4 ms·

Yes, we're kind of at the mercy of free-market competition to keep things honest. But that mechanism didn't work in any of the cases cited above. So I just do

by ta8645 6y ago

Yes, we're kind of at the mercy of free-market competition to keep things honest. But that mechanism didn't work in any of the cases cited above. So I just don't understand why so few people are skeptical, given the history.

AshWolfy 6y ago
because we can see these things with our actual eyes
- ta8645 6y ago
  What things? and where can you see them? And are you sure you can see them with enough clarity to truly judge the proper statistical relevance? For instance polls say that people who watch the nightly news believe that violent crime is getting worse... they can see it with their own eyes. But if you believe some purported science, violence has been on a decades long decline. Unfortunately people can be prone to mass delusion and moral panic. Check out this for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_windshield_pitting_epidemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_windshield_pitting_epi...
  - AshWolfy 6y ago
    I can observe people getting sick with covid, i can observe 60 degree weather in the winter and weeks long heat waves, this isnt the news, or misremembering things
    - ta8645 6y ago
      People get sick of things all the time of all kinds of things, doesn't mean that a global lock down is the appropriate response or that the statistics you're accepting are actually correct. And there are many explanations that could explain heat waves, you can't use your eyes to justify an acceptance of the global warming explanation. All you've done is accepted the dominant narrative on faith. Face it, you just don't know what is true. You can't know as an individual.. all you can do is hope that the people who say they know, actually are correct. But that requires trust and faith.
      - kaba0 6y ago
        Your premises are sort of correct but your conclusion is not, because it is a hyperbole. A physicist may not have personally built up mathematics from the base axioms, but he/she can trust that he/she can apply the learnt formulas when appropriate without it, because there are others who done so, and there are overlaps between all these. Similarly, while there are some problem with reproducibility in sciences (often it is due to lack of knowledge of statistics), there are large agreements in the science community on basic facts. Understanding science is a mentally challenging thing, and we are by nature lazy. That doesn’t make the easier to understand alternative true.
        ta8645 6y ago
        This isn't about laziness or the difficulty in understanding anything. There is a fundamental limitation of perception and cognition. Science can only describe what it sees. But it never knows if there is something important yet undiscovered that will change the analysis, because you just can't know what you don't know. The universe is always capable of surprise. We are trapped forever with a limitation in what kind of pronouncements we can make about truth. The best we could ever say, is that something appears to be true today. For instance, there is a chance that we are actually in a simulation -- that we're literally just a running computer program. If that is the case, the programmers of that simulation could change the instructions that control our physics at any moment. And everything that you have declared "true" will have to be reevaluated. This might seem unlikely, but it is not impossible, and so science has to keep an open mind and hedge its bets when making any declaration about reality. Science can only give you a probability that something is true, it can not ever say things with 100% confidence.
        kaba0 6y ago
        Occam’s razor. Science does have some “dependency” on the philosophy of sciences, and while pedantic, simulation is a possibility, but so is “the world popped into existence this morning in a state that we have a collective memory of an imaginary past, and with dinosaur bones in the ground etc”. But this requires much much more presupposition than the scientifically accepted position with the Big Bang et al. And in my view, it is only of limited importance to look for what possible, but not probable explanations we can make up.

by ta8645 6y ago

AshWolfy 6y ago

because we can see these things with our actual eyes

ta8645 6y ago
What things? and where can you see them? And are you sure you can see them with enough clarity to truly judge the proper statistical relevance? For instance polls say that people who watch the nightly news believe that violent crime is getting worse... they can see it with their own eyes. But if you believe some purported science, violence has been on a decades long decline. Unfortunately people can be prone to mass delusion and moral panic. Check out this for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_windshield_pitting_epidemic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_windshield_pitting_epi...
- AshWolfy 6y ago
  I can observe people getting sick with covid, i can observe 60 degree weather in the winter and weeks long heat waves, this isnt the news, or misremembering things
  - ta8645 6y ago
    People get sick of things all the time of all kinds of things, doesn't mean that a global lock down is the appropriate response or that the statistics you're accepting are actually correct. And there are many explanations that could explain heat waves, you can't use your eyes to justify an acceptance of the global warming explanation. All you've done is accepted the dominant narrative on faith. Face it, you just don't know what is true. You can't know as an individual.. all you can do is hope that the people who say they know, actually are correct. But that requires trust and faith.
    - kaba0 6y ago
      Your premises are sort of correct but your conclusion is not, because it is a hyperbole. A physicist may not have personally built up mathematics from the base axioms, but he/she can trust that he/she can apply the learnt formulas when appropriate without it, because there are others who done so, and there are overlaps between all these. Similarly, while there are some problem with reproducibility in sciences (often it is due to lack of knowledge of statistics), there are large agreements in the science community on basic facts. Understanding science is a mentally challenging thing, and we are by nature lazy. That doesn’t make the easier to understand alternative true.
      - ta8645 6y ago
        This isn't about laziness or the difficulty in understanding anything. There is a fundamental limitation of perception and cognition. Science can only describe what it sees. But it never knows if there is something important yet undiscovered that will change the analysis, because you just can't know what you don't know. The universe is always capable of surprise. We are trapped forever with a limitation in what kind of pronouncements we can make about truth. The best we could ever say, is that something appears to be true today. For instance, there is a chance that we are actually in a simulation -- that we're literally just a running computer program. If that is the case, the programmers of that simulation could change the instructions that control our physics at any moment. And everything that you have declared "true" will have to be reevaluated. This might seem unlikely, but it is not impossible, and so science has to keep an open mind and hedge its bets when making any declaration about reality. Science can only give you a probability that something is true, it can not ever say things with 100% confidence.
        kaba0 6y ago
        Occam’s razor. Science does have some “dependency” on the philosophy of sciences, and while pedantic, simulation is a possibility, but so is “the world popped into existence this morning in a state that we have a collective memory of an imaginary past, and with dinosaur bones in the ground etc”. But this requires much much more presupposition than the scientifically accepted position with the Big Bang et al. And in my view, it is only of limited importance to look for what possible, but not probable explanations we can make up.