I agree that humans have largely not "evolved past faith" and that the "science clergy" problem is real. Many people have too much faith in scientific institutions as sources of authoritative knowledge. But I don't lay the blame with the institutions of science themselves, or the pursuit of more knowledge. Those things are good and powerful, even if people misunderstand them.
Based on reading your comments and the note you linked to, I think I disagree with your critique of the growth of knowledge in two main ways.
While I agree that the continued fast growth of knowledge comes with serious dangers, I think it also averts at least as many dangers as it causes. Over 99 percent of species that have ever existed on earth are now extinct. That is because of functionally limitless exogenous dangers, most of which we probably don't know about yet. If humans don't radically increase the scope of our knowledge, and fast, the same will happen to us. AI is a great example of a technology that poses new serious dangers, but also offers hope of averting limitless serious dangers. I believe it is ultimately worth the tradeoff for reasons I explain here:
The other area of disagreement is the practical question of how easy it is to wipe out humanity. You say that "In the nuclear weapons era the room for error we’ve always counted on in the past is erased, and one bad day is all it takes to end the possibility for further progress." You make several statements like that throughout your writing. These are significant overstatements. I am not blind to how catastrophic things could get if people began misusing nuclear weapons in unprecedented days, etc. It could be really bad. But there is no realistic scenario where all of humanity gets wiped out any time soon by nuclear weapons. Nukes could do a lot of damage and begin humanity's decline, which is an important concern, but that is a much weaker claim than the one you've made that one bad day would be all it takes. Here is a good article that gives some of the details of why wiping out humanity is harder than a lot of people make it sound:
Let's hear it for Knowing That We Don't Know! Huzzah!
I agree that humans have largely not "evolved past faith" and that the "science clergy" problem is real. Many people have too much faith in scientific institutions as sources of authoritative knowledge. But I don't lay the blame with the institutions of science themselves, or the pursuit of more knowledge. Those things are good and powerful, even if people misunderstand them.
Based on reading your comments and the note you linked to, I think I disagree with your critique of the growth of knowledge in two main ways.
While I agree that the continued fast growth of knowledge comes with serious dangers, I think it also averts at least as many dangers as it causes. Over 99 percent of species that have ever existed on earth are now extinct. That is because of functionally limitless exogenous dangers, most of which we probably don't know about yet. If humans don't radically increase the scope of our knowledge, and fast, the same will happen to us. AI is a great example of a technology that poses new serious dangers, but also offers hope of averting limitless serious dangers. I believe it is ultimately worth the tradeoff for reasons I explain here:
https://www.knowledgemaximalism.com/p/why-ai-doomers-spread-counter-enlightenment
The other area of disagreement is the practical question of how easy it is to wipe out humanity. You say that "In the nuclear weapons era the room for error we’ve always counted on in the past is erased, and one bad day is all it takes to end the possibility for further progress." You make several statements like that throughout your writing. These are significant overstatements. I am not blind to how catastrophic things could get if people began misusing nuclear weapons in unprecedented days, etc. It could be really bad. But there is no realistic scenario where all of humanity gets wiped out any time soon by nuclear weapons. Nukes could do a lot of damage and begin humanity's decline, which is an important concern, but that is a much weaker claim than the one you've made that one bad day would be all it takes. Here is a good article that gives some of the details of why wiping out humanity is harder than a lot of people make it sound:
https://www.aei.org/commentary/its-hard-to-wipe-out-humanity-even-for-super-ai/