2 ms·
It's not that the source material is accurate, it's that our knowledge is based on the source material, so the limits of the source material make clear the limi
by snowwrestler 6y ago
It's not that the source material is accurate, it's that our knowledge is based on the source material, so the limits of the source material make clear the limits of our knowledge.
It's kind of like the concept of "significant digits" in science. If your experimental apparatus can only measure a value with precision plus or minus one tenth, it's inappropriate to report your results with digits out the thousandths. Doing so would make it seem more precise to the reader, but the additional precision is an illusion.
In much the same way, using software in 2020 to guess what things "really looked like" can give viewers a false impression of how much we actually know about what things really looked like.
- kube-system 6y agoI am now imagining up-scaling my ruler to be accurate to 0.000001"
- edaemon 6y agoWouldn't the same logic apply to someone drawing or painting a historical event based on written source material? I find it hard to believe these academics would criticize Paul Philippoteaux for the Gettysburg Cyclorama despite it going far beyond the limits of the source material.
- jawns 6y agoAre you saying that we should only display dinosaur bones and never draw illustrations of what the dinosaurs actually looked like, because it might fool someone into thinking we know more than we actually do?