures and relationships, but they aren’t great for describing the world outside of the laboratory. Modern intellectuals are too zoomed-in in their analyses and theories. They do not see how interconnected the world is nor how many domains one has to research in order to gain competence. For example, you simply cannot have a rigorous understanding of political theory without studying economics. Nor can you understand physics without thinking about philosophy. Yet, almost nobody has interdisciplinary knowledge or skill.
Even within a single domain like medicine, competence requires a broad exposure to concepts. Being too-zoomed-in has resulted in a bunch of medical professionals that don’t understand basic nutrition, immunologists that know nothing of virology, surgeons that unnecessarily remove organs, dentists that poison their patients, and doctors that prolong injury by prescribing anti-inflammatory drugs and harm their patients through frivolous antibiotic usage. The medical establishment has greatly underestimated the complexity of biological systems, and due to this oversimplification, they yank levers that end up causing more harm than good. The same is true for the economists and politicians who believe they can centrally plan economies. They greatly underestimate the complexity of economic systems and end up causing more harm than good. That’s the standard pattern across all disciplines.
2. Specialization has made people stupid.
Modern specialization has become so extreme that it’s akin to a mental handicap. Contemporary minds are only able to think about a couple of variables at the same time and do not entertain variables outside of their domain of training. While this myopia works, and is even encouraged, within the academy, it doesn’t work for understanding the real world. The world does not respect our intellectual divisions of labor, and ideas do not stay confined to their taxonomies.
A competent political theorist must have a good model of human psychology. A competent psychologist must be comfortable with philosophy. Philosophers, if they want to understand the broader world, must grasp economic principles. And so on. The complexity of the world makes it impossible for specialized knowledge to be sufficient to build accurate models of reality. We need both special and general knowledge across a multitude of domains.
When encountering fundamental concepts and assumptions within their own discipline, specialists will often outsource their thinking altogether and say things like “Those kinds of questions are for the philosophers.” They are content leaving the most important concepts to be handled by other people. Unfortunately, since competent philosophers are almost nowhere to be found, the most essential concepts are rarely examined with scrutiny. So, the specialist ends up with ideas that are often inferior to the uneducated, since uneducated folks tend to have more generalist models of the world.
Specialization fractures knowledge into many different pieces, and in our present dark age, almost nobody has tried to put the pieces back together. Contrary to popular opinion, it does not take specialized knowledge or training to comment on the big-picture or see conceptual errors within a discipline. In fact, a lack of training can be an advantage for seeing things from a fresh perspective. The greatest blindspots of specialists are caused by the uniformity of their formal education.
The balance between generalists and specialists is mirrored by the balance between experimenters and theorists. The 20th century had an enormous lack of competent theorists, who are often considered unnecessary or “too philosophical.” Theorists, like generalists, are able to synthesize knowledge into a coherent picture and are absolutely essential for putting fractured pieces of knowledge back together.
3. The lack of conceptual clarity in mathematics and physics has caused a lack of conceptual clarity everywhere else. These disciplines underwent foundational crises in the early 20th century that were not resolved correctly.
The world of ideas is hierarchical; some ideas are categorically more important than others. The industry of ideas is also hierarchical; some intellectuals are categorically more important than others. In our contemporary paradigm, mathematics and physics are considered the most important domains, and mathematicians and physicists are considered the most intelligent thinkers. Therefore, when these disciplines underwent foundational crises, it had a devastating effect upon the entire world of ideas. The foundational notion of a knowable reality came into serious doubt.
In physics, the Copenhagen interpretation claimed that there is no world outside of observation—that it doesn’t even make sense to talk about reality-in-some-state separate from our observations. When the philosophers disagreed, their word was pitted against the word of physicists. In the academic hierarchy, physicists occupy a higher spot than philosophers, so it became fashionable to deny the existence of independent reality. More importantly, within the minds of intellectuals, even if they naively believe in the existence of a measurement-independent world, upon hearing that prestigious physicists disagree, most people end up conforming to the ideas of physicists who they believe are more intelligent than themselves.
In mathematics, the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries undermined a foundation that was built upon for two thousand years. Euclid was often assumed to be a priori true, despite the high-quality criticisms leveled at Euclid for thousands of years. If Euclid is not the rock-solid foundation of mathematics, what is? In the early 1900’s, some people claimed the foundation was logic (and they were correct). Others claimed there is no foundation at all or that mathematics is meaningless because it’s merely the manipulation of symbols according to arbitrary rules.
David Hilbert was a German mathematician that tried to unify all of mathematics under a finite set of axioms. According to the orthodox story, Kurt Godel showed in his famous incompleteness theorems that such a project was impossible. Worse than impossible, actually. He supposedly showed that any attempt to formalize mathematics within an axiomatic system would either be incomplete (meaning some mathematical truths cannot be proven), or if complete, the system becomes inconsistent (meaning they contain a logical contradiction). The impact of these theorems cannot be overstated, both within mathematics and outside of it. Intellectuals have been abusing Godel’s theorems for a century, invoking them to make all kinds of anti-rational arguments. Inescapable contradictions in mathematics would indeed be devastating, because after all, if you cannot have conceptual clarity and certainty in mathematics, what hope is there for other disciplines?
Due to the importance of physics and mathematics, and the influence of physicists and mathematicians, the epistemic standards of the 20th century were severely damaged by these foundational crises. The rise of logical positivism, relativism, and even scientism can be connected to these irrationalist paradigms, which often serve as justification for abandoning the notion of truth altogether.
4. The methods of scientific inquiry have been conflated with the processes of academia.
What is science? In our current paradigm, science is what scientists do. Science is what trained people in lab coats do at universities according to established practices. Science is what’s published in scientific journals after going through the formal peer review process. Good science is what wins awards that science gives out. In other words, science is now equivalent to the rituals of academia.
Real empirical inquiry has been replaced by conformity to bureaucratic procedures. If a scientific paper has checked off all the boxes of academic formalism, it is considered true science, regardless of the intellectual quality of the paper. Real peer review has been replaced by formal peer review—a religious ritual that is supposed to improve the quality of academic literature, despite all evidence to the contrary. The academic publishing system has obviously become dominated by petty and capricious gatekeepers. With the invention of the internet, it’s probably unnecessary altogether.
“Following standard scientific procedure” sounds great unless it’s revealed that the procedures are mistaken. “Peer review” sounds great, unless your peers are incompetent. Upon careful review of many different disciplines, the scientific record demonstrates that “standard practice” is indeed insufficient to yield reliable knowledge, and chances are, your scientific peers are actually incompetent.
5. Academia has been corrupted by government and corporate funding.
Over the 20th century, the amount of money flowing into academia has exploded and degraded the quality of the institution. Academics are incentivized to spend their time chasing government grants rather than researching. The institutional hierarchy has been skewed to favor the best grant-winners rather than the best thinkers. Universities enjoy bloated budgets, both from direct state funding and from government-subsidized student loans. As with any other government intervention, subsidies cause huge distortions to incentive structures and always increase corruption. Public money has sufficiently politicized the academy to fully eliminate the separation of Science and state.
Corporate-sponsored research is also corrupt. Companies pay researchers to find whatever conclusion benefits the company. The worst combination happens when the government works with the academy and corporations on projects, like the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. The amount of incompetence and corruption is staggering and will be written about for centuries or more.
In the past ten years, the politicization of academia has become apparent, but it has been building since the end of WWII. We are currently seeing the result of far-left political organizing within the academy that has affected even the natural sciences. Despite being openly hostile to critical thinking, they have successfully suppressed discussion within the institution that’s supposed to exist to pursue truth—a clear and inexcusable structural failure.
6. Human biology, psychology, and social dynamics make critical thinking difficult.
Nature does not endow us with great critical thinking skills from birth. From what I can tell, most people are stuck in a developmental stage prior to critical thinking, where social and psychological factors are the ultimate reason for their ideas. Gaining popularity and social acceptance are usually higher goals than figuring out the truth, especially if the truth is unpopular. Therefore, the real causes for error are often socio-psychological, not intellectual—an absence of reasoning rather than a mistake of reasoning. Before reaching the stage of true critical thinking, most people’s thought processes are stunted by issues like insecurity, jealousy, fear, arrogance, groupthink, and cowardice. It takes a large, never-ending commitment to self-development to combat these flaws.
Rather than grapple with difficult concepts, nearly every modern intellectual is trying to avoid embarrassment for themselves and for their social class. They are trying to maintain their relative position in a social hierarchy that is constructed around orthodoxies. They adhere to these orthodoxies, not because they thought the ideas through, but because they cannot bear the social cost of disagreement.
The greater the conceptual blunder within an orthodoxy, the greater the embarrassment to the intellectual class that supported it; hence, few people will stick their necks out to correct serious errors. Of course, few people even entertain the idea that great minds make elementary blunders in the first place, so there’s a low chance most intellectuals even realize the assumptions of their discipline or practice are wrong.
Not even supposed mathematical “proofs” are immune from social and psychological pressures. For example, Godel’s incompleteness theorems are not even considered a thing skepticism can be applied to; they are treated as a priori truths to mathematicians (which looks absurd to anybody who has actually examined the philosophical assumptions underpinning modern mathematics.)
Individuals who consider themselves part of the “smart person club”—that is, those that self-describe as intellectuals and are often part of the academy—have a difficult time admitting errors in their own ideology. But they have an exceptionally difficult time admitting error by “great minds” of the past, due to group dynamics. It’s one thing to admit that you don’t understand quantum mechanics; it’s an entirely different thing to claim Niels Bohr did not understand quantum mechanics. The former admission can actually gain you prestige within the physics club; the latter will get you ostracized.
All fields of thought are under constant threat of being captured by superficial “consensus” by those who are seeking to be part of an authoritative group. These people tend to have superior social/manipulative skills, are better at communicating with the general public, and are willing to attack any critics as if their lives depended on it—for understandable reasons, since the benefits of social prestige are indeed on the line when sacred assumptions are being challenged.
If this analysis is correct, then the least examined ideas are likely to be the most fundamental, have the greatest conceptual errors, and have been established the longest. The longer the orthodoxy exists, the higher the cost of revision, potentially costing an entire class their relative social position. If, for example, the notion of the “completed infinity” in mathematics turns out to be bunk, or the cons of vaccination outweigh the benefits, or the science of global warming is revealed to be corrupt, the social hierarchy will be upended, and the status of many intellectuals will be permanently damaged. Some might end up tarred and feathered. With this perspective, it’s not surprising that ridiculous dogmas can often take centuries or even millennia to correct.
Speculation and Conclusion
In addition to the previous six points, I have a few other suspicions that I’m less confident of, but am currently researching:
1. Physical health might have declined over the 20th century due to reduced food quality, forgotten nutritional knowledge, and increased pesticides and pollutants in the environment. Industrialization created huge quantities of food at the expense of quality. Perhaps our dark age is partially caused by an overall reduction in brain function.
2. New communications technology, starting with the radio, might have helped proliferate bad ideas, amplified their negative impact, and increased the social cost of disagreement with the orthodoxy. If true, this would be another unintended consequence of modernization.
3. Conspiracy/geopolitics might be a significant factor. Occasionally, malice does look like a better explanation than stupidity.
In conclusion, the legacy of the 20th century is not an impressive one, and I do not currently have evidence that it was an era of great minds or even good ideas. But don’t take my word for it; the evidence will be supplied here over the coming years. If we are indeed in a dark age, then the first step towards leaving it is recognizing that we’ve been in one.
