From Palladium Magazine, May 23:
In 1633, the year after Galileo Galilei published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, a book that made a comparative argument strongly favoring heliocentrism, his work was banned by the Roman Catholic Church, and he was sentenced to lifelong house arrest. On October 31, 1992, after a 13-year investigation into the condemnation of the Italian astronomer, Pope John Paul II officially closed the inquiry and formally acknowledged the Church’s error in the affair. The Supreme Pontiff also stated that science and the Christian faith are not in opposition, and that contemporary culture requires constant effort to synthesize knowledge: “a true culture cannot be conceived of without humanism and wisdom.”
As artificial intelligence reshapes our relationship with knowledge, this synthesis is perhaps more relevant than ever. It is also more nuanced than what is highlighted about the case in popular tellings of the history of science. It then isn’t a coincidence that Galileo’s case is also invoked to bolster rejected or inadequate claims—a logical fallacy called the “Galileo gambit” that conflates scientific criticism with undue persecution, and one that has seen use by alternative medicine enthusiasts, vaccine and climate-change skeptics, conspiracy theorists, and pseudoscience proponents. It isn’t only good ideas that attract passionate advocates.
Whether as individual thinkers or as a civilization, we cannot simply drop the burden of discernment, the often difficult task of distinguishing sound scientific challenges from pseudoscience, and ultimately of distinguishing what is correct from what is not. The case reveals a fundamental tension in how society handles challenges to consensus that remains today: while scientists face legitimate concerns about their ideas being stifled or dismissed prematurely, this same concern is exploited to shield poorly evidenced claims from appropriate scrutiny.
However, scientists and researchers who take on entrenched views in academia and in the public eye today face daunting moral and professional challenges. These challenges are more subtle than papal decrees or house arrests, but academic gatekeeping, algorithmic visibility controls, funding pressures, and a strained, long-overextended peer-review system can have a similar detrimental effect.
This problem of institutional discernment has perhaps been the fundamental problem of knowledge and humanity’s relationship with it all along. Can science do better, or are we bound to continue seeing the same problems in new technologically and socially updated guises?
The Institutions of Knowledge
Institutions dedicated to accumulating and sharing knowledge evolve in lockstep with technological progress, with each major technological advancement reshaping our information preservation methods and how we synthesize knowledge into understanding. Pre-literate societies relied on oral traditions with structured memorization and performance to transmit knowledge across generations. The advent of writing led to libraries, transforming knowledge from ephemeral recitation into collectible, searchable, and cumulative works. Later, medieval monastic libraries played an important role in preserving valuable texts through societal collapse, while the emergence of universities in the 11th and 12th centuries helped institutionalize structured debate and formal teaching.The printing press enabled widespread distribution outside of localized institutions, giving rise to the Republic of Letters—an international network of intellectuals such as the botanist and physician Carl Linnaeus, who developed and popularized a system for classifying life or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of the most influential mathematicians who ever lived, and the author of over 15,000 letters to hundreds of scholars. In the Enlightenment era, knowledge became a recognized commodity, with rising specialization prompting the creation of scientific disciplines and laboratories. In contrast to prior bodies geared toward archiving and deliberation, laboratories rigorously expanded insights in focused areas, fueling the momentum of modern scientific progress.
With the advent of laboratories, the need to share and discuss discoveries became paramount. The emergence of scholarly publishers who recorded and distributed research and experimental outcomes, enabled the scientific community to scrutinize, debate, and build upon the existing knowledge base. This tradition began with the early printed journals, such as Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society dating back to the 17th century. While printed journals set the groundwork for the distribution of findings and sharing of ideas, contemporary digital scholarly publishing platforms have greatly expanded the volume and accessibility of published work.
The digitalization of knowledge brought its own challenges with scientists and researchers facing an overwhelming amount of data and published material. NASA’s EOSDIS program is estimated to archive over 500 petabytes of data by 2030, while CERN has already reached a one-exabyte milestone as of 2025. At the same time, arXiv recorded a steady year-over-year increase of paper submissions since August 1991, rising a thousandfold over 35 years. There are signs our ability to integrate and make sense of this digital deluge is lagging behind. Yet for the vast increase of the papers submitted, each paper is becoming less disruptive, and less likely to “break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions.”
Artificial Intelligence technology which excels at distilling large bodies of text and structured data, is in a timely alignment with the need for a transformation in science, promising both the potential to accelerate the expansion of academic publishing and the problems that come with it even as it holds vast potential to help humanity advance science. For now, we are yet to see its real impact on science and knowledge as a whole.
Each subsequent technological breakthrough has necessitated novel frameworks to synthesize knowledge. All relied on human judgment in some form or another. Oral traditions required the judgment of elders to decide which stories mattered; libraries required scholars to determine which texts to preserve and copy, and laboratories required peers to judge which findings held. These transformations can be seen as differing approaches for how to structure distributing the burden of discernment.
The Volume of Papers Has Overwhelmed Academic Journals
Despite a narrow audience, academic publishing is one of the highest-margin businesses today, with profit margins as high as 40% mirroring tech giants like Google and Microsoft. For many years, this field primarily functioned as a service to the academic community and was managed by scientific societies relying on handouts to cover printing costs rather than large conglomerates. The transformation occurred in the post-World War II era, when in 1951, Robert Maxwell, the enigmatic Czechoslovak-born British entrepreneur and father of the infamous socialite and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, took over a small scientific publisher that became Pergamon Press....
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If interested in a bit of a divertissement see 2021's "The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell"
Or back on topic:
—https://freesystems.substack.com/p/building-political-superintelligence
About Free Systems:
FREE SYSTEMS is a research lab and newsletter dedicated to one question: how do we preserve human liberty in an algorithmic world?
I’m Andy Hall, a political economist at Stanford GSB and the Hoover Institution. I’ve become convinced that AI is going to massively change the world, requiring new research to understand how we maintain freedom and liberty in this new era—-and that we can use AI itself to completely transform how we do that research.
So I started this Substack, built a radical AI-centered lab at Stanford, and hired a team of researchers all across the world, from Rwanda and Singapore to Japan and the UK, and of course the US, who help me manage AI agents, build new governance prototypes, and rapidly release research....
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