15 ms·
What Scientific Term or Concept Ought to be More Widely Known?
- spodek 10y agoConservation of energy, not just as an abstract concept, but in that every time you fly in a plane, drive in a car, turn on the air conditioner, etc, you are using energy, which pollutes, and, while we use fossil fuels, contributes to the greenhouse effect. Most people seem to think their contribution doesn't count or is somehow less than everyone else's. Also, curiosity and appreciating the beauty of nature. These were two of my main motivations to get my PhD in physics. To me they are fundamental to science.
- quickben 10y agoI feel that in this day and age, scientific rigour and reproducibility are starting to take the back seat in many popular fields.
- danharaj 10y agoThe concept of covariance which describes the way different observers' measurements of the same phenomenon are related. More generally the concept that the relationships between observers are a fundamental aspect of the systems they measure. In special relativity for example this is the Poincaré group which relates observers in different inertial reference frames. Another example is entropy in statistical mechanics (although I'm being weird by casting it in this light): entropy depends on the knowledge and sensitivity of the observer to the microstates of the system they are measuring. The relation to two observers here is considerably more complicated than a group but it is there and a fundamental aspect of the subject. I believe this concept is fundamental to every science but the "softer" you get, the harder it is to model. It is there implicitly whenever we make an observation.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- AndrewOMartin 10y agoThe No Free Lunch theorem. Technically put, "any two optimization algorithms are equivalent when their performance is averaged across all possible problems" More intuitively paraphrased, "if an algorithm performs well on a certain class of problems then it necessarily pays for that with degraded performance on the set of all remaining problems.". I forget if either or any of these are actually proven, or if they're the "folkloric" intuitions from more technical papers. More boldly overstated, there's no such thing as a general optimisation, all optimisations are relative to a subset of possible inputs. In extremis, there's exists a situation where Bogosort is preferable to Quicksort.
- rincebrain 10y agoI think this is provably false, probably, since you can compose a pathological case where you have a no-op that adds an O(n) (or more) step to the runtime and an optimization step that purely removes that no-op. There's optimizations which are tradeoffs against reducing the valid input space (or optimization for the common input cases), and then there's optimizations that eliminate unnecessary operations or combine things cleverly without degrading the worst-case scenario.
- AndrewOMartin 10y agoI'm not immediately convinced by your no-op example because I can conceive of situations that needs a little extra time to be passed between actions, such as in the case of sorting elements whose value isn't easily determinable and is best estimated n clock ticks after the previous action. This is of course a million miles away from the kind of sorting problems you get in Computer Science 101, but this is my point, the traditional sorting problems happen in a very well defined context, as soon as that changes, you might find any algorithm being optimal. Including Bogosort and, for example, quicksort with some extra no-ops. I like your point, but for the reason above I still think the No Free Lunch theorem is valuable, else I wouldn't have had this insight in the first place. At least, I consider it an insight, YMMV.
- rincebrain 10y ago
- cb18 10y ago(Hey guys, if you disagree, then argue and reason scientifically, don't censor and "flag") 1. IQ / g factor ------------------- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) Steven Pinker: Irony: Replicability crisis in psych DOESN'T apply to IQ: huge n's, replicable results. But people hate the message. https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/645301814955388930 https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/645301814955388930 Race, Evolution and Intelligence | Linda Gottfredson and Stefan Molyneux https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZPsXYo7gpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZPsXYo7gpc 2. Race ----------- The reality and existence of race, which people inherently know, but which cultural forces attempt to beat out of them. White people seem to take the brunt of the beatings. You see race "doesn't exist," but so much is "too white!" so we must diminish the prevalence of the white race(which doesn't exist btw) in the systems and institutions that they created. Race doesn't exist, but white people who essentially invented the modern world, who's influence is inescapable in every corner of the globe, yes those white people/Europeans, yes they "have no culture." Race doesn't exist, but the BBC will discriminate on race in hiring. Race doesn't exist, but go La Raza! go BLM! http://www.unz.com/runz/does-race-exist-do-hills-exist/ http://www.unz.com/runz/does-race-exist-do-hills-exist/ http://www.unz.com/gnxp/topic/race/ http://www.unz.com/gnxp/topic/race/
- sctb 10y agoUsers flagged the previous copy of this comment because inciting race wars is off-topic and not welcome on Hacker News. We've asked you not to do this before, and we have to ban accounts that continue like this. Please stop.
- jmount 10y agoMy pick (I know the article just said "science" and didn't leave the question open): Noether's Theorem which implies symmetries and conservation laws come in matched pairs in physics. From this you can derive conservation of momentum isn't just some empirical relation we have historically observed, but critically linked to symmetry of translation. Once you learn this you have a lot less sympathy for reaction-less drive con-artists.
- wfunction 10y agoAlong those lines (no pun intended), I think every STEM college graduate ought to be able to prove that the shortest path between 2 points is a line segment instead of taking it for granted.
- ams6110 10y agoThat's a high school freshman geometry problem.
- wfunction 10y ago> That's a high school freshman geometry problem. Looks like we found another person who doesn't know how to do it :) look it up! In pre-college geometry this isn't something you prove, it's something you postulate and take for granted.
- Xcelerate 10y ago> Science—that is, reliable methods for obtaining knowledge I really dislike this definition of science. Science is about making accurate predictions about the future (even if those future predictions concern the accuracy of past events). Predictivity is the defining feature of science, because without it, science may as well be any other subject. The Wikipedia definition is much better, because it incorporates the utility of knowledge but emphasizes the key role of prediction: > Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
- bagrow 10y agoI disagree about the emphasis on prediction. Science involves predictions, but it does not involve only predictions. Chaos theory, for example, shows that physical, deterministic systems can be rigorously understood while prediction is (approximately) impossible. Likewise, you can make predictions without understanding, with sufficiently advanced machine learning (interpretability vs. flexibility).
- ClayFerguson 10y ago"Emergence": Most everything in science (from Chemistry to Consciousness) is an emergent phenomenon and most people are plain ignorant of the concept and meaning of that word, although I did see it appear a lot in 2016, in scientific articles. The only thing (or things) in science that are not emergent are the laws of Quantum Mechanics and Relativity (as a simplification), and there are more and more physicists that believe even both of those "rule sets" probably are emergent from some more fundamental and simpler set of "rules", that give rise to both QM, Gravity, Spacetime.
- AndrewOMartin 10y agoMy problem with emergence is that it makes you think in one conceptual direction, and not the other. To explain, emergence as stated in the parent is a name for how a bunch of molecules could interact to make something you might call a football. This is a phenomenon at the "higher" everyday physical level emerging from the phenomena of the "lower" chemical level. What I think this story misses is the importance of the "even higher" phenomena which resulted in a football being created, those of the human cultural level which caused the football to be manufactured and, for example, placed on some grass, or a desk, to be studied. This isn't a purely sociological or philosophical point either, when you're looking at brain macro-activity for example, it's only partially explicable by referencing the micro-activity of, say, individual neurons, to get a better understanding you need to refer to activity outside of the brain that caused certain individual neurons to be acting like that. These higher level phenomena can be simple things like the movement in the neck that caused a change in stimulation, and also more wooly concepts like cultures which provide certain aesthetics or behaviours. Emergence is important, but I feel its too often considered as a standalone phenomenon, rather than as one side of an irreducible causal cycle.
- ClayFerguson 10y agoEmergence is a broad term for when things with definable, reproducable, novel, and predictable behaviors, which can be studied, quantified, and have math rules written about them, arise spontaneously from the lower rule-sets they are built on. It's like when you can identify a separate and distinct set of behaviors in the causality chain, but yes the word 'causality' encompasses 'emergence' in a very vague way, and so vague that it's indistinguishable from 'time' itself.
- artpepper 10y agoBayesian probability. I see a lot of popular reporting that talks very naively about probability and relative risk.
- wyager 10y agoA lot of people on HN consider themselves logical because they know how to work with Boolean logic and they know how to identify some Boolean fallacies (slippery slope, correlation does not imply causation, etc.). Of course, this is absolutely insufficient for almost any real-world scenario; Boolean logic does not equip one to make probabilistic inferences about the state of the world, which is the best we can do for the vast majority of everyday propositions. The reality is that "slippery slope" is a very powerful heuristic, correlation correlates with causation, etc. People here often mistakenly think probabilistic arguments are Boolean (e.g. thinking Occam's razor tells you to believe only the most a priori likely hypothesis) or mistakenly think that Boolean arguments can be interpreted probabilistically (e.g. "Correlation doesn't imply causation, so I'm not going to treat this demonstrated correlation as evidence for causation").
- joshmarlow 10y agoSample bias: I feel that so many subtleties are lost because people don't generally realize that their observations/anecdotes/experiences are biased. If I see a steak on my plate, I can't conclude that there is no world hunger. If I see a snowball, I can't conclude that there is no global warming. If I've never experienced racial bias against me, I can't conclude that it does not happen to other people. Edit: for clarity.
- Chronic77 10y agoYou have to realize that a lot of people understand sample bias. Those people (myself included) simply don't care about global warming, global hunger, racism, etc.
- ulrikrasmussen 10y agoOr maybe most people do care, and your extrapolation is an example of sample bias :)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- wutbrodo 10y ago> Sample bias: I feel that so many subtleties are lost because people don't generally realize that their observations/anecdotes/experiences are biased. This one is so odd to me. There's plenty of logical errors and shortcuts the brain takes that I had to learn to consciously think around, but the idea that my experience isn't necessarily representative of the entire world was something that was blindingly obvious when I was literally a child. I'm still taken aback for a second when I see people say things like "most of the people I know do X" or even "everyone in my family has Y", without giving any thought to whether their sample even approaches representativeness.
- greendestiny 10y agoHah!
- 10y ago
- murkle 10y agoNon-transitive dice (ie the idea that it's impossible to rank (almost) anything/anyone(!) sensibly)
- hackuser 10y agoScientific method. The great majority don't understand even that fundamental of science, and thus they cannot utilize it themselves, many do not trust it, they don't understand the epistemological problems it addresses, and they don't understand what terms like 'study', 'theory', etc. really mean.
- pdkl95 10y agoThis is easily the most important topic that needs to be more widely known. It's hard to progress in any other topic if you don't understand the basic methods for filtering good information from the many mistakes, misinterpretations, scams and other bad data. The need for education on the very basics of the scientific method has even made it into the recent popular press as concerns about "fake news". Democracy and modern civilization itself requires at last some understanding of the scientific method. Sagan's warning in "The Demon-Haunted World"[1] was frighteningly prescient: I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... Until the public "baloney detection kit"[2] (and uses it regularly), trying to teach other topic is probably a waste of time[3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World [2] https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-kit-carl-sagan/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-k... [3] http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resistance-of-s/ http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resi...
- hackuser 10y agoSaid one smart person: You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.
- convolvatron 10y agosample distribution processes and measurement aren't ideal. learn to live with it.
- internaut 10y agoDid anybody understand where Margaret Levi got this? "Indeed, the expectation of reciprocity can both reduce and even undermine altruism." Surely expectation of reciprocity would make the reciprocal loop stronger, not weaker.
- internaut 10y agoI spoke to the author and she said: "You are right that there is lot of evidence that the expectation of reciprocity strengthens the loop, but there is also evidence that non-cooperators can take advantage of that expectation and ultimately weaken the loop; they break the virtuous circle of trust and trustworthiness. The sentence you cite signals the possibility of such conditions." Which makes sense of course, parasitism is definitely a failure mode.
- teddyh 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.” — Richard Feynman
- js8 10y agoIn general, I wish more people understood some elementary facts about global warming, for example, because we observe more warming at the poles, during the winter and during the night, and also we observe cooling of the stratosphere, the cause must be in the Earth's atmosphere, it cannot be the Sun. In mathematics, I wish more people knew about typed lambda calculus and its connection to mathematical logic. I think the fact that most mathematicians use predicate logic, while theorem provers use e.g. calculus of constructions is one of the big obstacles for more wide usage of automated theorem provers. But it's just a language barrier. In economics, I wish more people knew about (I don't know the name, unfortunately) the approach to calculating of equilibrium prices that is described in J.M.Blatt's book Dynamic Economic Systems, and is based on input-output production matrices. It's a much more superior approach to the classical supply-demand analysis that dominates the textbooks, because it requires much less free parameters and assumptions.
- erik14th 10y agoI'd pick Juarez Cirino's book "Radical Criminology". It reeks of ultraidealist marxism but I think the observations it makes on the workings of the criminal system in capitalist societies is simply enlightening. He draws from ideas of Foucault, Marx, Pasukanis and many others to form a concise and understandable take on modern criminal and penal systems.
- harrumph 10y agoDid you read this in English, or Portugese? I'm interested and I can't find an English translation.
- erik14th 10y agoEven in portuguese the book is unfortunately pretty hard to find. I actually am thinking about translating it myself, I already asked the publisher if I can make it easily available online(I'm thinking something like a github repo so people can help translate and fix errors), not sure if they'll answer me tho. Send me a mail at erik@14th.info and I'll let you know if I get something done.
- Gravityloss 10y agoStock and flow or just basic integration. People have very bad understanding of rate vs level problems. http://www.systemdynamics.org/conferences/2004/SDS_2004/PAPERS/197KAPME.pdf http://www.systemdynamics.org/conferences/2004/SDS_2004/PAPE... This doesn't even get to the problem of compounding yet, which is related. Another pet of mine is Bayesian logic. Doctors and psychologists at least should definitely be familiar with the idea.
- appleflaxen 10y ago> Doctors and psychologists should at least should definitely at least be familiar with the idea. this is covered in all medical schools because it's part of the licensing exam: http://www.usmle.org/pdfs/usmlecontentoutline.pdf http://www.usmle.org/pdfs/usmlecontentoutline.pdf It's about 1/4 of the way down on page 28. Not sure about psychologists, but I'm guessing they are exposed to it to. The big difference IMO is learning it vs. understanding/internalizing/recognizing it when it is applicable.
- plg 10y agoAffirming the consequent
- soberhoff 10y agoI'd appreciate a more general appreciation of how little can be accurately predicted. Any time I hear sports commentators predict winners I internally shake my head. Why do so few people have the ability to admit to themselves that most things are just unpredictable?
- michaelfeathers 10y agoConfirmation bias. Once you start looking for confirmation bias you see it everywhere.
- wtvanhest 10y agoI came here to say the same. Definitely the most important bias
- SudoNhim 10y ago> Once you start looking for confirmation bias you see it everywhere. Hah. I can't tell if you are joking, because it's true.
- michaelfeathers 10y agohttp://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html
- marviel 10y agoFound an Anki deck for memorizing biases, seems useful to share: https://ankiweb.net/shared/ https://ankiweb.net/shared/
- marviel 10y agohttps://ankiweb.net/shared/info/970971960 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/970971960 (last link was broken, sorry)
- dispo001 10y agoThat making enough oxygen for one person, using electrolysis, requires 2000 kwh per day. That earth's forest area decreases by 13 000 000 hectares per year. And that we add about 75 000 000 people every year.
- mistermann 10y agoWow, did you read this somewhere in an article that goes into more interesting depth? 2000 kwh/day is like $200 bucks a day where I live, that's crazy! Now add in what's needed for the animals I eat. And that's just for the oxygen we consume? One of the more interesting things I've learned in quite some time. EDIT: You know, this is something that is so relate-able to the layman, it should be a widely used propaganda talking point.
- mistermann 10y agoAnd if you think about it more, if this number is correct, it shows in a very understandable way the magnitude of solar energy that the Earth receives - if this number is true, 100% sustainable energy is not only possible but should be incredibly easy once we develop the proper technology. I wonder, could global transmission possibly be an answer to the lack of storage problem?
- lend000 10y agoI always used to worry more about 'running out of oxygen' than CO2 emissions as I became aware of environmental science and the growing discussion about climate change. I think there are two main reasons scientists do not worry about it as much as originally seemed intuitive (to me): First, the raw amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is large enough that fluctuations can go unnoticed. To decrease the percentage of oxygen by 5% would result in many orders of magnitude more CO2 (proportionally) being released, such that the oxygen would be negligible. There's also the geology of it: rocks absorb and release oxygen over millions of years and add hysteresis to atmospheric composition. The amount of atmospheric gases trapped in the Earth's crust is significant and resists long-term changes.
- vondur 10y agoExponential growth. It's something few people outside of science/engineering learn.
- remarkEon 10y agoFrom statistics: Simpson's Paradox. Maybe a little more obscure than what some others have mentioned, but it is the idea that there can be patterns in data that appear in separate groups, but then vanish or reverse when those groups are combined. It can be a useful framework. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox
- invaliduser 10y agoI think we should make it more widely understood how bad we human are at science. Our brain is full of what we call cognitive biases, that prevent us from processing data correctly, our sensors are specially bad, even the ones we mostly rely on (eyes and ears) are very very easily cheated, and we can't even tell. Our storage unit (memory) is awful, we forget a lot, and time is our ennemy. We call a lot of science concepts «not intuitive» because of the limitations of our brains, and very little people, at the cost of studying a lot, and being highly stimulated in their first years of life, can actually really get a grasp of them. Quantum mechanics of course, but just see how people reacted to the monty hall problem: https://priceonomics.com/the-time-everyone-corrected-the-worlds-smartest/ https://priceonomics.com/the-time-everyone-corrected-the-wor... Other examples at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterintuitive#Counterintuition_in_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterintuitive#Counterintuit... Sure, we are better at science than all other species on earth, but in absolute terms, we human are very badly designed for it. Yet, we try our best.
- lightedman 10y agoPhoton Flux Density. Lumens is so over-used and so often wrongly used.
- witty_username 10y agoComparative advantage (China produces things cheaper) and lump of labor fallacy (jobs aren't finite; if you work for 0$ a hour you'll get a job).
- techdragon 10y agoThe Overton window. What sometimes looks to be a slippery slope argument is actually just the first person to see someone constructing the Overton window against them. I'm not saying slippery slope arguments aren't hideously overused, but it's deviously hard to explain to many people when their own mind is being used against them and not knowing what the Overton window is makes that even harder.
- 7402 10y agoError bars. Whenever I see a plot without them, I think someone is trying to pull a fast one. Some scientific fields (or quasi-scientific) fields use them much more than others. Quick-and-dirty physicists' method of generating an error bar when dealing with number of events in an interval is to assume that Poisson counting statistics apply, and take the square root of the number of events. Example: Two months ago we sold 400 units. Last month we sold 410 units. Should we celebrate? Square root of 400 is 20. The change in sales is within the margin of error. Celebration would be premature.