Western society has nearly completely lost the infrastructure that could support complex thinking.
To dig into the relevant infrastructure:
1. A culture open to voicing accurate observations about itself. Every capable thinker voices these early in life before they learn better, if this disqualifies them, the culture cannot support original thinkers.
2. Viable economic niches. Academia is much too contested. Silicon Valley allows for some original thinking, but the thinking isn't what provides returns.
3. Viable social niches. Trust fund kids don't have a leisured class that values thought they could join. The role of public intellectual is extinct, it is possible to be a popularizer. Comparable to say Polybius.
4. Viable knowledge succession. Deep mentoring is considered unfair, threatening or cult-like. The assumption is always that the most recent experts have the best information in a field.
The socioeconomic structure of society was intelligence proofed long before the internet educated showed up.
There was significant variation in among past societies.
Some intellectual golden ages: Classical Greece, Hellenistic Greece (Science), Abbasid Golden Age, Italian Renaissance
etc.
The infrastructure isn't easy to recreate, because the social dynamics are so central to it, read more here:
There are only two companies in the world capable of building and exporting the largest type of civilian aircraft, the "jumbo jet": Boeing and Europe's Airbus.
Since 1992, Boeing has gone from enjoying 70% market share to falling behind Airbus in orders and manufacturing.
2/n
Manufacturing aircraft is very expensive and technically challenging.
Only about a thousand large civilian aircraft are sold every year, so margins are small despite government subsidies, unlike say cars or microchips.
In April 2022, both the IMF and S&P Global forecasted an 8.5% annual decline in Russia's GDP.
Biden administration officials predicted that, due to the sanctions, Russia would go back to "Soviet style living standards from the 1980s."
This has obviously not happened.
2/n
Instead, Russia has become a rare live experiment in whether a major country can replace its reliance on the industrial bases of the U.S.-aligned world of North America, Europe, Japan, and South Korea with the industrial base of China.
In-Q-Tel is both an intelligence outpost in Silicon Valley and a software outpost in Northern Virginia.
Its most high-profile investment is probably Palantir. But it also invested in what would become Google Earth, as well as GitLab, MongoDB, Wickr, and Databricks.
2/n
In-Q-Tel was not founded to be like DARPA, which has a budget an order of magnitude larger and which focuses on blue-sky research over decades.
Instead, it just acts like a normal venture capital firm, mainly for software, seeking tools the CIA or government would like.
This isn't the case because Romans employed Hellenistic Greek experts they employed made use of exact mathematical models to describe the natural world.
Heron isn't the contemporary of Plato or Aristotle, rather he stands on the shoulders of Archimedes and Eratosthenes.
Ctesibius of Alexandria invented the force-pump that makes use of pistons in the 3rd century BC. Classical scholars also attribute to him the discovery of the elasticity of air.
Formally, the Japanese constitution forbids a Japanese military, the states's "right of belligerency," and "other war potential."
Yet Japan has nearly 250,000 uniformed "self-defense force" service members with jet planes, warships, missiles, and a defense industrial base.
2/n
This large military is maintained through a consensus between Japan's conservative political elite, often-absurd language games regarding military terminology, and U.S. foreign policy that desires Japan to be a military counterweight to China (and previously, the USSR).