The algorithm snagged my attention, as it often does, on this Unity / Disunity story. Unity is the name of a big bucks on paper stock market (virtual bulls) venture made valuable by game developers, and to some extent academic modelers. They make an engine, which in this case means a software framework, which developers use as a basis virtual reality.
I’m prone to see intellectual history as a roiling melting pot with schools of thought (invisible colleges) adding ingredients, hoping to make something yummy, but we all know the “too many cooks” adage. I’ve seen the legalese speakers feeling triumphant over their mastery of the reality principle, but then engineers can be that same way, as their disciplines boil down to the reality principle as well.
The lawyers are ascendent in many dimensions, as they’re the ones who see themselves applying a living corpus, their law talk, to the unfolding of history, in terms of who are the real criminals. Which presidents were likewise gangsters, in the technical sense? That’s the game show on TV now, as infrastructure is more neglected, with engineering considered “sexy” only if it’s about launching phalluses towards space, ala Apollo. The oceans are still mostly militarized such that thinking about submarine infrastructure is largely discouraged in the tabloid opinion papers.
However I’m not seeing LAWCAP as farsighted enough to plan the phasing in of more science, with its independent grasp on reality. Competition from the engineering minded is fended off more than welcomed, leading to the disconnect foreseen and satirized by H.G. Wells in his Time Machine. We get the Eloi (pudgy) and the Morlocks (chthonic), a Martian Math theme I keep coming back to.
