bouncing eggnog courtiers and other distractions

I should really be writing about my own arid region of lack of philos, eros, agape, and cathexis, but such writing gets old and impersonal after a while, in that it seems like I'm saying the same old thing all over again. So, that rant gets written elsewhere. What I currently have in mind is the kind of epistemological bottleneck that we might be going through, as a species.

I hate writing about the species because I don't (and no one at the moment does beyond a very limited and highly arrogant kind of culturally biased autobiography which manages to insult, in one way or the other, those who it chronicles and describes) have the patience or energy to write about it in anything but a very imaginative way (which is not what I'm going to be writing about at the moment)

I have a book by Reuben Hersh (and with another, assisting writer whose name I cannot remember at the moment), about mathematics, and at the start of the book, he mentions a quote by the historian Jakob Burckhardt, about the twentieth century, about how it would be a time of enormous and deleterious simplification.

I'm going to say first off that issues of media literacy are really beyond the scope of this document. I'm not writing about them. There's a litany of predigested material, and autodigesting material out there which (for similar reasons as the above cultural monstrosities mentioned) isn't amenable to a dry inhuman analysis (which in all honesty would be richer and less vague than biased human analyses currently available).

So, sketchy reasoning aside, where is the beak taking us? The epistemological nightmare of theoretical physics is coming to a head at the moment: we're starting to see signs that the research directions of the past twenty years or so have been immensely silly, perhaps even on the order of Solaristics silly. But time will tell, there's no hard evidence either way and at least the mathematical dividends have been enormous, but transparent, and generally speaking, invisible to most people. So, modding out the enormous successes of applied physics by the primate authority hierarchies, we're left with what is generally speaking, a quite successful jab.
(the corollary here is that the people who use the best reasoning models take the blame when those with the largest and most addled masses of muscle (whether directly or indirectly choose to use them) usually take the blame sometimes. it's up for grabs which way you want to take that and far too dependent on circumstance, and also not really within the scope of this document).
Pure mathematics, is never so pure and holy, and perhaps the most brilliant work of the twentieth century still languishes in relative obscurity. Godel remains the keystone of the social scientist's criticism of mathematicians, tho' he probably (along with Turing, Church, Chaitin and others) was probably the greatest triumph of any sort of human reasoning: one that manages on its own effort to pop its own bubble. No type of human reasoning, before or since, has managed a coup of that level of subtlety. The strange beasts of Mandelbrot, Feigenbaum, Grothendieck still tend to a great deal of invisibility, particularly the last.

The point of this diatribe is that there is a massively fertile landscape out there which is abysmally invisible as regards most people' s perception. Mathematics education mostly ends for ninety percent of people at the unsolvability of the quintic and little pieces of differential and integral calculus. Astonishing work is currently being done, but it's nowhere. At least, nowhere which immediate perception has available to it. And it's churning with quantum computers and other exotic concepts, and the next breakthrough will come from it.