Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I admire those scientists -- I mean actual credentialed working scientists -- who deign to spend a lot of time explaining science to layfolks like me. They are a differentiated bunch. Examples that come to mind are: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss, Michael Polanyi, and -- my personal favorite -- Sabine Hossenfelder.  This must be roughly the tenth time she has inspired a post in this humble blog.  Let me introduce her credentials. Hossenfelder has a Ph.D. from Goethe University Frankfurt, for which she wrote a thesis on "Black Hole Relics in Large Extra Dimensions."  That will give a flavor of such of her work as is aimed at peers.  She is also a fellow blogger. In a recent post on one of those blogs she argues that humans have been lying to ourselves about plastic. She thinks that the stuff is building up and may well prove disastrous for us.  To this point she cites the OECD, which says that the use of plastics doubled globally in the period 2000 to 2019...

Random reading.... In the February issue of HARPER'S, Rebecca Solnit works to relate the Second World War to ... every environmental disaster since. The following may be the money quote. "In crucial, material ways, the technological modernization of World War II never ended. Pesticides, nuclear engineering, and plastics -- all developed during the militarization of industrial production -- are now part of a war by other means. All three industries sought profitable postwar applications and found them in agriculture, in energy production, and in the creation of untold disposable plastic items, the ubiquity of which was aided by he rise of advertising and marketing." The reference to pesticides there brought me up short. Are pesticides the consequence of that war in the same  sense as nuclear engineering? Sulfur was used as a pesticide by the Chinese back around 1,000 BC. My understanding is that the modern and highly marketable nature of pesticides dates back to ...