The scale of things

It is hard to grasp the scale of things.

Humans are incredibly powerful in mastering things that are relatively predictable. Advance in technology is immense, but one should not overlook the fact that this mastering is enabled, pretty much singlehandedly, by the predictability of nature. In this sense, all of scientific and technological advance, the totality of which has so radically has changed society and the way in which we relate to the world, really is not so much of a wonder, and a direct consequence, of the far more wondrous, yet retrospectively smaller, intellectual steps that uncovered this predictability. I'm thinking here of just a few key insights, methodological (doubt, induction, ?) and conceptual (causation, composition, ?).

One is in a state of hubris, when one thinks that our current knowledge of the world is advanced; for as much knowledge as we have in the natural sciences, we lack it in all other disciplines. Psychology is often the scape goat, blamed for its incompetence. But this is only because of its logical aspirations to a natural science; logical, because it is so easily seen how that would work, yet, it does not. But the state of psychology is a manifestation of a larger truth: wherever the object of study is not an obviously predictable and isolatable thing, as is the case with any field of knowledge worth consideration when tasked with questions as to society, politics and human endeavor in general, mastery of the subject is severely lacking. This is not to paint a grim picture, but just to give a sense for the state of advancement what we're in: pretty much complete mastery of all clearly identifiable local aspects of nature, and not much more than a divided clue as to anything that appears on the general horizon of human endeavor.

Such is the scale of things.