Comment by glenstein

>Given that we have seen this play out

We saw two examples, definitely unfortunate for what they were but well short of a built in civilization level reaction to scientific progress writ large. I don't think there's a single by and large way that people react to scientific revolutions, negative or otherwise. Feels like it depends on a combination of how it impacts most powerful stakeholders, things about culture, and things about the zeitgeist of a particular moment.

>we don't need an actual instance of scientists committing suicide to suggest that it's plausible, because we don't have an actual instance of proton-scale supercomputers sabotaging results

Right, the specifics of the science fiction don't matter here. And plausibility counts for something though it's a dramatically lower threshold. And the person above who is appealing to scientific revolutions writ large seem to be attempting a general level inference to human reaction to scientific revolutions, which is a huge inference to make on the back of a pair of one-off examples.

Possibility counts for something, but I would say it only goes as far as explaining contingencies of particular circumstances and doesn't explain trends, and what happens within the fiction of the book is a trend, and it's explained by a sabotage campaign rather than by an appeal to the stresses of day-to-day science.