6 ms·

Going to need some citations here since the texts that I'm familiar with from that time period are "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" by Maxwell (mid-lat

Going to need some citations here since the texts that I'm familiar with from that time period are "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" by Maxwell (mid-late 1800s) and "A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity" by E. T. Whittaker, neither of which mentions anything of the sort. I suspect you are choosing from texts that at the time likely would not have been considered academic or standard.

jvanderbot 2y ago
Your points of memory are not counterpoints. Those are the ones that lived - and are not indicative of the general quality of science during those times. Obvious survivor bias. The fact that you can recall those reinforces the point that the value is determined by how long it is useful and remembered, not the fact that it was published.
- momoschili 2y ago
  Indeed, but you are clearly missing the historical context as these were two highly celebrated and referenced texts of the time period by leading scientists. However, it appears that the leading scientific minds (of which Maxwell and Whittaker are) did not include these uses in their texts. I do not dispute that science can be wrong (in fact it is almost always 'wrong' in the end) nor do I dispute that there could have been published research in those applications. I would argue that these applications were likely fringe at best within the scientific community by the mid 1800s. There are of course incredible scientists that went down disappointing paths (eg Shockley, Dyson, Pauling) in terms of their research output later on, though one must remember that typically this occurs outside their original field of expertise. If you read my comment you will see that I am asking for the references to the claims the previous author made. I simply provided my own references which werew written at the time and are representative of the times that do not corroborate the tall tale of the previous author. If you have any references to support their claim I would be interested in perusing them.
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    And what's to say that other highly celebrated and highly referenced texts from that time were not based on bad science or were outright frauds? Your memory of them? Picking the winners as examples is not good sampling.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - momoschili 2y ago
      The originator explicitly said that 'any engineering book' would contain these references, thus it would seem that this was at least a widespread belief among physicists and engineers at the time. Do you have any example? Again, you and the original poster seem to have this understanding that scientists and engineers from the mid 1800s to early 1900s are not to be trusted. I think that this assertion should be backed by considerable evidence, and that burden is of course mostly on you I don't dispute that there were doctors applying electricity and/or magnetism to the body in an "un"-rigorous manner, but is there documentation that suggests that the scientists at the time had come to the conclusion that it worked? Also notably, Whittaker's work was a 'loser'. I chose it specifically for this purpose. I had read parts of it previously because it was a 'loser' as he chose to dispute Einstein's contributions to special relativity.
      - jvanderbot 2y ago
        We've gotten into the territory of just repeating ourselves, so I don't want to do that. I will say that > Again, you and the original poster seem to have this understanding that scientists and engineers from the mid 1800s to early 1900s are not to be trusted. Is not correct as far as I believe. Instead, we're saying that there's no reason to believe any study until it has stood the test of time. The longer it remains impactful the better. I am building from this statement: > The scientific method works over a long period of time, but to blindly trust a peer review study that just came out, any study, is almost as much faith as religion, specially if you're not a high level researcher in the same field and have spent a good amount of time reading their methodology yourself. Saying that textbooks from Maxwell's era had misunderstandings and bad information is not saying they are inept, it's saying that that is how it works, it always has and always will be that way. That's it, really. The fact that good science came from it is to be expected, and the fact that bad science existed is also not to be suprising. I think you interpreted the statement about the 1900s textbooks being wrong as a slander against the entire era, which is not how I read it, and certainly not what I meant to imply by any of my comments.
Maxatar 2y ago
Because those two texts are the two among literally thousands of scientific publications that have survived the test of time, which is exactly the point being made. This might seem crazy to hear now, but when Maxwell first published A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in 1865, no one cared, it received very little attention at the time. It was decades later in 1888 with the work of Hertz that Maxwell's equations started to gain significance within the scientific community.
- momoschili 2y ago
  It seems convenient that the evidence to corroborate the claim can't be found yes? I think you will also find that the publications of the 1800-1900s are quite well preserved.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - vasco 2y ago
    > It seems convenient that the evidence to corroborate the claim can't be found yes? You posted this less than 15 minutes after my comment, friend.
crystal_revenge 2y ago
Here's a more recent (1950) example that I think makes parent's point quite well: > I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go. Anyone on this site who doesn't know what this is from should feel a bit of shame in the current era of hype around machine intelligence, so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader if you aren't already familiar with this paper.
- mmooss 2y ago
  What is the source?
- momoschili 2y ago
  Alan Turing was an incredible computer scientist and mathematician. Unfortunately he is out of his area of expertise in physics and human biology/neuroscience (? not sure where telepathy would be if it was to be rigorously studied). This is akin to Freeman Dyson on global warming. That scientists can have strange ideas is something nobody can dispute. That those strange ideas enter into scientific legitimacy is another story entirely.
  - crystal_revenge 2y ago
    The point is that I don't believe Turing's ideas were widely considered strange at the time. The point is more that, even under conditions of honest actions, it's very easy for educated, smart, and sincere thinkers to take for fact something that with time we believe is wildly not fact. Science even at it's most sincere should always be approached with thoughtful skepticism. The phrase that I hear touted often these days "trust the science", is in essence not how science should be thought of.
vasco 2y ago
Sure, check out Audel's Electric guide, 1927 print, volume 10, for example. This is a series of books intended for practitioners at the time, in wide circulation in the USA. The "Electric Therapeuthics" section changed a lot with each edition so it's even interesting to compare across older versions if you can find multiple. I didn't want to reference specific old niche books but if you're willing to ebay it, I guess you can check. My point was more general than just electric engineering though.
- momoschili 2y ago
  Awesome thanks for providing a reference!
- throwup238 2y ago
  The Internet Archive has a copy: https://archive.org/details/audels-electric-library-vol-10/page/n657/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/audels-electric-library-vol-10/p... The electro-therapeutics chapter starts on page 658
yeahwhatever10 2y ago
It's called survivorship bias.

jvanderbot 2y ago

Your points of memory are not counterpoints. Those are the ones that lived - and are not indicative of the general quality of science during those times. Obvious survivor bias. The fact that you can recall those reinforces the point that the value is determined by how long it is useful and remembered, not the fact that it was published.

momoschili 2y ago
Indeed, but you are clearly missing the historical context as these were two highly celebrated and referenced texts of the time period by leading scientists. However, it appears that the leading scientific minds (of which Maxwell and Whittaker are) did not include these uses in their texts. I do not dispute that science can be wrong (in fact it is almost always 'wrong' in the end) nor do I dispute that there could have been published research in those applications. I would argue that these applications were likely fringe at best within the scientific community by the mid 1800s. There are of course incredible scientists that went down disappointing paths (eg Shockley, Dyson, Pauling) in terms of their research output later on, though one must remember that typically this occurs outside their original field of expertise. If you read my comment you will see that I am asking for the references to the claims the previous author made. I simply provided my own references which werew written at the time and are representative of the times that do not corroborate the tall tale of the previous author. If you have any references to support their claim I would be interested in perusing them.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  And what's to say that other highly celebrated and highly referenced texts from that time were not based on bad science or were outright frauds? Your memory of them? Picking the winners as examples is not good sampling.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - momoschili 2y ago
    The originator explicitly said that 'any engineering book' would contain these references, thus it would seem that this was at least a widespread belief among physicists and engineers at the time. Do you have any example? Again, you and the original poster seem to have this understanding that scientists and engineers from the mid 1800s to early 1900s are not to be trusted. I think that this assertion should be backed by considerable evidence, and that burden is of course mostly on you I don't dispute that there were doctors applying electricity and/or magnetism to the body in an "un"-rigorous manner, but is there documentation that suggests that the scientists at the time had come to the conclusion that it worked? Also notably, Whittaker's work was a 'loser'. I chose it specifically for this purpose. I had read parts of it previously because it was a 'loser' as he chose to dispute Einstein's contributions to special relativity.
    - jvanderbot 2y ago
      We've gotten into the territory of just repeating ourselves, so I don't want to do that. I will say that > Again, you and the original poster seem to have this understanding that scientists and engineers from the mid 1800s to early 1900s are not to be trusted. Is not correct as far as I believe. Instead, we're saying that there's no reason to believe any study until it has stood the test of time. The longer it remains impactful the better. I am building from this statement: > The scientific method works over a long period of time, but to blindly trust a peer review study that just came out, any study, is almost as much faith as religion, specially if you're not a high level researcher in the same field and have spent a good amount of time reading their methodology yourself. Saying that textbooks from Maxwell's era had misunderstandings and bad information is not saying they are inept, it's saying that that is how it works, it always has and always will be that way. That's it, really. The fact that good science came from it is to be expected, and the fact that bad science existed is also not to be suprising. I think you interpreted the statement about the 1900s textbooks being wrong as a slander against the entire era, which is not how I read it, and certainly not what I meant to imply by any of my comments.

Maxatar 2y ago

Because those two texts are the two among literally thousands of scientific publications that have survived the test of time, which is exactly the point being made. This might seem crazy to hear now, but when Maxwell first published A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in 1865, no one cared, it received very little attention at the time. It was decades later in 1888 with the work of Hertz that Maxwell's equations started to gain significance within the scientific community.

momoschili 2y ago
It seems convenient that the evidence to corroborate the claim can't be found yes? I think you will also find that the publications of the 1800-1900s are quite well preserved.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- vasco 2y ago
  > It seems convenient that the evidence to corroborate the claim can't be found yes? You posted this less than 15 minutes after my comment, friend.

crystal_revenge 2y ago

Here's a more recent (1950) example that I think makes parent's point quite well: > I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go. Anyone on this site who doesn't know what this is from should feel a bit of shame in the current era of hype around machine intelligence, so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader if you aren't already familiar with this paper.

mmooss 2y ago
What is the source?
momoschili 2y ago
Alan Turing was an incredible computer scientist and mathematician. Unfortunately he is out of his area of expertise in physics and human biology/neuroscience (? not sure where telepathy would be if it was to be rigorously studied). This is akin to Freeman Dyson on global warming. That scientists can have strange ideas is something nobody can dispute. That those strange ideas enter into scientific legitimacy is another story entirely.
- crystal_revenge 2y ago
  The point is that I don't believe Turing's ideas were widely considered strange at the time. The point is more that, even under conditions of honest actions, it's very easy for educated, smart, and sincere thinkers to take for fact something that with time we believe is wildly not fact. Science even at it's most sincere should always be approached with thoughtful skepticism. The phrase that I hear touted often these days "trust the science", is in essence not how science should be thought of.

vasco 2y ago

Sure, check out Audel's Electric guide, 1927 print, volume 10, for example. This is a series of books intended for practitioners at the time, in wide circulation in the USA. The "Electric Therapeuthics" section changed a lot with each edition so it's even interesting to compare across older versions if you can find multiple. I didn't want to reference specific old niche books but if you're willing to ebay it, I guess you can check. My point was more general than just electric engineering though.

momoschili 2y ago
Awesome thanks for providing a reference!
throwup238 2y ago
The Internet Archive has a copy: https://archive.org/details/audels-electric-library-vol-10/page/n657/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/audels-electric-library-vol-10/p... The electro-therapeutics chapter starts on page 658

yeahwhatever10 2y ago

It's called survivorship bias.