#this is extremely sound science | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

centi-pedve · 11 months ago

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hiiiiiiiiiiii!! Did Joseph choose the design of his wings? i guess they were linked to genes and mutation so maybe he couldnt choose...

regardless, do Joseph's parents like . babyproof the claws on his wings? Those bad boys are POINTY and not really suitable for 10 year-olds methinks ... i dont want my boyo to get hurtie sniffles

yess he did! the way their society has developed it, aesthetic changes can be performed like how we do normal surgery, just much more advanced, or genetically, but that typically has certain limitations (easier to change certain aspects of already existing traits than create entirely new ones). joseph's aesthetic alterations were surgical, so his body was manually remade where necessary to enable the construction of wings that also function (aka he can move them and they're an extension of his body with nerves and shit rather than just something taped on.) we imagine he'd probably need some sort of additional help when it comes to growth though because his body can't do that by itself. aka expensive both initially and for upkeep oughh 🤕 meanwhile five has an aesthetic alteration in his hair that's more genetic, so he wasn't born with hair like that or had anyone in his family which would allow hair like that, but since his actual genes have been altered his hair now naturally grows white/black and it can be passed on to any kids he might have. if joseph did gain wings through more natural means so that any genetic traits he had prior would determine color, he could also choose to have those traits altered so that his wings would look different.

he specifically chose his wings to appear the way they do because of the connection to a highly respected group revolving around justice that considers themselves modern day knights, whose members all take care to resemble green dragons. it's both formal and informal i.e. there's an actual organization of proper members who are fully connected to each other, and people who aren't a part of the actual org but subscribe to their beliefs and align with them both in appearance and behavior. other aesthetic changes come with certain associations by result of people being people, so while it's entirely possible and fine to just want the green dragon vibe while not caring for the org, people will still assume you're associated. stuff like that would probably manifest in a lot of different ways, like people assuming you're a fan of a celebrity because you have a similar added trait that a celebrity has, or thinking you're annoying because you have pink hair and everyone who gets pink hair is annoying duhh, etc etc. but in this case it's an association joseph wants, even though some people might see it as a bad thing.

and they do not 😇 he'd probably go crazy if they tried babyproofing it and would just remove it. tbh he'd probably accidentally hurt other people more than he would hurt himself... kind of just one of those things he has to be aware of so he probably knows how to watch where his claws are atp.

#joseph performs the surgical equivalent of buying a fursuit when you're 13 even though you're gonna grow and you'll need a new one #if any SCIENCE NERDS wanna be all 'ermm actually the way you explain genes and surgery is wrong because-' shhh...#besides it's also important to note that a lot of advancements are magic assisted and so they can get away with a lot more #while it'd be expensive we like to think it wouldn't be as expensive as such a surgery would be in the real world because #of how common it is and the fact that it's inherently easier for them. surgery and other bodily manipulations are super focused on #hence making them much safer easier and by result much more accessible #the main premise is kind of just extending those modifications to the mind as fucked as that sounds #by reverse engineering mind alteration based magic and making it long term #hence influencing people's political stances to extreme points #grins #ioi #ioi joseph #asks

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kanyniablue · 5 months ago

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it's tempting to blame tiktok for bad literary opinions but some of you were this bad before tiktok

#i swear every post i see including the words 'reading comprehension' is a self fulfilling prophecy of poor reading comprehension #this was even more abt 'i didnt relate to the main character' 'likability' 'plot relevance' complaints #none of you would survive a university level literature class. i say that as a science major.#also just 'social media bad!!' 'its cuz yuor always on that damn phone' 'tumblr is already the Elite uwu'#you sound like the stereotype standard of The BoomerTM #OH! and the Extremely Clever DialogueTM that is ridiculous #you are not saying anything. you're saying words that mean nothing

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omegasmileyface · 7 months ago

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do you think the object cartoon fans know that the guy who made their blorbos has a planet named after him

#well. one of the guys. but that didnt sound as funny #(shoutout to michael maybe hell get a planet too)#.............(ive never seen a second of bfdi i just watch carys science videos and think its an extremely funny venn diagram of viewership)

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phantomrose96 · 1 year ago

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Thinking about Edward Elric as the Amestrian Military's specialest little unfireable boy

State alchemists can be fired for underperforming. We know this up front from the likes of Shou Tucker. And this makes a ton of sense from the homunculi's standpoint since the state alchemists are sacrifice candidates, and the homunculi would want to cull the weakest candidates and focus only on cultivating the strongest ones who stand the best chance of opening the portal.

........Then there's Edward. Who's already opened the portal.

There's no need to cultivate him. No gamble taken on whether he's good enough to open the portal. He passed the final test already. Graduated 4 semesters early.

And as such, has a free pass to do Absolute Fuck All.

And I'm imagining how funny this is from like an outside perspective.

Some newish state alchemist who'd only ever read up on the stories of Edward Elric, ready and excited to start their career of being paid handsomely with endless freedom to research and travel and do anything they want in the pursuit of science... surprised and confused to find themselves put on probation their first month for things like "ignoring orders." Which is, as best they had thought, a famous Edward Elric pastime.

Roy showing a slight bit of stress about his yearly state alchemist report, and Ed just snorting and rolling his eyes at Roy because every year HE just hastily does his on the train ride over (canon in the manga, a travesty it was left out of the anime) and it gets rubber stamped. Ed not realizing that other alchemists' reports get genuinely scrutinized and torn apart while Ed is free to turn in whatever absolute bullshit he thinks of 36 hours ahead of time. One year his report was about whether alchemy could be done via dance (conclusion: no it can't) and no one cared. Roy WANTS to tell Ed there's some kind of unknown favoritism around Ed making him literally bullet-proof but Roy has no way to phrase this that doesn't sound like he's just in denial and mad at how good Ed's train-reports are.

Guy from the Internal Amestrian Affairs sector who's responsible for auditing other internal military personel for any suspicious activity hitting about 1 million red flags for Edward Elric, issuing a STRONG and URGENT recommendation to suspend the alchemist pending further investigation into things like "literal bunk-buddies with two members of the Xingese royalty (enemy nation)" and "spent $10,000,000 of his stipend on a librarian to make her re-copy (what he seemed to interpret as?) military records in some extremely transparent effort to unearth state secrets (it was a recipe book but he was literally asking her about state secrets)" and "literally has never once obeyed an order, ever, not even once in his career, and is on public record having said 'I do not care about the goals and protections of the Amestrian Military. I am in fact only pursuing my own interests several of which are diametrically opposed to the safety and well-being of the governing body of Amestris'"

The issued recommendation is intercepted before it even reaches its intended desk. President Bradley himself has taken issue with it and denies it before a single set of eyes has seen it. The President's veto stamp is a terrifying hammer, used rarely, and it is now sitting on the auditor's desk.

The auditor sleeps with one eye open from then on out.

#fma #fullmetal alchemist #fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood #fma:b #literally anything about the dynamic between edward and the amestrian government is so so so funny to me #im begging you to come pick up your alchemist he keeps committing treason #Roy: absolute perfect ass-kisser and career-man playing the part 24/7 to disguise his treasonous ambitions and still #not flying under the radar #Edward on his public Twitter: bored. might tear down the Amestrian government for fun.

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aethersea · 6 months ago

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another thing fantasy writers should keep track of is how much of their worldbuilding is aesthetic-based. it's not unlike the sci-fi hardness scale, which measures how closely a story holds to known, real principles of science. The Martian is extremely hard sci-fi, with nearly every detail being grounded in realistic fact as we know it; Star Trek is extremely soft sci-fi, with a vaguely plausible "space travel and no resource scarcity" premise used as a foundation for the wildest ideas the writers' room could come up with. and much as Star Trek fuckin rules, there's nothing wrong with aesthetic-based fantasy worldbuilding!

(sidenote we're not calling this 'soft fantasy' bc there's already a hard/soft divide in fantasy: hard magic follows consistent rules, like "earthbenders can always and only bend earth", and soft magic follows vague rules that often just ~feel right~, like the Force. this frankly kinda maps, but I'm not talking about just the magic, I'm talking about the worldbuilding as a whole.

actually for the purposes of this post we're calling it grounded vs airy fantasy, bc that's succinct and sounds cool.)

a great example of grounded fantasy is Dungeon Meshi: the dungeon ecosystem is meticulously thought out, the plot is driven by the very realistic need to eat well while adventuring, the story touches on both social and psychological effects of the whole 'no one dies forever down here' situation, the list goes on. the worldbuilding wants to be engaged with on a mechanical level and it rewards that engagement.

deliberately airy fantasy is less common, because in a funny way it's much harder to do. people tend to like explanations. it takes skill to pull off "the world is this way because I said so." Narnia manages: these kids fall into a magic world through the back of a wardrobe, befriend talking beavers who drink tea, get weapons from Santa Claus, dance with Bacchus and his maenads, and sail to the edge of the world, without ever breaking suspension of disbelief. it works because every new thing that happens fits the vibes. it's all just vibes! engaging with the worldbuilding on a mechanical level wouldn't just be futile, it'd be missing the point entirely.

the reason I started off calling this aesthetic-based is that an airy story will usually lean hard on an existing aesthetic, ideally one that's widely known by the target audience. Lewis was drawing on fables, fairy tales, myths, children's stories, and the vague idea of ~medieval europe~ that is to this day our most generic fantasy setting. when a prince falls in love with a fallen star, when there are giants who welcome lost children warmly and fatten them up for the feast, it all fits because these are things we'd expect to find in this story. none of this jars against what we've already seen.

and the point of it is to be wondrous and whimsical, to set the tone for the story Lewis wants to tell. and it does a great job! the airy worldbuilding serves the purposes of the story, and it's no less elegant than Ryōko Kui's elaborately grounded dungeon. neither kind of worldbuilding is better than the other.

however.

you do have to know which one you're doing.

the whole reason I'm writing this is that I saw yet another long, entertaining post dragging GRRM for absolute filth. asoiaf is a fun one because on some axes it's pretty grounded (political fuck-around-and-find-out, rumors spread farther than fact, fastest way to lose a war is to let your people starve, etc), but on others it's entirely airy (some people have magic Just Cause, the various peoples are each based on an aesthetic/stereotype/cliché with no real thought to how they influence each other as neighbors, the super-long seasons have no effect on ecology, etc).

and again! none of this is actually bad! (well ok some of those stereotypes are quite bigoted. but other than that this isn't bad.) there's nothing wrong with the season thing being there to highlight how the nobles are focused on short-sighted wars for power instead of storing up resources for the extremely dangerous and inevitable winter, that's a nice allegory, and the looming threat of many harsh years set the narrative tone. and you can always mix and match airy and grounded worldbuilding – everyone does it, frankly it's a necessity, because sooner or later the answer to every worldbuilding question is "because the author wanted it to be that way." the only completely grounded writing is nonfiction.

the problem is when you pretend that your entirely airy worldbuilding is actually super duper grounded. like, for instance, claiming that your vibes-based depiction of Medieval Europe (Gritty Edition) is completely historical, and then never even showing anyone spinning. or sniffing dismissively at Tolkien for not detailing Aragorn's tax policy, and then never addressing how a pre-industrial grain-based agricultural society is going years without harvesting any crops. (stored grain goes bad! you can't even mouse-proof your silos, how are you going to deal with mold?) and the list goes on.

the man went up on national television and invited us to engage with his worldbuilding mechanically, and then if you actually do that, it shatters like spun sugar under the pressure. doesn't he realize that's not the part of the story that's load-bearing! he should've directed our focus to the political machinations and extensive trope deconstruction, not the handwavey bit.

point is, as a fantasy writer there will always be some amount of your worldbuilding that boils down to 'because I said so,' and there's nothing wrong with that. nor is there anything wrong with making that your whole thing – airy worldbuilding can be beautiful and inspiring. but you have to be aware of what you're doing, because if you ask your readers to engage with the worldbuilding in gritty mechanical detail, you had better have some actual mechanics to show them.

#finx rambles #worldbuilding #for writers #honestly I quite liked the asoiaf books I read #it's a well-constructed story! it's a well-constructed world too on its own merits #none of this stuff about grain and spinning is actually important to the story #the problem is that grrm himself seems to just. not realize this #and goes about blithely insisting he's created an extraordinarily realistic fantasy world where all the tax policies make sense #he has not!#he has invited people to tear his creation apart if they can and! it turns out! they absolutely can!#this shit's got no tensile strength! it's made of glue and popsicle sticks!#you're not supposed to put weight on it

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angelsforthenight · 20 days ago

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arcane women nsfw headcanons

(vi, caitlyn, sevika, ambessa)

cw: 18+, overstimulation, brief mention of bdsm, choking, spit, i talk about both topping and bottoming with each characters.

vi:

when topping: eats it for her own pleasure: meaning she can have her face buried in between your thighs for hours and hours on end, pushing you back down onto the bed whenever you’d try lift yourself up and get away from the onslaught of overwhelming pleasure. service top when she’s in a good mood, sure — she’d be obsessed with your sounds, the way your walls would flutter around her. it would be making love rather than sex: sweet and tender. but when she isn’t in a good mood? she’d be selfish and greedy. more focused on her own pleasure than yours. her stroke game would be Crazy… ?!?? fast and rough as fuck. like let us breathe, damn!

when bottoming: a shameless MOANER!!! vocal as fuck obviously. she drools, whining in frustration when she doesn’t get what she wants. loves to arch her back. she’d have sensitive ass nipple piercings that would drive her insane if you touched them, crying out if you’d flick your tongue against them. pants like a bitch and breathlessly begs to cum hehehehe

caitlyn:

when topping: would treat you as if you were a fucking science experiment, meaning she’d explore what would stimulate you the most and push you to extreme lengths to see what would truly break you. murmuring ‘ah…’s and humming to herself in fascination when she clocks your reactions, what would make you squirm and twitch like crazy. she’d be pretty cruel, not giving a fuck if you’d start crying. a little ‘poor baby’ would suffice. a freakaleek…. bdsm would go WILDDDD with her, and you wouldn’t expect it too; the way she carries herself so humbly in public.

when bottoming: heavy breather until you’re, like, three rounds in… that’s when the whining and the drawled moans and whimpers start to come out full throttle. power bottom, would communicate if she wanted you to keep doing what you’re doing. “just like that, don’t stop…” would lace her fingers through your hair if you were eating her out, gripping it tightly if the pleasure was truly messing her uppppp! not only your hair, her hands would find purchase in anything to hold on to if you were fucking her good, good.

sevika:

when topping: ohhh this bitch likes to taunt… i mean, taunt taunt you. she’s so teasing, laughing at the helpless look on your face. she’d force you to look up at her, make eye contact as she’s fucking you senseless. would play coy when she’d stop just as you were on the brink of releasing, “oh? is something wrong?” would gently yet patronisingly shush you if you started to cry. oh my fucking god and the smearing??? she would spit on your already weeping pussy and spread it with her fingers, mixing it with your arousal. shit, she’d make you suck her fingers before smearing it all over your face, especially if your face was already wet with tears. she’d love squishing your face, giving it a playful shake whilst knowing you were on the brink of passing out. PET NAMES!!!! bunny, baby, princess, sweetheart would not fail to leave her lips. good at hiding how pathetic she really is, except when she’s eating the fuck out of your pussy, being so driven by your sounds and the way you taste that she’d cum without even being touched.

when bottoming: professional hip buckler. so fucking stupid. you’d see a completely different side to the sevika she usually presents herself as, being a needy and whining mess instead: eyes rolling to the back of her head. loves being overstimulated, babbling words like ‘yesyesyes’ that slur together. if you’d choke her, you’d be able to visibly see her brain kick down a few gears; the foggy eyes, arched eyebrows and slack jaw combo would be sososo cute :(( would nod along like a bobble-head to anything you’d tell or ask her to do, with her lil puppy eyes too. maybe a little bit of a masochist,,,,, shhhhhh

ambessa:

when topping: oh ambessa would know how to FUCK. it would be so easy for her to find your sweet spots, and she’d be vigilant like a hawk about it. she’d hit your g-spot consistently, her movements precise and efficient. she’d enjoy your shyness, your struggle with looking at her in the eye: finding it adorable. would talk you through your orgasm. sweet voice whispering praises in your ear as you teetered on the edge of a searing climax. your waist would be her favourite thing to hold on to, especially if she’s giving you back-shots. her lips would be rested in a satisfied smile throughout the entire thing.

when bottoming: hmmmmm i feel like bottoming would kind of be an extension to her topping, meaning she wouldn’t be a bottom 😭 ambessa is such a dominant, powerful character that it’s quite hard to imagine her as submissive. so she’d just let you pleasure her once in a while, praising you as you’d lap up her juices like a dog, fuelling you to do more. her moans would come from her throat, face falling a little if it felt a little too good.

a/n: fofmfhskejfnsjwjdnnwjw something small whilst i cook up a long abby fic. (i miss writing long story fics🙁) lmk ur nsfw headcanons ab these characters >3<

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bunnywithablog · 18 days ago

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Hi! I saw that requests were open, so I wonder... can I request an imagine or headcanons (whatever you're more comfortable doing) about Legosi falling for a carnivore s/o and struggling with that after being so sure to be attracted to herbivores only please??

my writing chops are a bit rusty so please excuse me if this feels a bit off 😭 i had lots of fun writing it though!! if anyone is interested in a part 2, please let me know! i think it's a cool concept to explore and would love to do more with this >:) thank's for requesting and i hope you enjoy!

requests | rules | masterlist

pairing: Beastars - legoshi x carnivore!gn!reader - feeling conflicted over falling for a carnivore hc’s

warnings: internalized ...species-phobia??, brief locker-room talk from bill, implied love triangle if you squint

- now this just threw him for an absolute loop

- i mean, sure legoshi has always been more than capable of recognizing when a carnivore would be considered conventionally attractive

- but to actually FEEL attracted to them himself???

- manages to convince himself that maybe he just really likes you,,,,as a fellow peer?

- why else would he feel so strongly towards you?

- it had to be some pack-mentality science! yeah, definitely! 🤔

- but it's hard to ignore the way his ears perk at the sound of your voice during class

- or the slight wag of his tail when he catches your scent in the hallways

- or how his heart seems to stop whenever you look in his direction,,,, 💗

- it's like you were sent into his life specifically to shake him up, it's so confusing!

- so his best solution to this? avoiding you entirely.

- outta sight outta mind 🫡

- sitting extremely far away from your spot in classes, changing which hallway routes he takes, getting to and leaving the cafeteria way before/after you

- it's a perfect plan, really!

- except you don't leave his mind

- no matter where he is or what he's doing, images and questions about you creep into his thoughts

- 'what do they like to do in their free time? they have a really pretty smile, i bet it attracts a lot of people... are they interested in dating right now? would they even be interested in a grey wolf, for that matter? how do they keep their fur looking so soft?'

- he even makes more time to hang around with haru to try reinforce his established attraction to just herbivores

- the only thing this really achieves is sending him into a spiral about how he's attracted to two different people now

- and when you get scouted into the drama club as one of the dancers, it's even harder to keep you out of his sight

- starts making slip-ups with angling the lighting correctly since his focus can't help but shift to you during rehearsals

- the others in the backstage crew actually start asking if he's alright because he never makes this many mistakes

- he thinks every movement you make is so graceful, controlled and confident,,,

- it's a testament to the way you own your strengths and effortlessly channel them into your skills; it makes it undeniably alluring to watch the way you move

- wait! no! it's normal for most carnivores to be good at the physical arts so it's not attraction, just admiration for how good you are!

- denial is a river in egypt,,,,

- this cycle goes on for quite some time until the first dress rehearsal

- "oh man, did you see how good [name] looks out there in their costume? what a hot bod, especially doing all those poses and bends during the dance routine! heh, what i'd do to get a piece of that... huh? hey, legoshi, what's got you all wound-up?"

- hearing bill talk about you like that and subsequently having to hold back from hurtling a mean punch his way, legoshi finally accepted that this was a feeling he had to address 💀

- despite the borderline obsessive pull toward you, he realizes he doesn't actually know you beyond being classmates and drama club members together

- eventually concludes the best course of action is to formally introduce himself and hopefully spend some time together

- figures it's also a good way to see if these feelings grow or fade the more he gets to know you, maybe it really is just some carnivore pack-mentality thing!

- best-case scenario is that he just really wanted to be friends with you so he can continue pursuing haru without worry, but only time will tell now...

enjoy what i write? consider helping with my transition! 💕

#beastars #beastars x reader #beastars x gn reader #beastars legoshi x reader #beastars legoshi x gn reader #legoshi x reader #legoshi x gn reader #x gn reader #x carnivore reader #romantic #strangers to friends #strangers to lovers #implied love triangle

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starfieldcanvas · 4 months ago

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talking about various primitive instincts is all well and good, pareidolia and all that, you're not saying anything i'm not already familiar with, but you're adding stuff that simply was not there in the original tags in the original screenshot. the original just says "religion and spiritually", not "the building blocks that frequently add up to religion and spirituality." it doesn't matter how many interesting things you have to say about anthropomorphism and pattern-finding in your follow-up posts because OP was never disagreeing with the new stuff in the follow-up posts. OP merely disagreed with the tags in the screenshot.

you can't simply teleport people from argument A into argument B and then declare they're losing.

did you write the original tags? i don't get why you're bending over backwards to steelman them. especially because the way you've chosen to do it is directly at odds with defending the intelligence of religious people. i feel pretty comfortable asserting that most people who value intelligence see irrationality and primitive instinct as the opposite of intelligence. but you've just declared that a bunch of "primitive instincts" and well-known human irrationalities are the basis of religious thinking, while trying to argue that we shouldn't look down on religious people as unintelligent. so..... what kind of point are you trying to make here? that religious people are primitive and irrational, but we shouldn't judge them so harshly because all humans are prone to being primitive and irrational?

that may indeed be true, but you've sure gone out of your way to emphasize how benighted and backwards religious thinking is...while castigating others for looking down on religious people.

man,

☝️stupid addition to an ok post about how it's wrong to be a dickhead to people just because they're religious. but fwiw the strong tendency for religious people to say moronic shit like this is why some atheists are gonna get mean about it. like, no they aren't.

#go ahead #add another extremely random condescending assertion #about how i can't see the connection between dog-level anthropomorphism #and modern religious practice #get even more aggressive about how religion springs from animalistic survival instincts #you're making religious people sound soooooo enlightened and rational #definitely not like backwards cavemen at all #sigh #irreverence #dove.txt #long post #yeah science!

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 month ago

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Expert agencies and elected legislatures

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/#decisions-decisions

Since Trump hijacked the Supreme Court, his backers have achieved many of their policy priorities: legalizing bribery, formalizing forced birth, and – with the Loper Bright case, neutering the expert agencies that regulate business:

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/scotus-decisions-chevron-immunity-loper

What the Supreme Court began, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are now poised to finish, through the "Department of Government Efficiency," a fake agency whose acronym ("DOGE") continues Musk's long-running cryptocurrency memecoin pump-and-dump. The new department is absurd – imagine a department devoted to "efficiency" with two co-equal leaders who are both famously incapable of getting along with anyone – but that doesn't make it any less dangerous.

Expert agencies are often all that stands between us and extreme misadventure, even death. The modern world is full of modern questions, the kinds of questions that require a high degree of expert knowledge to answer, but also the kinds of questions whose answers you'd better get right.

You're not stupid, nor are you foolish. You could go and learn everything you need to know to evaluate the firmware on your antilock brakes and decide whether to trust them. You could figure out how to assess the Common Core curriculum for pedagogical soundness. You could learn the material science needed to evaluate the soundness of the joists that hold the roof up over your head. You could acquire the biology and chemistry chops to decide whether you want to trust produce that's been treated with Monsanto's Roundup pesticides. You could do the same for cell biology, virology, and epidemiology and decide whether to wear a mask and/or get an MRNA vaccine and/or buy a HEPA filter.

You could do any of these. You might even be able to do two or three of them. But you can't do all of them, and that list is just a small slice of all the highly technical questions that stand between you and misery or an early grave. Practically speaking, you aren't going to develop your own robust meatpacking hygiene standards, nor your own water treatment program, nor your own Boeing 737 MAX inspection protocol.

Markets don't solve this either. If they did, we wouldn't have to worry about chunks of Boeing jets falling on our heads. The reason we have agencies like the FDA (and enabling legislation like the Pure Food and Drug Act) is that markets failed to keep people from being murdered by profit-seeking snake-oil salesmen and radium suppository peddlers.

These vital questions need to be answered by experts, but that's easier said than done. After all, experts disagree about this stuff. Shortcuts for evaluating these disagreements ("distrust any expert whose employer has a stake in a technical question") are crude and often lead you astray. If you dismiss any expert employed by a firm that wants to bring a new product to market, you will lose out on the expertise of people who are so legitimately excited about the potential improvements of an idea that they quit their jobs and go to work for whomever has the best chance of realizing a product based on it. Sure, that doctor who works for a company with a new cancer cure might just be shilling for a big bonus – but maybe they joined the company because they have an informed, truthful belief that the new drug might really cure cancer.

What's more, the scientific method itself speaks against the idea of there being one, permanent answer to any big question. The method is designed as a process of continual refinement, where new evidence is continuously brought forward and evaluated, and where cherished ideas that are invalidated by new evidence are discarded and replaced with new ideas.

So how are we to survive and thrive in a world of questions we ourselves can't answer, that experts disagree about, and whose answers are only ever provisional?

The scientific method has an answer for this, too: refereed, adversarial peer review. The editors of major journals act as umpires in disputes among experts, exercising their editorial discernment to decide which questions are sufficiently in flux as to warrant taking up, then asking parties who disagree with a novel idea to do their damndest to punch holes in it. This process is by no means perfect, but, like democracy, it's the worst form of knowledge creation except for all others which have been tried.

Expert regulators bring this method to governance. They seek comment on technical matters of public concern, propose regulations based on them, invite all parties to comment on these regulations, weigh the evidence, and then pass a rule. This doesn't always get it right, but when it does work, your medicine doesn't poison you, the bridge doesn't collapse as you drive over it, and your airplane doesn't fall out of the sky.

Expert regulators work with legislators to provide an empirical basis for turning political choices into empirically grounded policies. Think of all the times you've heard about how the gerontocracy that dominates the House and the Senate is incapable of making good internet policy because "they're out of touch and don't understand technology." Even if this is true (and sometimes it is, as when Sen Ted Stevens ranted about the internet being "a series of tubes," not "a dump truck"), that doesn't mean that Congress can't make good internet policy.

After all, most Americans can safely drink their tap water, a novelty in human civilization, whose history amounts to short periods of thriving shattered at regular intervals by water-borne plagues. The fact that most of us can safely drink our water, but people who live in Flint (or remote indigenous reservations, or Louisiana's Cancer Alley) can't tells you that these neighbors of ours are being deliberately poisoned, as we know precisely how not to poison them.

How did we (most of us) get to the point where we can drink the water without shitting our guts out? It wasn't because we elected a bunch of water scientists! I don't know the precise number of microbiologists and water experts who've been elected to either house, but it's very small, and their contribution to good sanitation policy is negligible.

We got there by delegating these decisions to expert agencies. Congress formulates a political policy ("make the water safe") and the expert agency turns that policy into a technical program of regulation and enforcement, and your children live to drink another glass of water tomorrow.

Musk and Ramaswamy have set out to destroy this process. In their Wall Street Journal editorial, they explain that expert regulation is "undemocratic" because experts aren't elected:

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/musk-and-ramaswamy-the-doge-plan-to-reform-government-supreme-court-guidance-end-executive-power-grab-fa51c020

They've vowed to remove "thousands" of regulations, and to fire swathes of federal employees who are in charge of enforcing whatever remains:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/20/24301975/elon-musk-vivek-ramaswamy-doge-plan

And all this is meant to take place on an accelerated timeline, between now and July 4, 2026 – a timeline that precludes any meaningful assessment of the likely consequences of abolishing the regulations they'll get rid of.

"Chesterton's Fence" – a thought experiment from the novelist GK Chesterton – is instructive here:

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

A regulation that works might well produce no visible sign that it's working. If your water purification system works, everything is fine. It's only when you get rid of the sanitation system that you discover why it was there in the first place, a realization that might well arrive as you expire in a slick of watery stool with a rectum so prolapsed the survivors can use it as a handle when they drag your corpse to the mass burial pits.

When Musk and Ramaswamy decry the influence of "unelected bureaucrats" on your life as "undemocratic," they sound reasonable. If unelected bureaucrats were permitted to set policy without democratic instruction or oversight, that would be autocracy.

Indeed, it would resemble life on the Tesla factory floor: that most autocratic of institutions, where you are at the mercy of the unelected and unqualified CEO of Tesla, who holds the purely ceremonial title of "Chief Engineer" and who paid the company's true founders to falsely describe him as its founder.

But that's not how it works! At its best, expert regulations turns political choices in to policy that reflects the will of democratically accountable, elected representatives. Sometimes this fails, and when it does, the answer is to fix the system – not abolish it.

I have a favorite example of this politics/empiricism fusion. It comes from the UK, where, in 2008, the eminent psychopharmacologist David Nutt was appointed as the "drug czar" to the government. Parliament had determined to overhaul its system of drug classification, and they wanted expert advice:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

To provide this advice, Nutt convened a panel of drug experts from different disciplines and asked them to rate each drug in question on how dangerous it was for its user; for its user's family; and for broader society. These rankings were averaged, and then a statistical model was used to determine which drugs were always very dangerous, no matter which group's safety you prioritized, and which drugs were never very dangerous, no matter which group you prioritized.

Empirically, the "always dangerous" drugs should be in the most restricted category. The "never very dangerous" drugs should be at the other end of the scale. Parliament had asked how to rank drugs by their danger, and for these categories, there were clear, factual answers to Parliament's question.

But there were many drugs that didn't always belong in either category: drugs whose danger score changed dramatically based on whether you were more concerned about individual harms, familial harms, or societal harms. This prioritization has no empirical basis: it's a purely political question.

So Nutt and his panel said to Parliament, "Tell us which of these priorities matter the most to you, and we will tell you where these changeable drugs belong in your schedule of restricted substances." In other words, politicians make political determinations, and then experts turn those choices into empirically supported policies.

This is how policy by "unelected bureaucrats" can still be "democratic."

But the Nutt story doesn't end there. Nutt butted heads with politicians, who kept insisting that he retract factual, evidence-supported statements (like "alcohol is more harmful than cannabis"). Nutt refused to do so. It wasn't that he was telling politicians which decisions to make, but he took it as his duty to point out when those decisions did not reflect the policies they were said to be in support of. Eventually, Nutt was fired for his commitment to empirical truth. The UK press dubbed this "The Nutt Sack Affair" and you can read all about it in Nutt's superb book Drugs Without the Hot Air, an indispensable primer on the drug war and its many harms:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/drugs-without-the-hot-air-9780857844989/

Congress can't make these decisions. We don't elect enough water experts, virologists, geologists, oncology researchers, structural engineers, aerospace safety experts, pedagogists, gerontoloists, physicists and other experts for Congress to turn its political choices into policy. Mostly, we elect lawyers. Lawyers can do many things, but if you ask a lawyer to tell you how to make your drinking water safe, you will likely die a horrible death.

That's the point. The idea that we should just trust the market to figure this out, or that all regulation should be expressly written into law, is just a way of saying, "you will likely die a horrible death."

Trump – and his hatchet men Musk and Ramaswamy – are not setting out to create evidence-based policy. They are pursuing policy-based evidence, firing everyone capable of telling them how to turn the values espouse (prosperity and safety for all Americans) into policy.

They dress this up in the language of democracy, but the destruction of the expert agencies that turn the political will of our representatives into our daily lives is anything but democratic. It's a prelude to transforming the nation into a land of epistemological chaos, where you never know what's coming out of your faucet.

#pluralistic #politics #political science #department of government efficiency #loper bright #chevron deference #david nutt #drugs #regulation #democracy #democratic accountability #ukpoli #nutt sack affair #war on drugs #war on some drugs

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