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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5163349" data-attributes="member: 4720">I'll cop to a small amount of presumption, but not arrogance.  History repeats itself with stunning regularity.  History shows a pattern:1) A medium is invented2) It is used badly for a while3) It is derided for not being art and as a negative impact on youth4) People figure out how to do commercially viable porn with it (optional)5) It is derided more for not being art and is declared a pox on youth6) Truly artful examples become more common7) Screams that it is not art resonate from the rafters8) Time passes with a few examples of undeniable art that are vociferously denied anyway9) The Citizen Kane/Maus moment: Almost everyone jumps aboard and we largely forget what the fighting was all about.  The average "man on the street" will say "Of course they can be art" when asked.I am assuming, based on my experience watching the medium grow up, that video games are in fact on this path and are in the middle of step 6.  Comics are probably the most recent medium to reach step 9.  We haven't had them on the Senate floor in decades.  Everyone acknowledges that they can communicate ideas, both good and bad.Which is really all there is to it.  Once you reach step 3, you have government/religion acknowledging that the medium is capable of communicating concepts.  They just don't like the concepts being communicated.  At that point, it's effectively all over except for waiting for the right artists to figure out how to present the right concepts in the right way to push the medium forward in the chain.Interestingly, we re-fight this one with genres as well as media.  In music, we had to go through a fast version of this whole process with heavy metal and rap most recently, but rock and roll before that, jazz before that, and so on.  Impressionism and cubism both had to deal with this nonsense as well, even though painting in the broad sense was well established.Yes and no.  Each individual work is subject to interpretation by individuals.  But a medium as a whole is subject to public opinion.  No one can be taken seriously nowadays claiming that film is not an art form, or that comics are not an art form.  The existence of awful B-movie dreck does not negate the fact that film is Art.Yep.  Just like a number of decades ago, there were many, many voices insisting films could not be Art.  Or more recently, that rap could not be Art.  But these three cases are the same.  The voices crying "NEVER!" were (and are) working against the tide.Again, I've already said that age is not a primary factor here.  Age is a red herring.  It's all about the inevitability of history. Your position is bad science, you know.If there had been a Nobel prize when Gregor Mendel did his experiments, I'd have been happy to see him win it, but that doesn't mean he had the whole picture.  There are massively more complicated interactions governing what was going on in his work.  He's still a pillar of genetics, but hundreds of people have proven some of what he did wrong, far more complicated than he thought, and so on.  Science is progressive.  We move forward, we develop new ways of collecting more detailed data and new understandings of the complex interactions in the world.  Being out of date is not the same as being wrong.  With the tools and understanding he had available, Borlaug did amazing work, but we can't put older science on such a pedestal that we're afraid to question it or build on it.  That is antithetical to the very nature of science.To the specific case of Borlaug, his work helped feed a lot of people, but there are consequences to his methods that aren't all positive.  For example, increasing energy demand at the expense of worker demand in developing nations.  This created an artificially high demand for something they did not have (energy) and an artificially low demand for something they did (labor).  There's a lot of recent work showing that many of those countries can get substantial yield increases out of improving low-level management practices that are more labor intensive than energy intensive, in addition to a larger base of employed workers.  It also substantially decreases the need for high energy-cost fertilizers and pesticides, so for the same net cost, you're getting higher yields and also paying more local workers, which is good for the economy.  That's not throwing Borlaug out completely, but it does show that he was not 100% right.  No one ever is in science.  There is always room for improvement.Borlaug helped put a lot of infrastructure in place that was and is needed, but we can't call an end to it there and assume because he was partially right that all the problems are solved.Besides, the guys who get the prizes are the guys who get the thing in public eyes.  Most of the real work is done by the people iterating in their wake.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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