6 ms·
What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
- zuj 5y agoLot of interesting concepts and fallacies. My favourites are Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety and costly signalling.
- jschveibinz 5y agov = dx/dt If you are driving 5 miles across town (dx), and you average 25 mph (v), it will take you roughly 5/25 hours, or 12 minutes (dt) to get there. By driving 50 miles per hour, you get there in 6 minutes. Is it worth the risk to yourself and others (bikers and pedestrians) to save 6 minutes? If you are driving to work and it normally takes you 30 minutes to get there by going 60 mph (30 miles), then if you go 80 mph by frequently changing lanes and tailgating the guy in front of you you will save around 8 minutes getting to work. dt = 30/60 = 30 min dt = 30/80 = 22.5 min Is it worth the risk to yourself and others to save 8 minutes? Drive safely with the appreciation of v = dx/dt!
- antisthenes 5y agoAnd, by association, F = m*V^2 The risk of serious injury in an accident increases exponentially with speed. This is especially true for pedestrian victims.
- johndough 5y agoYou probably mean E = 1/2 m v^2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy#Kinetic_energy_of_rigid_bodies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy#Kinetic_energy_...
- epgui 5y agoYou can harmlessly spread a lot of energy difference over a large enough time, or a large enough surface. The most relevant concepts are probably impulse [1] and inelastic collision [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_(physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_(physics) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inelastic_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inelastic_collision
- antisthenes 5y agoAh, yes. The perils of making comments at 2 AM. I stand corrected.
- tomjen3 5y agoTime is one thing. Going fast is also just plain fun.
- DoingIsLearning 5y agoIt really is! But that is why we have track days. There really is no excuse for doing on a public road.
- OccamsRazr 5y agoDangerous driving will eventually introduce one to another familiar, but much more devastating, concept: a = dv /dt.
- dotancohen 5y agoWith an extremely small value for dt.
- walls 5y agoYou're saving 8 minutes both ways. That's seven days of your life back every year.
- oezi 5y agoYou seem to work too many days per year or have shorter days. With 220 work days and 16 wake hours I think you would lose less than 4 days.
- andi999 5y agoWork 100km. Driving 80km/h with little lane switching is 75 min. Going 150km/h also with little lane switching is 40min. Is saving 35 minutes worth it: absolutely.
- geocrasher 5y agoEarth Round. Mask Good.
- spartanatreyu 5y agoHell I'd be happy with: Science = reproducible, Faith = exactly consistent with unfeeling random chance. Everything else can come out of those two principles.
- artificialLimbs 5y ago1.)Quantum entanglement, to instill a sense of appreciation for the unknown. 2.)Astrology, to grant an understanding of the language of archetypes.
- epgui 5y agoAstrology is not a science, and while quantum entanglement is a fascinating and important concept, it's not clear what it has to do with "the unknown". Was that humour?
- artificialLimbs 5y agoAstrology was a science long before the western Enlightenment, which is irrelevant to its unique contributions to human knowledge - as a language of archetypes. Have the workings of entanglement been explained?
- epgui 5y agoThe only thing scientific about astrology, even generously speaking in historical context, is the observations and measurements of what would now fall under astronomy. Astrology in the context of personality traits or "archetypes", as you put it, has never been a science and has always been a pseudoscience. Smarter minds than me understand the workings of quantum entanglement about as well as they understand the workings of gravity. There are plenty of things we don't know.
- artificialLimbs 5y agoWhat do you know about the scientific research of astrology? It sounds like nothing, to me. So you relegate all study of personality traits (which are different than archetypes) to the pseudoscience bin? >> .. as well as they understand the workings of gravity... So pretty much not at all then. This was my original point.
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- ggm 5y agoError bars to uncertainty of facts presented. Confidence. Sometimes I think the bandwidth/delay product is insufficiently appreciated but I can't quite say why. Db are widely misunderstood. And RMS. Without a reference, 2x bigger is meaningless. Likewise s/n ratio is misunderstood. Scale free can be OK, but usually not. People need to know that cells don't have walls and are not bags of liquid. At the scale we're talking about lipid membranes, and van der waals forces inside a cell and the like are not well described by "wall" and "fluid"
- andi999 5y agoWhat is wrong with the cell wall idea. Yes it is a lipid double layer, but it seems to separate the inside and outside quite well (you need all those channels to get stuff in)
- Twisol 5y agoAs a complete layperson, I suspect osmosis may be a good counterexample. Channels react selectively to various compounds, but water can probably pass through the membrane more easily. Wikipedia (heh) seems to support this idea, but my gosh is this all complex. > Compared to ions, water molecules actually have a relatively large permeability through the bilayer, as evidenced by osmotic swelling. [...] Small uncharged apolar molecules diffuse through lipid bilayers many orders of magnitude faster than ions or water. This applies both to fats and organic solvents like chloroform and ether. Regardless of their polar character larger molecules diffuse more slowly across lipid bilayers than small molecules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid_bilayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipid_bilayer
- andi999 5y agoBut then any model has its limitations, doesn't it. I think hydrogen can go through metal (and probably walls), so you could say walls are not a good model for walls.
- ggm 5y agoYea,those channels. They're complicated and x ray crystallography only broadly supports a thesis they are little holes. There's all kinds of weirdness going on, opening and closing by twisting under voltage and other stimuli. If you think it's a little pipe or even like a stomata (which is a macrocellular structure in plants which have cell walls in real sense) you've been led down the metaphor too far. Or, so I am told. I'm not a cell biologist.
- dbtc 5y agoYou don't believe in science, you do it.
- jl2718 5y agoi.e. the scientific method As in, not this: https://youtu.be/RxyQNEVOElU https://youtu.be/RxyQNEVOElU
- epgui 5y agoIn more practical terms, yes you absolutely should trust scientists, and it's important to know the difference between an "appeal to authority fallacy" and "deferral to expertise". https://thelogicofscience.com/2015/03/20/the-rules-of-logic-part-6-appealing-to-authority-vs-deferring-to-experts/ https://thelogicofscience.com/2015/03/20/the-rules-of-logic-...
- TeeMassive 5y agoIt's still a fallacy. As with most fallacies, it exist because it's a good enough rule of thumb to live our lives.
- epgui 5y agoI recommend reading the article. It's the difference between an inappropriate heuristic, and an appropriate heuristic.
- jl2718 5y agoScientists are not in the business of making recommendations to lay people. There are other professions for that: doctors, lawyers, bankers, teachers, journalists etc. Scientists are mostly in the business of disproving the conjectures of other scientists.* * actually grant-writing, but I’m not sure that counts either Also, I’m pretty sure that the inclusion of “deferring to experts” in the accepted rules of formal logic would be a minority opinion among philosophy professors specializing in that area. “The fallacy guy” may not appreciate the irony there. It’s still a fallacy because it’s not logical in the strict sense of an argument (deduction from premise), regardless of whether it’s a good idea or not. It would only hold if the premise was that the “expert” source was an honest oracle, so without acceptance of that premise by both parties, the argument is erroneous.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoThat almost every news headline or report involving a "large number" is misleading, and can be deconstructed starting with the question "Is that actually a big number?" This is the purpose of BBC Radio's "More or Less", which can also be found as a podcast.
- vishnugupta 5y ago2nd law of thermodynamics. IMO it applies to virtual systems. A big misconception about software among laypeople is it doesn’t need maintenance. It’s just not true. Even the best of them need maintenance and up gradation for the simple reason that the environment in which operates is continuously changing.
- vishnugupta 5y agoSteven Pinker agrees with me ;-) https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27023 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27023
- Beldin 5y agoBase Rate fallacy. The gist: consider a yes/no test that has a small chance of being wrong (false positive and false negative). Examples: spam filter, virus filter, pregnancy test, testing for another illness, etc. How well it performs in reality depends enormously on the real ratio of yes vs. no. Example: Spam filter is 99% correct, 1% false positive and equally 1% false negative. That sounds good! And it is - IF your spam vs ham rate is 50-50. If, however, 99% of mails are spam, and you use this filter on 10,000 mails, then: - 9900 are spam; 100 ham - 1% of ham = 1 mail ends up in spamfolder - 1% of spam = 99 mails end up in inbox. So your inbox now contains 99 ham mails and 99 spam - an unacceptable 50-50 ratio, even though your using a superduper spam filter. Changing the base rate of spam affects the outcome drastically. Obviously, 99% ham and only 1% spam flips the numbers around: inbox is fine, but 50% of your spamfolder isn't spam. Also not really okay -- and that with exactly the same filter, just a different base rate. TL;DR: actual effectiveness of tests which have false positives/negatives is heavily skewed by the frequency of occurrence of whatever you're testing for.
- epgui 5y agoSee also: - Conditional probability - Bayes' Theorem
- theshrike79 5y agoAlso: Simpson's paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
- ninju 5y agoAfter a 20 year run the Annual Question blog stopped the following year https://www.edge.org/annual-questions https://www.edge.org/annual-questions
- zuj 5y agoYeah, lot of interesting questions and answers there. Sad to see it no longer continued.
- glenstein 5y agoAm I missing something? This is a link to an article where a bunch of scientists and public intellectuals answer the question, and it provides all kinds of cool content, such as "impedance matching", and the notion that natural selection implies that our DNA can tell us about the environments our genetic ancestors lived in. Instead of reading, reacting, or engaging with any of those ideas, people are just directly responding to the headline as though this is an ask HN thread. I'm not sure that that's what was intended here? I would love to hear people talk about this "genetic book of the dead" idea. For instance, the terrifying drowning reflex that people have, there must have been scenarios in our evolutionary past where that happened often enough that this mutation came in handy, which is haunting to think about. I would love for this thread to be a discussion of the ideas presented in the article.
- zuj 5y agoOp here. Absolutely my ideas when I posted.
- AussieWog93 5y agoQuantum computing.
- ssda2211 5y agoI second this. If you are here and have skipped the article, I strongly recommended it. It is a fun and interesting read, and a jumping point for a bunch of rabbit holes I will probably end up wandering in this afternoon!
- ghostpepper 5y agoAs someone who learned about the electrical meaning of impedance matching in school, where impedance is a commonly discussed fundamental quantity in circuits (it’s the AC equivalent to resistance), I have always tried to avoid using the term outside of engineering circles to avoid confusing people. This is the first I’ve ever heard someone deliberately apply it to a disparate array of phenomena but I have to say that, to me, the phrase makes sense in all those contexts and has a nice ring to it.
- TeeMassive 5y agoOrganic chemistry. Most of the stuff barely requires high school math to understand and is fundamental for health and nutrition are your responsibility to take care of, not your doctors'. As a corollary, macro nutrients. How computer works from logic gates and up. (I think it was in the article under boolean logic) This one actually requires high school math to understand, but not that much. Knowledge is power and tech is everywhere in our life and society. Democracy as we know it can't continue to exist if the power is in the minds of a few technocrats.
- akomtu 5y agoProportions in the solar system. Most people know that Moon:Sun diameters is 400, and so is distances to Moon and Sun from Earth. That's why it eclipses Sun so well. But hardly anyone knows that this kind of proportions are almost everywhere in the solar system.
- gorgoiler 5y agoThe obvious counter argument to the genetic book of the dead would be that our genome, rather than being an append-only log of our evolution, is a snapshot of our current morphology that is constantly being overwritten. There simply is no history because the overwrites delete what was there before. If we evolve wings then our arms=arms gene gets deleted and replaced with a arms=wings gene? That is clearly not how Dawkins thinks of it but I wish he had explained why the genes-as-mutable-variables model is wrong.
- jl2718 5y agoFormal Logic and Argumentation I find it amazing that people can argue endlessly about conclusions or personal judgements, especially when morals are concerned, without any effort to discover the premise upon which the disagreement rests. I think people should learn about argumentation as a method to discover truth and agreement, rather than a competition. I’m not highly knowledgeable in this domain, just a person that would like to have more productive and less emotional or moralistic conversations.
- leaded_syrinx 5y agoMost people aren't able to observe and willingly acknowledge their emotional response to a given issue, others don't think deeply enough to understand why disagreeing can sometimes lead to a clearer understanding of both their position and the world around them. People parodying two completely different court cases against each-other and claiming some kind of "injustice" is a common example of this. It's charitable to even consider this kind of lowball mental gymnastics a middle-school level of argumentation. Tbh, I think most people who haven't studied logic or understand why first principles are important just let the current tide of politics / emotion completely drive their perception.
- pmdulaney 5y agoThese seem to be, for the most part, mind hacks rather than scientific concepts. But that's OK -- it probably makes them more useful. An actual scientific/mathematical/statistical concept that ought to be more widely known is convergence to the mean.