Always prevail. An interesting thought on Crooked Timber:
It seems to me that there’s a shared attitude towards science among various right-leaning technophiles (Glenn Reynolds being a paradigmatic example). Roughly speaking, they tend to agree with science when it suggest new possibilities for human beings (the Singularity! nanotechnology! conquering the universe via spaceflight! longer lifespans!) and to strongly disagree with scientific results or prognoses that suggest fundamental limits to human beings’ can-do ability to prevail over their circumstances (global warming, ecological collapse).
I’ll be on the lookout for this kind of spin in my own thinking, but also testing whether the doom-mongering is making accurate predictions (oil scarcity looks tricky at the moment given economic strength vs the increasing price of oil; continued discovery of oil reserves) and also whether belief in the ability to prevail is removing real obstacles from consideration.