WTF Bites
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
@Benjamin-Hall: you have a very warped view of science.
Yes, science is about belief and truth. Science aims to be predictive, in other words you believe that the model you've developed is truthful enough to predict things that are measurable before actually measuring them, and that the results are repeatable.
It doesn't mean your explanation can't be refuted, or that it offers a completely exhaustive explanation of how things work. If you think that, whoever taught you science was wrong, or you didn't listen to him/her.
Do science and religion conflict sometimes? You bet they do. It's hard to believe at the same time that "lightning occurs when a god is angered at humans" and "lightning occurs as a result of an electrostatic process".
There are people who believe in both science and religion, but usually they turn to religion for questions that are either currently unanswered by science, or are more philosophical than scientific in nature.
I reject that view of science (and religion) entirely. Science is about building tools to help us predict behavior. That's it. Not about truth at all. There are many great models that are completely wrong (from a fundamental standpoint). For the purposes they were built for, they gave good enough answers. Science does not care about the truth of the theories at the epistemological level. All it cares about is whether the predictions hold up and let us do useful things (generate more theories). That's a much weaker level of "truth." And it's independent of the scientist's belief in the truth (or lack of truth) of those models. I know Newtonian mechanics is wrong (being both incomplete and making incorrect predictions). Doesn't mean it's not useful for 99+% of every-day life. In fact, useful but inaccurate makes for much better theories than accurate but intractable or non-productive.
As an example, there are several dominant models in my PhD field (low-to-moderate energy molecular collision theory). All of them are unphysical--one because it assumes that the colliding molecules move in straight lines at constant speeds (and that the electrons respond instantaneously to changes in nuclear positions), the other because it treats nuclei as classical particles and handles the electron response in a low-order way (a variant on SCF). They have different strengths and weaknesses. The first treats electron behavior more easily and is more numerically tractable, the second behaves better under certain assumptions and can give trajectory information that the other can't.
Both are wrong, physically. Both are relatively inaccurate (a factor of 2 from experiment was normal). I don't believe either one. Instead, they're tools. Tools to be used when useful and discarded when not useful. In reality, angels could be pushing those atoms around for all I care, as long as the behavior works decently and lets us reason about new phenomena well enough.
The more exact models (using CCSD(T) techniques) of electron behavior are, to put it nicely, intractable. They're super precise, but that precision gets washed out with all the other things and costs tons of computer time to get even a single result. It also scales like O(N^7), where ours scales like O(N^2) or so. Since we have to do this evaluation at every time step/nuclear position (of which there are many), the more precise model is less useful. So it's not used.
DFT is another model where we're pretty sure it's physically meaningless (since there isn't a unique density functional, something that can be proven). But it gives good results, so we use it. The "truth" of a model is meaningless. And we can use theories without even believing (in any meaningful way) that they actually model reality. The only measure is in their utility (or lack thereof).
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According to your definitions, nothing will ever be good enough to be considered true. Because if you find science insufficiently rigorous to determine truth, you're not going to get a satisfying answer from religion (whose criteria for truth are a lot lower), either.
At this point it's not about science, it's about twisting semantics. And it has absolutely nothing to do with what people mean when they say they "don't believe in evolution".
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
According to your definitions, nothing will ever be good enough to be considered true. Because if you find science insufficiently rigorous to determine truth, you're not going to get a satisfying answer from religion (whose criteria for truth are a lot lower), either.
At this point it's not about science, it's about twisting semantics. And it has absolutely nothing to do with what people mean when they say they "don't believe in evolution".
It isn't even about rigor. My point is that belief and science are different things entirely. "I don't believe in evolution" is not the same as "I don't accept that evolution is the best scientific model we have." Science does not occupy a privileged position as to truth-discovery. Because science doesn't care about truth, it's orthogonal to epistemological truth.
There are many types of knowledge. Some amenable to logic, some not. Some ephemeral, some lasting. Some can be shown to others, others are personal. Attacking people using adherence to one particular theory as your rule of canon shows that you're not thinking scientifically at all, you're thinking religiously.
For the record, I'm both religiously devout and have a PhD in Physics. And there are no contradictions--truth is true regardless of source. I don't like modern evolutionary theory for purely aesthetic reasons, but I accept that it's the best we have right now. Like the Standard Model of QM. It works, so I have no problems using it. Is it the ultimate truth? Dunno. Don't care.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
. It's hard to believe at the same time that "lightning occurs when a god is angered at humans" and "lightning occurs as a result of an electrostatic process".
Third option: lightning in this particular instance occurred because God manipulated and used electrostatic processes to enact an unusual occurrence.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
Do science and religion conflict sometimes? You bet they do. It's hard to believe at the same time that "lightning occurs when a god is angered at humans" and "lightning occurs as a result of an electrostatic process".
Is it really? Besides the "anger at humans" part (which may or may not be relevant), why can't lightning be the action that an omniscient, omnipotent creator wanted to induce at a particular time and place, so created the universe so that the electrostatic laws and events were such that just that bolt of lightning would be generated?
For a perhaps more obvious example: in Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Ophelia is a woman who (apparently having gone insane?) climbed a tree, fell into a stream, and drowned. The dichotomy you're proposing is akin to asking, "Did the branch break because it couldn't hold Ophelia's weight, or because Shakespeare wanted it to break?"
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@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
. It's hard to believe at the same time that "lightning occurs when a god is angered at humans" and "lightning occurs as a result of an electrostatic process".
Third option: lightning in this particular instance occurred because God manipulated and used electrostatic processes to enact an unusual occurrence.
Yes. God working through law (that to our limited view looks like what we call natural law) is fundamental to most Christian belief. Like general relativity reducing to Newton's laws under the right assumptions, God's celestial law reduces to natural law under the right conditions. This lets us have faith unto salvation, because our belief, when vitalized by works, brings ever increasing knowledge of Him without contradiction or arbitrary whim. His law is eternal, even if the projection of that law onto our time-bound, ever-changing world isn't constant.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
the projection of that law onto our time-bound, ever-changing world isn't constant.
Yeah, that's what's so crappy sometimes." oh no, God apparently changed his mind! Must be false then!"
Anyways, should this convo be Jeffed out of the WTF bites thread yet, @mods?
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
Like general relativity reducing to Newton's laws under the right assumptions, God's celestial law reduces to natural law under the right conditions. This lets us have faith unto salvation, because our belief, when vitalized by works, brings ever increasing knowledge of Him without contradiction or arbitrary whim. His law is eternal, even if the projection of that law onto our time-bound, ever-changing world isn't constant.
Your particular brand of beliefs (to which I disagree) is leaking through. Your first and last sentences here and the last half of the middle one I could maybe agree with, since they're essentially statements about things being created in a particular way due to the extra-temporal, super-physical, wholly-consistent character of God.
The first half of the middle sentence is your own church's quite unique beliefs on soteriology. (But this may be a topic for another thread, instead of further derailing this one.)
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Y'all need philosophy!
@Benjamin-Hall is arguing from an Instrumentalist perspective, whereas most fans of science are Realists.
According to realism, claims about scientific objects, events, processes, properties, and relations ..., whether they be observable or unobservable, should be construed literally as having truth values, whether true or false. This semantic commitment contrasts primarily with those of certain “instrumentalist” epistemologies of science, which interpret descriptions of unobservables simply as instruments for the prediction of observable phenomena, or for systematizing observation reports.
Instrumentalism (or any non-realist philosophy) is not anti-science but a certain kind of epistemological skepticism. The advantage of an Instrumentalist perspective is that you never have to switch from "Theory X is true" to "Theory X is false" based on new evidence. Your commitment only changes from "Theory X is useful everywhere" to "Theory X's usefulness ends here."
To be fair to Realists like @Rhywden and @Zerosquare , their position isn't a simple "What Science says is TRUE!" Most of them don't think in terms of binary true/false, but more in terms of Isaac Asimov's Relativity of Wrong:
My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
So, saying that "Theory X is true" is more accurately rendered "The predictions of Theory X are closer to experimental results that attempt to measure the ultimately unknowable truth of how the universe actually behaves, and it would be a miracle of Theory X were totally off-base and yet predicted experimental resuts to stupidly accurate degrees."
The problem is that replacing "X is true" with "X is accurate within error bounds" feels like ceding ground to opponents who say "X is false, so I can ignore the consequences of X." Adversarial communication kills sophistication and nuance in ideas, which is why I think debate (or whatever it is that happens in the Garage) is largely useless as a form of communication. One advantage of the out-dated Logical Positivism is that they would say that, in practice, there is little difference in behavior between the Instrumentalists and the Realists, only in the words they choose when talking about their work. Therefore, the conflict is
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
For the record, I'm both religiously devout and have a PhD in Physics. And there are no contradictions--truth is true regardless of source.
Sorry. As someone with a different belief system, I see plenty of contradictions in yours.
I'm sure that according to your definitions of "truth", "beliefs" and "contradictions" you're being sincere, but that's not going to convince someone who does not agree with you in the first place.That being said, that conversation is going nowhere fast. We should get back to actual WTF bites, which are something we can actually agree on.
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
Not to mention, belief or unbelief in a scientific theory is rather meaningless
Nah, it's pretty meaningful. The real question is not about believing in evolution or not. It's about whether your beliefs are based on facts and logic, or not.
And that distinction has deep consequences for everyone. Health, for example (when you're sick, are you going to use a drug based on science, or pray to get better?)
You should go argue evolution with @djls45. You'll take about ten posts and say
'yeah, this is way out of my depth', and hopefully by some miracle you'll realize you were just taking authority's word for it too.I can't take this anymore, please stop making it hurtLast Thursdayism may be self-consistent, but the arguments for it are pain-inducing.
But he doesn't argue in favor of last-Thursdayism. He argues in favor of young-earth creationism.
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@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
Do science and religion conflict sometimes? You bet they do. It's hard to believe at the same time that "lightning occurs when a god is angered at humans" and "lightning occurs as a result of an electrostatic process".
Is it really? Besides the "anger at humans" part (which may or may not be relevant), why can't lightning be the action that an omniscient, omnipotent creator wanted to induce at a particular time and place, so created the universe so that the electrostatic laws and events were such that just that bolt of lightning would be generated?
For a perhaps more obvious example: in Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Ophelia is a woman who (apparently having gone insane?) climbed a tree, fell into a stream, and drowned. The dichotomy you're proposing is akin to asking, "Did the branch break because it couldn't hold Ophelia's weight, or because Shakespeare wanted it to break?"
This is one of those things where I would say that God could exist, or have existed at one point. It's pretty clear to me that everything in the universe is predetermined and everything we think of as 'random' is simply a sufficiently advanced pattern. It is completely possible that a being created the universe in meticulous detail, such that everything would play out exactly as he wanted it to, and then set off the Big Bang and watched everything unfold.
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Chrome's New Tab page now lets you customized the background image:
Fantastic! I have multiple browser profiles, I can set a different background for each one! Well, no, actually the background is global, but the text color is per-profile, so if you set a light image on one and a dark image on the other, the text color remembers correctly, but whatever image you set last is shown on all profiles.
how do you mess that up?
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how do you mess that up?
Well, did you really expect anything better from the Chrome devs? They got their own little Discourse-like cargo cult going complete with a
to shoot down any reasonable opposition to their implementations.
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how do you mess that up?
Well, did you really expect anything better from the Chrome devs? They got their own little Discourse-like cargo cult going complete with a
to shoot down any reasonable opposition to their implementations.You mean like https://crbug.com/833435? Or https://crbug.com/845259?
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@ben_lubar said in WTF Bites:
how do you mess that up?
Well, did you really expect anything better from the Chrome devs? They got their own little Discourse-like cargo cult going complete with a
to shoot down any reasonable opposition to their implementations.You mean like https://crbug.com/833435? Or https://crbug.com/845259?
Yes. Exactly like that.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
the colleges that are "test optional" are often the tonier private ones
The sorts of places that don't care as long as you “GIB DEM TEH MONEEZZZ!
”? Or the places that have rather specific requirements (particular beliefs, etc.) that restrict things to the point where they can't afford to be more selective?
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
@djls45 Your stance on evolution pretty much invalidates anything you're saying about your "big accomplishments". That's my personal opinion but any teacher who allows that shit isn't a real teacher.
What if I said that evolution just really isn't that important for most people? It matters for a few portions of one class, and a few careers.
It's not the specific topic, it's that he was taught this in a completely wrong way. And if she got that wrong then there's no telling what else she got wrong.
With a school it's not that much of a problem because you have a multitude of teachers. He only got the one.
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@Zerosquare said in WTF Bites:
@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
Not to mention, belief or unbelief in a scientific theory is rather meaningless
Nah, it's pretty meaningful. The real question is not about believing in evolution or not. It's about whether your beliefs are based on facts and logic, or not.
And that distinction has deep consequences for everyone. Health, for example (when you're sick, are you going to use a drug based on science, or pray to get better?)
You should go argue evolution with @djls45. You'll take about ten posts and say
'yeah, this is way out of my depth', and hopefully by some miracle you'll realize you were just taking authority's word for it too.I can't take this anymore, please stop making it hurtLast Thursdayism may be self-consistent, but the arguments for it are pain-inducing.
But he doesn't argue in favor of last-Thursdayism. He argues in favor of young-earth creationism.
The only difference is that one is serious and the other satire.
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I continue to be amazed by Firefox' design decisions.
I keep a bunch of tabs open but not loaded because I don't need them at the moment but I will later. It's a pretty normal thing to do I think, a lot of people do that.
Recently Firefox started detecting that a new version has been installed through a system update. When that happens, I get a message saying that "an update was installed in the background and Firefox needs to restart" every time I open one of these unloaded tabs. That alone is annoying as hell, but what's worse is that when I do actually restart FF, the tab where the message appeared is lost because this piece of shit browser can't remember what page it was on before the message was displayed in it. It was displaying the message when I restarted the browser so Firefox assumes it was a new tab with no history. There's no obvious way to recover it, once you see the message, whatever was in the tab before is gone forever. You better not accidentally open any unloaded tabs after updating...
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The Android YouTube app is begging me to quit using browser-based YouTube and switch to the Android YouTube app for a better experience. Sigh.
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@ben_lubar
So why WTDWTF doesn't have an app yet? Imagine the telemetry you could accidentally collect! You could run regular expression speed tests without all that mucking about, on any number of devices.Of course, for all that trouble we'd get a very nice exclusive "Sent from my iPhone" (or whatever) signature.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
"Sent from my
iPhoneBurner Phone"
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
@djls45 Your stance on evolution pretty much invalidates anything you're saying about your "big accomplishments". That's my personal opinion but any teacher who allows that shit isn't a real teacher.
What if I said that evolution just really isn't that important for most people? It matters for a few portions of one class, and a few careers.
It's not the specific topic, it's that he was taught this in a completely wrong way. And if she got that wrong then there's no telling what else she got wrong.
With a school it's not that much of a problem because you have a multitude of teachers. He only got the one.
As long as she didn't tell him something like "mutations aren't real, they're made up by the evil evolutionists to try to make us abandon our faith p.s. when you get old enough you're marrying your sister", I'm pretty sure believing an alternate story line for the origin of life and matter isn't really going to affect his scientific beliefs too much.
Historically speaking, many of the scientific breakthroughs on which modern science is founded have been made by creationists. You had folks who believed that God created, and yet they were still genuinely curious to find out how it all worked. This did not create an irresolvable conflict in their work. Genetics in particular had a lot of early groundbreaking work by a monk who was trying to figure out why certain traits seemed to be passed from generation to generation while others did not.
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@boomzilla said in WTF Bites:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
So why WTDWTF doesn't have an app yet?
I don't think he was being serious. That would be TR
.
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@anotherusername said in WTF Bites:
@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
@djls45 Your stance on evolution pretty much invalidates anything you're saying about your "big accomplishments". That's my personal opinion but any teacher who allows that shit isn't a real teacher.
What if I said that evolution just really isn't that important for most people? It matters for a few portions of one class, and a few careers.
It's not the specific topic, it's that he was taught this in a completely wrong way. And if she got that wrong then there's no telling what else she got wrong.
With a school it's not that much of a problem because you have a multitude of teachers. He only got the one.
As long as she didn't tell him something like "mutations aren't real, they're made up by the evil evolutionists to try to make us abandon our faith p.s. when you get old enough you're marrying your sister", I'm pretty sure believing an alternate story line for the origin of life and matter isn't really going to affect his scientific beliefs too much.
And you're sure that's not effectively what happened?
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@boomzilla
This is worrying, you know. Edit:I'd rather have... blwaargh...I didn't think this was actually up for consideration.
For all I know, you could take a tumble, bop your head, and two weeks later there's a bright yellow popup covering half the screen on every page touting "more immersive, more daily experience", the all-new WTFr.Oh, one might click "No, thanks", but it would show a spinner "saving your preferences", fail and never go away. In the meantime, there'd be a new popup under it that says "Please rate us how satisfied you are with the new experience", which covers the rest of the content.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
This is worrying, you know. I'd rather have "fuck you and everybody who looks like you".
Gotcha covered fam: https://what.thedailywtf.com/category/49/trolleybus-garage
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Soz, folks. NURSE! My goddamn coat's coming untied again!
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@anotherusername said in WTF Bites:
Historically speaking, many of the scientific breakthroughs on which modern science is founded have been made by creationists.
They didn't know better. Now we do. We're not living in the 18th or 19th century anymore.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
Oh, one might click "No, thanks", but it would show a spinner "saving your preferences", fail and never go away. In the meantime, there'd be a new popup under it that says "Please rate us how satisfied you are with the new experience", which covers the rest of the content.
That sounds almost as usable as NodeBB mobile.
I've actually toyed with the idea of making a viewer, I just haven't gotten around to it.
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@anotherusername said in WTF Bites:
Historically speaking, many of the scientific breakthroughs on which modern science is founded have been made by creationists.
They didn't know better. Now we do. We're not living in the 18th or 19th century anymore.
So? Why does that give you the right to be condescending toward the scientific contributions of people just because they hold some beliefs that you consider unscientific?
William Shockley was a racist proponent of eugenics, and yet his work on semiconductors in the 20th century was critical to modern computing. You may not have been able to type that post if it were not for the scientific discoveries of the same man who also said this:
My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially genetic in origin and, thus, not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in the environment.
He obviously let his intellect get to his head, but every scientist runs that same exact risk.
Anyway, we have a few threads dedicated to this subject in the garage (and maybe even the salon), so let's not debate it any further here.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
So why WTDWTF doesn't have an app yet?
I agree. Maintaining 3 (at least) completely different versions of the same program when there's no need to is a big WTF, so it would go well with the spirit of the site.
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Can we port Community Server to Electron.js?
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@mott555 The Evil Idea Thread is
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@Benjamin-Hall said in WTF Bites:
@djls45 Your stance on evolution pretty much invalidates anything you're saying about your "big accomplishments". That's my personal opinion but any teacher who allows that shit isn't a real teacher.
What if I said that evolution just really isn't that important for most people? It matters for a few portions of one class, and a few careers.
It's not the specific topic, it's that he was taught this in a completely wrong way. And if she got that wrong then there's no telling what else she got wrong.
With a school it's not that much of a problem because you have a multitude of teachers. He only got the one.
Ah, slippery slope?
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
So why WTDWTF doesn't have an app yet?
Chrome mobile. Tap three dots. Tap "add to desktop". Instant App-ification!
Bad news is that non-iFramely links may probably open in a blank page when you tap them.
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in WTF Bites:
Oh, one might click "No, thanks", but it would show a spinner "saving your preferences", fail and never go away. In the meantime, there'd be a new popup under it that says "Please rate us how satisfied you are with the new experience", which covers the rest of the content.
That sounds almost as usable as NodeBB mobile.
I've actually toyed with the idea of making a viewer, I just haven't gotten around to it.
Shouldn't be hard, you just need to know how to make a websocket and decode the json that spews from it. Everything else is up to you after that. Java away!
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in WTF Bites:
Java
Ew.
Wanna make An Android App? Consider yourself better for not making an Apple App!
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@anotherusername said in WTF Bites:
@anotherusername said in WTF Bites:
Historically speaking, many of the scientific breakthroughs on which modern science is founded have been made by creationists.
They didn't know better. Now we do. We're not living in the 18th or 19th century anymore.
So? Why does that give you the right to be condescending toward the scientific contributions of people just because they hold some beliefs that you consider unscientific?
I wasn't condescending. I was merely pointing out that those people back then did not have the amount of pieces to the puzzle we have now. We now know better. It's "ignorance" versus "willful ignorance".
Just to make it clear: Your attitude allows quackery like Homeopathy to exist.
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Just to make it clear: Your attitude allows quackery like Homeopathy to exist.
Um, no. I make no apologies for them. Their results can speak for themselves.
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@anotherusername said in WTF Bites:
Just to make it clear: Your attitude allows quackery like Homeopathy to exist.
Um, no. I make no apologies for them. Their results can speak for themselves.
They work on the same principles, though.
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@Rhywden And which principles are those?
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@anotherusername said in WTF Bites:
@Rhywden And which principles are those?
Centuries old theories not revisited, revised and ultimately thrown away in light of modern scientific discoveries?
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@Rhywden The difference is that a creationist isn't using or relying on those theories in his day to day scientific work. It makes not a bit of difference whether he believes the universe has been evolving for the past 6 billion years, the past 6000 years, or since last Tuesday. As long as his work is testable, repeatable, and gives you theories which can be used to make useful predictions about the world, why do you care about some ideas that didn't even negatively influence it?
If we were talking about some hypothetical creationist who, every time he was faced with something outside of what he predicted, threw his hands up and said "God did it", then I guess I'd agree with you. But I'm not talking about that guy.
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@anotherusername Because those views leak. They taint.
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@anotherusername Because those views leak. They taint.
Have you sources to cite?
Part of the point of Last-Thursdayism is that there's no proof for it because it was meticulously created for the purpose of fooling us. If the universe was created last Thursday specifically to act like it had been around for billions of years, then it's safe to use billions-of-years theory in your calculations.
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@pie_flavor said in WTF Bites:
@anotherusername Because those views leak. They taint.
Have you sources to cite?
If you're willing to throw away rational thought because facts fly in the face of your faith, then who's to say what other facts you're willing to overlook because they go against your creed?
There are countless examples where science was twisted to uphold a belief. Phrenology was one such example.
The point is: Those excuses you're making here ("Oh, but he's a brilliant scientist otherwise!") wouldn't fly at all if you replaced them with a different job:
"Oh, he's a brilliant surgeon! He just has this urge sometimes to butcher someone!" How far would you trust that surgeon?
