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I don't understand what's so interesting about pointing out things you personally dislike in whichever discipline without making any attempt to justify why you

by mnl 6y ago

I don't understand what's so interesting about pointing out things you personally dislike in whichever discipline without making any attempt to justify why you think they're wrong. That's simply prejudice of the lazy sort. I can improve on this. Cosmology: If there isn't any dark matter out there, there must be gremlins pushing stuff around to make it look like as there is. Otherwise there's no sensible way to explain the Bullet Cluster for starters. If the Universe is not expanding, there must be much bigger gremlins stretching homogeneously everything everywhere out, otherwise there's no way to explain the observational Hubble's law. If the Big Bang is wrong, there must be very naughty and ubiquitous gremlins matching somehow the primordial nucleosynthesis ratios and the CMB distribution everywhere you look at. I would have continued with the physics section, but I can't picture the gremlins doing theory atm. It's one thing to have a problem with whatever you think you know after reading pop sci, but there's textbooks and papers. That's way harder, but it's all there, the arguments, the counterarguments and more importantly the observational/experimental facts. You can't allow yourself to have problems with facts, if your intuition gets in the way of accepting them, just get rid of it.

gridlockd 6y ago
I think bringing up gremlins in order to lampoon some heterodox hypothesis is intellectually lazy as well. Dark matter assumes gravity is uniform across the universe. What if it isn't? Measuring the expansion of the universe relies on the speed of light being a constant. What if it isn't?
- ssivark 6y ago
  It must be noted that both of those hypotheses would be considered highly unlikely to pass Occam’s razor, since they involve a far more radical/fundamental change in our understanding of physics, than sons piddling “dark matter”.
- mnl 6y ago
  Of course it's lazy, but I said I could improve on it, don't expect me to put in more work than that. Then it's the job of the alternative theorists to come up with working models with better descriptions and/or predictions. To my knowledge neither MOND nor VSL theories do that, but I wouldn't have any inner conflicts if they did. We're here to learn about the Universe, not to dictate how it works.
dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
"Gremlins" is a very lazy way of making a strawman. Just because one can't imagine a different universe does not mean gremlins made it. All scientific knowledge we discovered made some previously true piece of knowledge false. It is a pretty bad attitude to make fun of people simply stating we could be wrong. We are most definitely wrong. Imagine somebody from 1000 years in the future read this; how embarrassed would they be that people believed what we believe?
- mnl 6y ago
  Of course I make fun of it. It's the only way to cope with this kind of stuff after being exposed to it for decades. It's cranks in physics, they don't take the trouble to really look up anything by doing actual work, they just know that everything's wrong. It's all there: dark matter doesn't exist, the universe isn't expanding, the big bang is a lie, string theory is bogus, quantum mechanics is incomplete and/or we don't understand it. The list used to include that Einstein was wrong and Special Relativity was false, luckily that's becoming rather unfashionable nowadays. I'm sorry, but there's a pattern here. Whatever kind of scientific topic that drives "common sense" folks out of their comfort zone has to be wrong, because well, it has to be. It doesn't matter that there are actual measurements and heaps of relevant technical literature full of excellent reasons for this or that theory (I mentioned a few). Whatever the people working in a field find convincing just can't be right because after having spent a few hours trying to fit the headlines to what they think they know about reality, they just can tell it can't be and that's that. Well, saying that something is wrong in science isn't enough, you have to include your convincing reasons for it or else your proposition turns out to be as valuable as saying that gremlins did it (but less fun). It's been a while now that new pieces of knowledge in physics fit over the old ones. That's because data exist and it's the result of measurements, not subjective numbers, so new theories can't disagree quantitatively with the confirmed predictions of the old ones. The anomalous magnetic moment of the electron won't change the day we find the mythical theory of everything (if such a thing exists), and the mythical theory of everything will have to include within itself a scenario in which plain QED first and then the full-blown SM happens, otherwise it's unlikely that you could predict its value to such an amazing degree. Again, there are technical reasons for this that you can find in texts about effective theories. To be honest and IMO true and false belong more in mathematics than they do in science. Newton's gravitation theory isn't false, it's a good approximation to a better theory that won't be false either if we come up with something even better. About true theories as in involving the things in themselves, I don't think we're doing that after Kant.
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
"If there is no luminiferous ether then there must be tiny invisible gremlins ferrying light particles around the universe" etc etc. Actually, I agree with you. "Gremlins" is a great way for unknown unknowns or necessary assumptions that are impossible given current observations. I'll start using the term in that way, if you don't mind.

by mnl 6y ago

gridlockd 6y ago

I think bringing up gremlins in order to lampoon some heterodox hypothesis is intellectually lazy as well. Dark matter assumes gravity is uniform across the universe. What if it isn't? Measuring the expansion of the universe relies on the speed of light being a constant. What if it isn't?

ssivark 6y ago
It must be noted that both of those hypotheses would be considered highly unlikely to pass Occam’s razor, since they involve a far more radical/fundamental change in our understanding of physics, than sons piddling “dark matter”.
mnl 6y ago
Of course it's lazy, but I said I could improve on it, don't expect me to put in more work than that. Then it's the job of the alternative theorists to come up with working models with better descriptions and/or predictions. To my knowledge neither MOND nor VSL theories do that, but I wouldn't have any inner conflicts if they did. We're here to learn about the Universe, not to dictate how it works.

dj_mc_merlin 6y ago

"Gremlins" is a very lazy way of making a strawman. Just because one can't imagine a different universe does not mean gremlins made it. All scientific knowledge we discovered made some previously true piece of knowledge false. It is a pretty bad attitude to make fun of people simply stating we could be wrong. We are most definitely wrong. Imagine somebody from 1000 years in the future read this; how embarrassed would they be that people believed what we believe?

mnl 6y ago
Of course I make fun of it. It's the only way to cope with this kind of stuff after being exposed to it for decades. It's cranks in physics, they don't take the trouble to really look up anything by doing actual work, they just know that everything's wrong. It's all there: dark matter doesn't exist, the universe isn't expanding, the big bang is a lie, string theory is bogus, quantum mechanics is incomplete and/or we don't understand it. The list used to include that Einstein was wrong and Special Relativity was false, luckily that's becoming rather unfashionable nowadays. I'm sorry, but there's a pattern here. Whatever kind of scientific topic that drives "common sense" folks out of their comfort zone has to be wrong, because well, it has to be. It doesn't matter that there are actual measurements and heaps of relevant technical literature full of excellent reasons for this or that theory (I mentioned a few). Whatever the people working in a field find convincing just can't be right because after having spent a few hours trying to fit the headlines to what they think they know about reality, they just can tell it can't be and that's that. Well, saying that something is wrong in science isn't enough, you have to include your convincing reasons for it or else your proposition turns out to be as valuable as saying that gremlins did it (but less fun). It's been a while now that new pieces of knowledge in physics fit over the old ones. That's because data exist and it's the result of measurements, not subjective numbers, so new theories can't disagree quantitatively with the confirmed predictions of the old ones. The anomalous magnetic moment of the electron won't change the day we find the mythical theory of everything (if such a thing exists), and the mythical theory of everything will have to include within itself a scenario in which plain QED first and then the full-blown SM happens, otherwise it's unlikely that you could predict its value to such an amazing degree. Again, there are technical reasons for this that you can find in texts about effective theories. To be honest and IMO true and false belong more in mathematics than they do in science. Newton's gravitation theory isn't false, it's a good approximation to a better theory that won't be false either if we come up with something even better. About true theories as in involving the things in themselves, I don't think we're doing that after Kant.

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago

"If there is no luminiferous ether then there must be tiny invisible gremlins ferrying light particles around the universe" etc etc. Actually, I agree with you. "Gremlins" is a great way for unknown unknowns or necessary assumptions that are impossible given current observations. I'll start using the term in that way, if you don't mind.