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Posts
11
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581
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • You've successfully turned the discussion from being about "can a field which does not produce reproducible results be a scientific field?" to "what are the requirements to judge whether a field is scientific?"

    I have a PhD in chemistry, and a good bunch of published scientific articles. Besides that I've studied philosophy of science for half a year. I assume that should make me qualified (in your eyes) to reiterate the questions and points made by !plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works: "Can a field that is largely incapable of producing reproducible results be regarded as scientific?", "Why do so many fields that are incapable of producing reproducible results insist on being called scientific?".

  • This is missing a lot of historical intrigues and "mistakes" in mathematics. Firstly, the way modern mathematical theorems and proofs are built up from axioms is relatively new (a couple hundred years or so). If you go back to Euclid, there are in fact contradictions that can be drawn from his work because he was defining his axioms inappropriately.

    In more modern times we have discussions around the "axiom of choice", and whole fields such as set theory and Fourier analysis faced some major hurdles in just being established.

    My point is that math is constantly changing, also on a fundamental level, because new systems and axioms are being introduced. These rarely invalidate old systems, but sometimes they reveal a contradiction in terms that puts limitations on when some system is valid.

    This is very similar to when Einstein developed a new framework for describing gravity: It didn't "disprove" Newton in the sense that Newton's laws still apply for all practical purposes in a huge range of situations, it just put clearer limits to when they apply and gave a more general explanation to why they apply.

  • It's not revisionist to say that and engineering texts are engineering texts rather than physics texts, it's just properly classifying them.

    I'm not sure whether the ancient Greeks really had a concept of "physics" as a dedicated discipline like we do today- they would probably put a lot of what we do under the umbrella of "natural philosophy". The separation of pure natural science into distinct branches is a relatively recent phenomenon. The separation between pure science and engineering on the other hand is quite old.

  • They do this in Norway too... they say that 70 % of trains are "on time", but don't mention that only 80 % of trains leave the station at all in the first place, and that the 70 % on time disregards those.

    Note: I'm not quite sure about the numbers, the concept is the point.

  • To be fair to the soldiers here: I can understand that a soldier who is tasked with guarding a federal building has trouble judging whether or not that is an illegal order. As a good example, deploying NG to the capitol on J6 would not have been giving illegal orders.

    There is a line between legal "guarding federal property and persons" and "displacing the police to illegally suppress protests".

  • The US literally beat the Nazis to developing fission technology, i.e. nukes (admittedly with a very international research community). It's quite clear just from that, that the US had plenty of strong scientists before they brought in Nazis/Nazi collaborators from overseas.

    As a complete side note: I believe it's been speculated (by people who know much more about this than me) that Nazi research on nukes, among other things, was hampered by researchers like Heisenberg deliberately dragging their feet because they were forced to work on the projects but didn't believe in the cause. I'm not meaning to clear the name of any Nazi collaborators, but pointing out that not all scientists working under the Nazi regime were necessarily nazis.

  • I actually experienced breaking a toilet lid by sitting on it once (I'm like 70 kg). It wasn't even one of those crappy ones. The problem was that it was designed with a slight upward arch and far too few points of contact with the seat, so if you sat down in just the right way (and happened to have your wallet in your back pocket) all the force was concentrated in the perfect way to make it crack.

    I used to sit down on toilet lids without batting an eye, but now I am scarred.

  • Another comment here gives an example of how a 6th grade reading comprehension test could be formulated. Essentially, it's about how complex sentences you can parse, and how large your "context window" is while reading.

    Imagine a small child just learning to read. They struggle with every word, so if a sentence grows more complex than "The dog is brown.", they simply can't get to the end of the sentence while still remembering what the start was about. This also applies at a higher level: Keeping track of a complex "scene" which describes a setting while also describing dialogue between characters and inner dialogue in parallel requires more cognitive effort than the simpler "scenes" in children's books. A higher reading level means you spend less cognitive effort reading and understanding the words and sentences, so you have more cognitive capacity in reserve to actually understand the full picture.

  • Censoring shit that doesn't need to be censored (i.e. swear words, and more recently any word like "kill", "died", "murdered", "raped", etc.) is likely the cheapest form of ragebait. You automatically trigger a bunch of engagement through responses of "you're allowed to say X on the internet". Engagement = More views, so throwing asterisks or blurring random words is proliferating.

  • Whatever anyone China-affiliated says they're not doing, it's a safe bet that's exactly what they're doing.

    I'm not going to push any conspiracy theories, but I believe the strongest evidence pointing towards Covid-19 originating in a lab is the Chinese government insisting that it didn't, while prohibiting anyone not under their control from investigating. That doesn't mean it did originate from a lab, but if anything, that's what it points to. To be explicit: My impression is that, currently, most available evidence points towards natural origins. However the Chinese government has done its best to convince me otherwise.

  • This is a case where you have to be careful about cause-effect order. I assume that Tiwanese people that are heavily opposed to China are more likely to avoid tiktok. But of course, it's been shown that tiktok tends to show more pro-China "content" as well, and likely influences the opinions of its users.

  • To be fair, this was originally the point of plastic. The primary point of plastic today is that it is an extremely cheap material that you can mould into pretty much any shape.

    Need a bag to carry stuff? Plastic.

    Packaging for toothpicks? Plastic.

    Spacers inside an electric circuit? Plastic.

    Packaging for clothes? Plastic.

    Fake plant? Plastic.

    Part of the problem is that we're using a wonder-material that lasts forever (plastic) for a bunch of mundane shit where we don't need it, because that wonder-material turns out to be the cheapest material around as well.

  • If you read the article, you'll find that they claim it's broken down into something which is processed by naturally occurring bacteria. I would have preferred that they linked to an actual research article for details, but this is explicitly not one of these "degradable" plastics that just dissolves into microplastic.

  • Without checking out the details, I can say with fairly high confidence that a material that will be degraded by a sodium chloride solution will most likely also be degraded by other electrolytes as well.

    However, the electrolyte-concentration in drinks is much, much lower than that in seawater. And if it can't be used for electrolyte-containing drinks, it could be used for water bottles.

    Maybe we could use this stuff for umbrellas too? My major concern is what this new material is broken down into.