Dwarkesh Patel

They're like, it's perfectly fine having Satan be your charismatic protagonist and God be kind of a jackass.

And also having Satan spout rhetoric, ferocious anti-monarchal rhetoric copied from revolutionary pamphlets that are circulating in the British colonies so that he's actually parroting

Republican anti-monarchal rhetoric, very dangerous stuff in the treatise.

That's fine.

But this one line about a comet causing a thing to happen, no, no, no, no, no.

Astrology is going to confuse people's souls.

And you're like, guys, you're speaking as a time traveler.

You're so wrong about what you're censoring.

But they always are.

Not the library, the most extensive experimental laboratory.

That's what I meant to say, yeah.

Daniele Macuglia is the scholar there.

That's from his dissertation.

Okay.

Though I think it's been published now, but I don't know if it's actually out in English.

It's out in Italian.

And he works on the Inquisition and the immediate aftermath of Galileo because they saw themselves as guarantors of truth and of accuracy and information.

And so they decided after Galileo that they had a duty to verify the truth of the books that they were sent to censor.

And that if people were going to be doing mechanical experiments, they needed to repeat the mechanical experiments to see whether they were true.

So they effectively – the Inquisition invented peer review, which is to say they invented a second laboratory trying to recreate the results of the first.