Baconian

More recently, Bostrom redefined the term as anything that would stop humanity from attaining what he calls "technological maturity," or a condition in which we have fully subjugated the natural world and maximized economic productivity to the limit — the ultimate Baconian and capitalist fever-dreams.

Not only has the longtermist community been a welcoming home to people who have worried about "dysgenic pressures" being an existential risk, supported the "men's rights" movement, generated fortunes off Ponzi schemes and made outrageous statements about underpopulation and climate change, but it seems to have made little effort to foster diversity or investigate alternative visions of the future that aren't Baconian, pro-capitalist fever-dreams built on the privileged perspectives of white men in the Global North.

The extent of Boyle’s involvement with alchemy after he left Dorset is still a matter of debate, and Lawrence Principe of Johns Hopkins University has made a persuasive case that Boyle was not so much trying to discard alchemy in favour of what we would now call chemistry, but that he was trying to bring the Baconian method into alchemy—to make alchemy scientific, as it were.

If the Baconian system can be summed up in a sentence, it is that science must be built on the foundations provided by facts—a lesson that Boyle very much took to heart.

Nor is the word ‘fact’ Baconian.