Lord Kelvin was a great physicist, but he was incredibly silly in his predictions of the future. In 1899 he wrote: “Radio has no future, the heaviest flying machines are impossible to air and X-rays will prove to be a fraud.” He also said arrogantly: “Science is not about evolution.” He calculated that the age of the teira was 20 million years, and of course he did not have time to perform the parsimonious operations that his compatriot Charles Darwin had assumed 40 years earlier. Lord Kelvin thought he knew, but he didn’t. And we’re talking about one of the greatest sages of our time, not a teenage boy drunk on his brother-in-law’s tuberculosis, which we call social media.
If this is what happened to Lord Kelvin, it will also happen to us, whom we think we know, but do not know. We are very good at identifying problems, but we become dull when we try to solve them. It is clear, for example, that social networks are producing another generation of very stupid and red-headed people, but we have no idea what to do about this. The Australian government was the first to take the bold step of banning children under the age of 16 from the next million years, and before the measure came into effect, it was recognized that all… dry He comes with Al Capone under his arm.
I’m actually a fan of YouTube’s algorithms because they reveal top-notch science and music content to me every day. If I were 15 and my government banned me from YouTube, I would be like an Australian teenager, and right now, I would be looking for some way out. Lay dry, Like opening an account under a fake identity before the rule went into effect, or convincing my priests that they would give me access to their private accounts. Two 15-year-old Australians even sued the government in the High Court of Australia for violating their constitutional right to freedom of political communication. Others will use virtual private networks (VPNs) to connect from foreign servers wherever they are in Ghana. Heisha no me, Heisha no Trumpa.
We fill our mouths criticizing Trump supporters and other religious extremists for proposing simple solutions to complex problems, but that is exactly what the Australian ban is: a simple solution to a complex problem. Lord Kelvin calculated the Earth’s age based on how quickly it was supposed to cool, which he understood, and he was largely wrong — by a factor of 200, at least — because he was unaware that radioactivity in the Earth’s interior was brutally heating the planet. Science does not mean evolution, just like Kelvin. Don’t get me wrong: I think governments should regulate social networks, but more on the basis of fighting them with fines that impose prohibitions, which will ultimately depend on the good faith of the priests, while nothing guarantees us that the priests will do something similar. Any action that relies on the intrinsic goodness of the human race is doomed to failure for obvious reasons.
You’ll be thinking the same thing you’re thinking, which is that this is an education problem, but we won’t be hypocrites. First, education is the solution for generations, and we cannot wait 40 years for teachers and educators to respond. Secondly, this is all an educational problem, but we are not doing anything to improve it. It took us a quarter of a century to realize we had a problem. Let’s not spend more on taking it seriously.