To be a scientist is to be naive. We are so focused on our search for truth, we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there, whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn't care about our needs or wants. It doesn't care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time.
Yup. The religious impulse doesn’t go away even after god is dead. People have been filling the god shaped hole in their being with all kinds of nonsense, but we’re in this weird in between place where we can’t really go backwards to the old-timey religions, but there’s nothing sophisticated to run towards yet
The middle part went over my head a little, but I think I got the gist of it when you tied it back in.
What this makes me think is, we don't have the right tools for handling the world we live in. It's like we're trying to play four dimensional chess on a Candyland board.
The world is really goddamn complex, and science (the real kind, not the Fauci kind) is super messy, and hard, and takes a long time, and requires lots of failure and dead ends. And even in the infinitesimally few cases where we have some breakthrough, we don't have great ways to plug that breakthrough into the rest of knowledge. We need better tools, and we need them soon.
Sorry I tried to avoid the weeds as much as I could, but you're totally right. Real science is really really ugly and takes a lot of work. And even after all that work, it's even more work to accurately communicate it with other people. On one hand, it'd be nice to go back to simplicity, but on the other, there's a lot of nasty things in the world we can't see but still affect us.
One point I wanted to make is that no matter how much we science, it's still just a model. Don't get me wrong, a lot of the models are freakin' amazing, but it bothers me when people start talking about them as if they're some kind of god.
And oh, it is time we think about an essay to explain the difference between scientific laws vs theories. Me think you would be more adept at the than yours truly!
That'd be an interesting topic, because they're both technically models.
e.g., Newton's laws are still models, but they're very well defined and get treated as absolutes in mechanics. But in quantum mechanics, there are cases where Newton's laws technically don't apply, but funny enough we end up using Newton's laws anyway for practical / simplification purposes.
That's why it gets so confusing, because it's models upon models upon models. What matters is the technical correspondence with measurements, because it's easy to get lost in the science language / model game. Like our atomic theories aren't "real," they're still just models, and there's actually different atomic models depending on the discipline. e.g., Chemistry, particle physics and nuclear physics all use different atomic models in practice.
Yup. The religious impulse doesn’t go away even after god is dead. People have been filling the god shaped hole in their being with all kinds of nonsense, but we’re in this weird in between place where we can’t really go backwards to the old-timey religions, but there’s nothing sophisticated to run towards yet
Very interesting and intellectually stimulating essay. Lot of work! I love the “Put your genitals into a blender and become a liberal.”
haha I was trying to jest without being too overly boring.
Outstanding post!
I'm glad you liked it :)
Dynamite.
The middle part went over my head a little, but I think I got the gist of it when you tied it back in.
What this makes me think is, we don't have the right tools for handling the world we live in. It's like we're trying to play four dimensional chess on a Candyland board.
The world is really goddamn complex, and science (the real kind, not the Fauci kind) is super messy, and hard, and takes a long time, and requires lots of failure and dead ends. And even in the infinitesimally few cases where we have some breakthrough, we don't have great ways to plug that breakthrough into the rest of knowledge. We need better tools, and we need them soon.
Sorry I tried to avoid the weeds as much as I could, but you're totally right. Real science is really really ugly and takes a lot of work. And even after all that work, it's even more work to accurately communicate it with other people. On one hand, it'd be nice to go back to simplicity, but on the other, there's a lot of nasty things in the world we can't see but still affect us.
One point I wanted to make is that no matter how much we science, it's still just a model. Don't get me wrong, a lot of the models are freakin' amazing, but it bothers me when people start talking about them as if they're some kind of god.
And oh, it is time we think about an essay to explain the difference between scientific laws vs theories. Me think you would be more adept at the than yours truly!
That'd be an interesting topic, because they're both technically models.
e.g., Newton's laws are still models, but they're very well defined and get treated as absolutes in mechanics. But in quantum mechanics, there are cases where Newton's laws technically don't apply, but funny enough we end up using Newton's laws anyway for practical / simplification purposes.
That's why it gets so confusing, because it's models upon models upon models. What matters is the technical correspondence with measurements, because it's easy to get lost in the science language / model game. Like our atomic theories aren't "real," they're still just models, and there's actually different atomic models depending on the discipline. e.g., Chemistry, particle physics and nuclear physics all use different atomic models in practice.