Rom":37sr6rhz said:
Why do we insist on spending million$ on research to justify how we behave today? The future, not the past, is going to tell us the benefits of our current social networking.
Because looking at where we come from provides more evidence to extrapolate from to attempt a guess at where we're going. And let's also not the cliche "those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it," which is absolutely true. Just look at the US, via lack of enforcement of the rules set in place after the Great Depression, and lo-and-behold, we have another extremely well-orchestrated collapse that actively benefits the top, and has the gap with the other 95% widening every day. All because government chose to ignore the past (or maybe they did learn from it; this depression has been extremely well-orchestrated in that we don't seem to be approaching a cascade failure of any kind, but the poor get poorer, and the rich get richer, as intended...)
I would also point out, it's not justification, it's explanation. We _know_ what we do today, but _why_ do we do it, and for how long? What are the origins of that behavior? Did it help us previously? In what ways? Bottom line, though, is that knowledge is its own end. We know more now than we did before the research. It was therefor worth the money.
