John. I am curious about your numbers regarding the masks. You compare a virion (150 nm) with a ping pong ball (40 mm), so roughly 266,000 times bigger. In order for the fibers to be one mile apart, it would mean that they are separated around 6 mm. That doesn't sound right.
I don't think masks work. But you might want to revise your numbers. Also, this proves that working with very big or very small numbers is difficult.
I personally use the analogy of trying to capture sand with a tennis racket. You can get a few grains, but most of the sand will simply go away.
I believe it is more accurate and it is also easier to understand for everybody.
I'm pinning your comment because I don't believe in hiding my mistakes.
You're right, those numbers check out. That'll teach me to get analogies from a meme, which is where I vaguely recall acquiring that comparison (in my defense, I didn't do that math myself originally).
that provides a rather absurdly detailed analysis of mask properties (imagine this being published in freaking Nature in the before times). They found that reusable masks have pores as large as 100 microns, or about 1000x larger than a COVID-19 virion (assuming 100 nm rather than 150 nm; there seems to be a range of values out there, from 25 nm to 150 nm). So the ping-pong ball analogy would indicate maximal pore diameters of about 40 m, making the cross-section of the virion in relation to the largest pores comparable to that of a ping-pong ball to a very large warehouse. Not a mile by a long stretch but easy enough to lose a ping-pong ball in.
I'm wondering if whoever performed the original calculation (assuming it was a calculation) got mixed up between diameter and volume or surface area or something. Or maybe I'm overthinking it and they just pulled a plausible seeming analogy out of their butt.
If it's a pathology, it's a beneficial affliction. For my part, I'm perfectly capable of checking numbers; I don't always bother if they make qualitative sense, though. Confirmation bias is a bitch.
It is encouraging that 'ordinary' people are doing their own research. As you say, and well know, we need to be alert to the fact that most studies these days come predetermined with certain agendas to maintain or attract funding for more of the same. In the fantastically subjective world of the 'social sciences' this is ubiquitous, and of course in biology the biases and straight up propaganda are there too. Not sure about the hard sciences but I guess there's a bit of the same going on.
I spoke in 2020 with some German scientists in immunology and virology who had a paper pulled from a high-end journal with little good reason - they were, of course, debunking some propaganda about the immune system and gene therapy - When I asked them for the reason why their paper was retracted from the journal they said it was political, nothing to do with their results or the robustness of their study. They had been in the game for many years and had not encountered anything like this before (which seems surprising now). So when we do our research and use libraries such as PubMed we have to know that these journals are thoroughly curated, not just for good scientific method and significance, but for being on the right side of the narrative. I've been on a peer-review panel - if it doesn't fit the reviewers (or the chief editor's) paradigm the authors are told to go back and try again or it simply doesn't go through. It then takes more detective work to find the smaller parties doing honest work, probably not getting published by top-tier journals but can be found on Researchgate or their own relatively ignored blog. Consensus by the 'experts' or being published in Nature doesn't mean it's the truth, yet the majority of the population would say it does.
I try to stay as open-minded as possible when reviewing - I've let papers through containing conclusions I was pretty sure were wrong, limiting myself to correcting their worst mistakes or requiring the authors to show more of their work. Science is a dialogue, and the appropriate way to challenge a result is to do so with a better study - not to try and prevent someone from publishing.
Peer review is a scam, but that's a whole other topic.
In any case, keeping in mind that a large portion of the literature is nonsense is absolutely crucial alitheology.
Aye, peer review is probably a net negative at this point. I have only rarely ever gotten actually useful feedback. Generally it is more the form of "I think you should have written this paper instead" or "Why didn't you cite [my] papers 1, 2, and 3?" Or the ever so common "I don't like the conclusions. Reject."
Considering the crap that gets published, one wonders why even bother. Reviewing seems more about keeping non-consensus work, or even just new competitors out of journals than anything remotely like checking for errors.
To be fair, it's sometimes extremely difficult for me to ree about "why didn't you cite me". I try to make up for that impulse by pointing out the other 20 papers they should have cited, that weren't written by me.
Your light handed approach is the way it's supposed to be done. After all it's not your paper, nor your research, you are only gatekeeping for the obvious errors and opportunities to improve. Good on you.
And yes, peer review is mostly a scam as is the whole financial model of scientific journals.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have been lied to, info has been hidden from me, I have been gaslit, I have been mocked, I have been accused of being anti-social and even willingly murderous, I have been treatened with livlihood and life, I have been told I would be better off dead - in the name of science, for not accepting a booster, or for simply questioning official Covid Policy.
So, to those condescending scientists, go suck a phizer.
I heartily agree, although common sense is remarkably hard to find sometimes. I don't know to what I can contribute that lack, but damn, some people who seem perfectly functional can't seem to reason their way out of a small closet.
Still, we are clearly a species that works really well on limited, localized knowledge, widely distributed across various individuals. Most scientists understand about as much about ordinary things as ordinary people know about science. That'd be fine, if the scientists stopped trying to tell everyone what to do. (Or stopped lending their prestige to politicians trying to do that.)
My older brother is a retired Air Force Colonel genuine rocket scientist and if you need a nuclear warhead sent through the door, window, or elevator shaft of a given building, he is your man! He may be the world's premier expert on launch vehicle failures. As a launch control officer, he never had one, a failure that is.
You might not be surprised to learn he has reams of common sense. Just not about anything "common." I shouldn't be too hard on him, honestly I have only met one person in my life I would consider smarter than him.
Loved this. I was watching a clip of a show where someone went around interviewing people about inflation, how it was impacting them, etc. People had choice words to say, but the most alarming was a guy who said, well, yeah I can barely fill up my car to get to work, but I figure smarter people than me are working on it. I figure they know what they’re doing.
It made me wonder if it’s not that people don’t have common sense (well, maybe this guy didn’t...), but that we’ve always been trained to think that there are smarter people than me “working on this problem”. It’s pretty ingrained in us. The day I realized I knew more than my doctor was jarring to me. Kind of like the day you realize your parents didn’t know what they were doing half the time.
It’s why the work you do is important. I have been so offended at the lack of intelligence these last couple of years, it has been a sheer relief to find good writers and thinkers on this platform.
With regard to the argument/idea that certain results of physics go against common sense, I don't think it's that simple. Because when it comes to the "big questions", we are often at the mercy of the zeitgeist and current metaphysical assumptions. Today, we tend to think of the universe as materialist, dead, deterministic, i.e. billiard ball universe. This, of course, is in no way a "scientific fact", it is nothing but a philosophical position that makes a TON of presuppositions that arose historically and got deeply entrenched. At other times, people made very different assumptions.
So seen from this current paradigm, quantum mechanics for example seems to go against common sense. But it doesn't have to be so: for instance, the fact that we know there is a table (common sense) that is supposed to be made up of entangled, wave-particle-duality-infested, indeterminate/probabilistic "stuff" (what is "stuff" anyway?) is a problem for common sense *only* if you buy into the reductionist program. But as Werner Heisenberg himself saw it (no doubt a complete heresy for many physicists today), when you go from physics to chemistry, and from chemistry to biology etc., everything changes. Reductionism does not work. So it is not strange in the least that we have a stable, common-sensical macro world, and a flowing, process-like, indeterminate, potentiality-actualizing micro world.
Things like quantum entanglement is a problem only if you work under the assumption that nothing can travel faster than c, that nothing can be connected at a distance without physical contact of some sort, etc. Here, we see how common sense tells us otherwise: we routinely speak about feeling "connected" to loved ones, how it's bad to think bad thoughts, or about mildly telepathic phenomena. Because of our presuppositions, we tend to dismiss all of that, but still can't help noticing such things and speaking in such terms.
It must be remembered that physics is about finding patterns in nature, using math to describe them, and then thinking about what that might mean. It is not about defining things - we have no idea what a wave *is*, or gravity, or motion. However, many physicists pretend otherwise, precisely because they work under a (often unconscious) set of deeply ingrained presuppositions and models that they mistake for reality.
I think a great book that gives a glimpse into today's mainstream physics is "Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation" by Joao Magueijo. It shows how the physics establishment treats heretics - and mind you, this is not a fringe guy or proponent of the Electric Universe theory or something. This is a mainstream cosmologist who merely *entertained* the idea that the speed of light might not be so fixed after all...
In any event, it is also true that common sense can go south when we are dealing with highly abstract concepts. So when it comes to phenomena that are extremely far removed from experience, I think we can be a bit more tolerant of seemingly strange ideas, while also asking ourselves why it is that they might seem so strange, and what that might tell us about our presuppositions.
I'm riffing off Feyerabend's treatise Against Method. Briefly, when actual scientific practice is compared across different fields or examined in specific examples, the idealized, formalized scientific method melts away. What you really have is methodological anarchy - methods are chosen on the basis of what works for study of a given subject. It's fairly rare to find someone applying the classic 'hypothesis, model, experiment, deduction, new hypothesis' loop in its pure form. Things are often a lot messier, along the lines of 'what happens if I press this button?'
May 22, 2022·edited May 22, 2022Liked by John Carter
Maybe we need a shorthand with which to discuss the failure modes of common sense, such as in the case of the mask madness that gripped us. As you rightly point out, the common error (for the otherwise sane) was due to a misunderstanding of scale. For engineering problems in particular, what converts theoretical success to material disaster is almost always a scaling error.
But the current mask error also reminds me of another error which (ironically?) also involved masks and pandemics. I'm thinking of the kind of masks employed during the bubonic plague, filled with sweet smelling aromatics. The "common sense" told that the stench (of septic materials, of death) was the miasmic cause instead of the effect. Thus the entirely useless strategy was - in a sense - uselessly scientific. When things smelled bad, people got sick! So the obvious PPE solution of the time was to combat sense-alarming odors with their supposed opposites.
I think this category of error isnt one of scale, but rather one that overestimates our understanding of causality, while still applying a sensible heuristic to a real problem. I suggest we name such instincts "pseudo-common sense", in the same way the psuedo-science label is typically applied.
My favorite on is about the "Dark Side of the Moon."
Somebody in a group of people made a comment about some photos they had seen that were taken of the far side of the moon. Somebody else asked, "What, did they use a night vision camera?"
I said "Well, of course they used a night vision camera, or very long exposures, everybody knows the dark side of the moon don't get no sunlight. This is not some radical concept."
Not a solitary soul protested my statement!.
Of course, then I straightened them out, and one young lady said "I didn't know that, I feel stupid, but I really didn't know that."
So, there is an international contest at the ESA (European Space Agency) to select the next mission that will be funded. The French delegation proposes launching a rocket to the moon. The German, launching a rocked to Mars. The Spanish delegation proposes launching a rocket to the Sun. Everybody laughs at the Spanish, saying: "Don't you know that the heat from the Sun will melt the rocket?"
The chief of the Spanish delegation promptly replies "Hey, do you think we are stupid? Of course we will launch the rocket at night."
I'm starting to think with all these examples the field I was looking at going to school for to research in overlaps with yours with all these references. And, from what little I can see of that community, I'm getting similar impressions.
Not entirely related, but I wanted to see what people's thoughts were on doctoral graduates in that field starting businesses, and for whatever reason, Reddit is the sole resource for getting a glimpse into that community. Someone had asked on that subreddit a similar question about creating a business and getting a PhD. There were few comments, but one was "Well, study business instead if you want to do that." The decent comment still made huge assumptions as though "startup" can only refer to the pipeline of VC-based, Silicon Valley-type nonsense. Yet, I see all sorts of professors in STEM fields who have "consulting" businesses. (Granted, they never really discuss what and how frequently they get work, but I always chalked that up to weak business acumen.)
That's a tough one. On the one hand, if you've got the cognitive horsepower necessary to succeed in a graduate program in a STEM field, you've certainly got what it takes to succeed in the private sector. On the other hand, there isn't a lot of overlap in the personality profiles of effective scientists and successful entrepreneurs. It also depends of course on which field you study, e.g. engineering or biotech are likely to provide skillsets that port well to private sector R&D, mathematics translates fairly easily into finance, etc.
The most interesting anecdote I've seen was a physicist creating a business that was essentially based on price optimization. It's possible, but most common think private sector R&D when they think going into industry. And of course you're right, since they are easy examples to point to of mathematicians in finance. I spent a lot of time in biotech, so you'll find more overlap there. It seems that physicists in general have little overlap outside of that one anecdote. My experience with math is those who moved into, say, finance or data science and started a business had a network to rely on that at least appears to be largely shaped by their research career or having connections the average person wouldn't.
I can't remember where, but someone claimed an unsuccessful entrepreneur-scientist was the person who made Silicon Valley what it is today. So, I suppose even if you're clumsy as an entrepreneur, you can do something.
There are quite a few examples of physicists being quite successful in the private sector. Frankly, if you can do physics, you can do basically anything. The habits of thought developed in the course of a physics education find ready application in a wife array of fields. Physicists themselves often don't realize this; having spent so long in the academic silo, and having grown so accustomed to their cognitive toolset, it's easy to forget that those tools are in fact extremely rare in the general population.
As another example, the German database software corporation SAP was founded by a physicist, who furthermore prefers to hire physicists to this day, precisely because their ability to analyze problems and identify solutions is so much more effective than what tends to be found elsewhere.
May 25, 2022·edited May 25, 2022Liked by John Carter
Aggressive idiocy is everywhere.
The problem with this stuff is that it's a pendulum swing. Right now the academic ignorants are running the show but I'm not too keen to be ruled by ignorant cavemen, either, and at some point they will take over.
One of these losers with a Punisher skull avatar issued vague threats toward me for defending the concept of viruses. My subscriber list went substantially down when I wrote my Coley's toxins post. I can't prove that it's because I insinuated that viruses can cure cancer, but if I was a betting person, I'd bet that is the reason.
Idiots are everywhere and unfortunately a different crop of idiots will take over soon and it's the new crop we will then need to protect ourselves from. Not sure which crowd is worse, quite frankly, when viewing from a broader historical lens.
May 25, 2022·edited May 25, 2022Liked by John Carter
The strongest and smartest humans are still pretty stupid. Sheesh, I almost sound like an environmentalist wacko elite wishing for a virus to take out humanity. haha
If you take even the most elite female athlete of today, her bones are 15% weaker by comparison to a paleolithic female. If you brought a human from 40k years ago to the present day, I'd wager they'd be more intelligent on average than today's humans, too, since there is no mind-body dichotomy.
So take this lady and make her 15% stronger, faster, and maybe smarter. (Possibly.) Pretty impressive to think about. Though, she is closer genetically to the paleolithic than the rest of us are because Maori only recently underwent colonization (I'll go out on a limb -- no pun intended -- and assume the same is true for males.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYUoK8dcR-E
The modern lifestyle may be good for reproduction, but it doesn't seem very good for our bodies or souls otherwise.
So maybe it would be better if the human race goes extinct, or "regresses" to the Stone Age so the whole thing can start over, than to become fat Wall-E cyborgs operating remote controlled drone weapons in recliners, while sipping on meals in cups delivered by drones.
Even in civilizations that decayed, there aren't completely similar parallels. Some days, I think we'll scrape by with only 5% global population loss and then recover. At other times, I think it will be a lot worse. The problem is, my predictions on this type of thing have been wrong before, so I got the sense that I was off-base.
The thing that worries me is this. Some people in Rome were probably fat, but they couldn't stay in their recliners and have their food delivered to their doorstep. They still had to walk to the marketplace, and I don't think it was selling plastic food.
I believe the same was true of paleolithic males, although, I do wonder if the comparison being made is typical cro-magnon to typical agriculturalist - i.e. peasant - or if the same comparison to e.g. nobility (with their high protein diet) would give the same stark results.
Certainly agree that the Wall-E future is a failure mode. Like wolves turning into toy poodles. Sheer body horror really.
As to the Romans, I'm not so sure the ones rich enough to get fat did have to walk to the marketplace. They had slaves to run those errands, and if they absolutely had to go in person, slaves to carry their palanquins.
What I wonder about is the motivation of the highly educated peddling this...
Are they sincere, and if so, what do they really mean... or are they placed to tarnish dissenting movements...
I first thought their idea might be redefining what a virus is / shifting it into a bit of a different context than normally seen in, but it seems not to be the case, and when pressed for giving their alternate explanations for transmission, they get evasive or/and angry...
(Talking of e.g. Drs Stefan Lanka and Andrew Kaufman)
John. I am curious about your numbers regarding the masks. You compare a virion (150 nm) with a ping pong ball (40 mm), so roughly 266,000 times bigger. In order for the fibers to be one mile apart, it would mean that they are separated around 6 mm. That doesn't sound right.
I don't think masks work. But you might want to revise your numbers. Also, this proves that working with very big or very small numbers is difficult.
I personally use the analogy of trying to capture sand with a tennis racket. You can get a few grains, but most of the sand will simply go away.
I believe it is more accurate and it is also easier to understand for everybody.
I'm pinning your comment because I don't believe in hiding my mistakes.
You're right, those numbers check out. That'll teach me to get analogies from a meme, which is where I vaguely recall acquiring that comparison (in my defense, I didn't do that math myself originally).
Poking around, I found this paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43246-021-00160-z
that provides a rather absurdly detailed analysis of mask properties (imagine this being published in freaking Nature in the before times). They found that reusable masks have pores as large as 100 microns, or about 1000x larger than a COVID-19 virion (assuming 100 nm rather than 150 nm; there seems to be a range of values out there, from 25 nm to 150 nm). So the ping-pong ball analogy would indicate maximal pore diameters of about 40 m, making the cross-section of the virion in relation to the largest pores comparable to that of a ping-pong ball to a very large warehouse. Not a mile by a long stretch but easy enough to lose a ping-pong ball in.
I'm wondering if whoever performed the original calculation (assuming it was a calculation) got mixed up between diameter and volume or surface area or something. Or maybe I'm overthinking it and they just pulled a plausible seeming analogy out of their butt.
I believe your last hypothesis is the correct one.
For my part, every time I see numbers, I have to check them. It is a pathology, really.
If it's a pathology, it's a beneficial affliction. For my part, I'm perfectly capable of checking numbers; I don't always bother if they make qualitative sense, though. Confirmation bias is a bitch.
"Confirmation bias is a bitch" -> Amen to that.
Great article once again you Barsoom war hero!
It is encouraging that 'ordinary' people are doing their own research. As you say, and well know, we need to be alert to the fact that most studies these days come predetermined with certain agendas to maintain or attract funding for more of the same. In the fantastically subjective world of the 'social sciences' this is ubiquitous, and of course in biology the biases and straight up propaganda are there too. Not sure about the hard sciences but I guess there's a bit of the same going on.
I spoke in 2020 with some German scientists in immunology and virology who had a paper pulled from a high-end journal with little good reason - they were, of course, debunking some propaganda about the immune system and gene therapy - When I asked them for the reason why their paper was retracted from the journal they said it was political, nothing to do with their results or the robustness of their study. They had been in the game for many years and had not encountered anything like this before (which seems surprising now). So when we do our research and use libraries such as PubMed we have to know that these journals are thoroughly curated, not just for good scientific method and significance, but for being on the right side of the narrative. I've been on a peer-review panel - if it doesn't fit the reviewers (or the chief editor's) paradigm the authors are told to go back and try again or it simply doesn't go through. It then takes more detective work to find the smaller parties doing honest work, probably not getting published by top-tier journals but can be found on Researchgate or their own relatively ignored blog. Consensus by the 'experts' or being published in Nature doesn't mean it's the truth, yet the majority of the population would say it does.
I try to stay as open-minded as possible when reviewing - I've let papers through containing conclusions I was pretty sure were wrong, limiting myself to correcting their worst mistakes or requiring the authors to show more of their work. Science is a dialogue, and the appropriate way to challenge a result is to do so with a better study - not to try and prevent someone from publishing.
Peer review is a scam, but that's a whole other topic.
In any case, keeping in mind that a large portion of the literature is nonsense is absolutely crucial alitheology.
Aye, peer review is probably a net negative at this point. I have only rarely ever gotten actually useful feedback. Generally it is more the form of "I think you should have written this paper instead" or "Why didn't you cite [my] papers 1, 2, and 3?" Or the ever so common "I don't like the conclusions. Reject."
Considering the crap that gets published, one wonders why even bother. Reviewing seems more about keeping non-consensus work, or even just new competitors out of journals than anything remotely like checking for errors.
To be fair, it's sometimes extremely difficult for me to ree about "why didn't you cite me". I try to make up for that impulse by pointing out the other 20 papers they should have cited, that weren't written by me.
The one damn good thing we learned in 5+ years of Pharmacy School was how to read a study.
I did have one person ask me how much of the 5 years was spent on learning to read prescriptions, I told them quite honestly "Fifteen minutes."
Your light handed approach is the way it's supposed to be done. After all it's not your paper, nor your research, you are only gatekeeping for the obvious errors and opportunities to improve. Good on you.
And yes, peer review is mostly a scam as is the whole financial model of scientific journals.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have been lied to, info has been hidden from me, I have been gaslit, I have been mocked, I have been accused of being anti-social and even willingly murderous, I have been treatened with livlihood and life, I have been told I would be better off dead - in the name of science, for not accepting a booster, or for simply questioning official Covid Policy.
So, to those condescending scientists, go suck a phizer.
I heartily agree, although common sense is remarkably hard to find sometimes. I don't know to what I can contribute that lack, but damn, some people who seem perfectly functional can't seem to reason their way out of a small closet.
Still, we are clearly a species that works really well on limited, localized knowledge, widely distributed across various individuals. Most scientists understand about as much about ordinary things as ordinary people know about science. That'd be fine, if the scientists stopped trying to tell everyone what to do. (Or stopped lending their prestige to politicians trying to do that.)
"Remarkably hard to find?"
Hell, Doc, it is damn near impossible!
My older brother is a retired Air Force Colonel genuine rocket scientist and if you need a nuclear warhead sent through the door, window, or elevator shaft of a given building, he is your man! He may be the world's premier expert on launch vehicle failures. As a launch control officer, he never had one, a failure that is.
You might not be surprised to learn he has reams of common sense. Just not about anything "common." I shouldn't be too hard on him, honestly I have only met one person in my life I would consider smarter than him.
Loved this. I was watching a clip of a show where someone went around interviewing people about inflation, how it was impacting them, etc. People had choice words to say, but the most alarming was a guy who said, well, yeah I can barely fill up my car to get to work, but I figure smarter people than me are working on it. I figure they know what they’re doing.
It made me wonder if it’s not that people don’t have common sense (well, maybe this guy didn’t...), but that we’ve always been trained to think that there are smarter people than me “working on this problem”. It’s pretty ingrained in us. The day I realized I knew more than my doctor was jarring to me. Kind of like the day you realize your parents didn’t know what they were doing half the time.
It’s why the work you do is important. I have been so offended at the lack of intelligence these last couple of years, it has been a sheer relief to find good writers and thinkers on this platform.
Thanks for your thoughts, John.
With regard to the argument/idea that certain results of physics go against common sense, I don't think it's that simple. Because when it comes to the "big questions", we are often at the mercy of the zeitgeist and current metaphysical assumptions. Today, we tend to think of the universe as materialist, dead, deterministic, i.e. billiard ball universe. This, of course, is in no way a "scientific fact", it is nothing but a philosophical position that makes a TON of presuppositions that arose historically and got deeply entrenched. At other times, people made very different assumptions.
So seen from this current paradigm, quantum mechanics for example seems to go against common sense. But it doesn't have to be so: for instance, the fact that we know there is a table (common sense) that is supposed to be made up of entangled, wave-particle-duality-infested, indeterminate/probabilistic "stuff" (what is "stuff" anyway?) is a problem for common sense *only* if you buy into the reductionist program. But as Werner Heisenberg himself saw it (no doubt a complete heresy for many physicists today), when you go from physics to chemistry, and from chemistry to biology etc., everything changes. Reductionism does not work. So it is not strange in the least that we have a stable, common-sensical macro world, and a flowing, process-like, indeterminate, potentiality-actualizing micro world.
Things like quantum entanglement is a problem only if you work under the assumption that nothing can travel faster than c, that nothing can be connected at a distance without physical contact of some sort, etc. Here, we see how common sense tells us otherwise: we routinely speak about feeling "connected" to loved ones, how it's bad to think bad thoughts, or about mildly telepathic phenomena. Because of our presuppositions, we tend to dismiss all of that, but still can't help noticing such things and speaking in such terms.
It must be remembered that physics is about finding patterns in nature, using math to describe them, and then thinking about what that might mean. It is not about defining things - we have no idea what a wave *is*, or gravity, or motion. However, many physicists pretend otherwise, precisely because they work under a (often unconscious) set of deeply ingrained presuppositions and models that they mistake for reality.
I think a great book that gives a glimpse into today's mainstream physics is "Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation" by Joao Magueijo. It shows how the physics establishment treats heretics - and mind you, this is not a fringe guy or proponent of the Electric Universe theory or something. This is a mainstream cosmologist who merely *entertained* the idea that the speed of light might not be so fixed after all...
In any event, it is also true that common sense can go south when we are dealing with highly abstract concepts. So when it comes to phenomena that are extremely far removed from experience, I think we can be a bit more tolerant of seemingly strange ideas, while also asking ourselves why it is that they might seem so strange, and what that might tell us about our presuppositions.
As a sociologist who taught the scientific method I'd love you to elaborate on what doesn't exist about it. Really enjoyed the article by the way...
I'm riffing off Feyerabend's treatise Against Method. Briefly, when actual scientific practice is compared across different fields or examined in specific examples, the idealized, formalized scientific method melts away. What you really have is methodological anarchy - methods are chosen on the basis of what works for study of a given subject. It's fairly rare to find someone applying the classic 'hypothesis, model, experiment, deduction, new hypothesis' loop in its pure form. Things are often a lot messier, along the lines of 'what happens if I press this button?'
Haven't read that one here I thought you'd go into quantum physics how the observer changes the observed type of things. I wrote about Flat Earth Theory awhile ago (ditto I think it's bunk) https://amysukwan.substack.com/p/what-to-believe-taking-on-the-flat?s=w
Maybe we need a shorthand with which to discuss the failure modes of common sense, such as in the case of the mask madness that gripped us. As you rightly point out, the common error (for the otherwise sane) was due to a misunderstanding of scale. For engineering problems in particular, what converts theoretical success to material disaster is almost always a scaling error.
But the current mask error also reminds me of another error which (ironically?) also involved masks and pandemics. I'm thinking of the kind of masks employed during the bubonic plague, filled with sweet smelling aromatics. The "common sense" told that the stench (of septic materials, of death) was the miasmic cause instead of the effect. Thus the entirely useless strategy was - in a sense - uselessly scientific. When things smelled bad, people got sick! So the obvious PPE solution of the time was to combat sense-alarming odors with their supposed opposites.
I think this category of error isnt one of scale, but rather one that overestimates our understanding of causality, while still applying a sensible heuristic to a real problem. I suggest we name such instincts "pseudo-common sense", in the same way the psuedo-science label is typically applied.
My favorite on is about the "Dark Side of the Moon."
Somebody in a group of people made a comment about some photos they had seen that were taken of the far side of the moon. Somebody else asked, "What, did they use a night vision camera?"
I said "Well, of course they used a night vision camera, or very long exposures, everybody knows the dark side of the moon don't get no sunlight. This is not some radical concept."
Not a solitary soul protested my statement!.
Of course, then I straightened them out, and one young lady said "I didn't know that, I feel stupid, but I really didn't know that."
That's genuinely hilarious.
But again: applied common sense. A moment's thought and it's clear that 'dark side of the Moon' is a meaningless statement.
Well, we can probably blame it all on Pink Floyd.
Yep.
This reminds me of an old (and very bad) joke.
So, there is an international contest at the ESA (European Space Agency) to select the next mission that will be funded. The French delegation proposes launching a rocket to the moon. The German, launching a rocked to Mars. The Spanish delegation proposes launching a rocket to the Sun. Everybody laughs at the Spanish, saying: "Don't you know that the heat from the Sun will melt the rocket?"
The chief of the Spanish delegation promptly replies "Hey, do you think we are stupid? Of course we will launch the rocket at night."
Sorry about that. I couldn't resist.
I'm starting to think with all these examples the field I was looking at going to school for to research in overlaps with yours with all these references. And, from what little I can see of that community, I'm getting similar impressions.
Not entirely related, but I wanted to see what people's thoughts were on doctoral graduates in that field starting businesses, and for whatever reason, Reddit is the sole resource for getting a glimpse into that community. Someone had asked on that subreddit a similar question about creating a business and getting a PhD. There were few comments, but one was "Well, study business instead if you want to do that." The decent comment still made huge assumptions as though "startup" can only refer to the pipeline of VC-based, Silicon Valley-type nonsense. Yet, I see all sorts of professors in STEM fields who have "consulting" businesses. (Granted, they never really discuss what and how frequently they get work, but I always chalked that up to weak business acumen.)
That's a tough one. On the one hand, if you've got the cognitive horsepower necessary to succeed in a graduate program in a STEM field, you've certainly got what it takes to succeed in the private sector. On the other hand, there isn't a lot of overlap in the personality profiles of effective scientists and successful entrepreneurs. It also depends of course on which field you study, e.g. engineering or biotech are likely to provide skillsets that port well to private sector R&D, mathematics translates fairly easily into finance, etc.
The most interesting anecdote I've seen was a physicist creating a business that was essentially based on price optimization. It's possible, but most common think private sector R&D when they think going into industry. And of course you're right, since they are easy examples to point to of mathematicians in finance. I spent a lot of time in biotech, so you'll find more overlap there. It seems that physicists in general have little overlap outside of that one anecdote. My experience with math is those who moved into, say, finance or data science and started a business had a network to rely on that at least appears to be largely shaped by their research career or having connections the average person wouldn't.
I can't remember where, but someone claimed an unsuccessful entrepreneur-scientist was the person who made Silicon Valley what it is today. So, I suppose even if you're clumsy as an entrepreneur, you can do something.
There are quite a few examples of physicists being quite successful in the private sector. Frankly, if you can do physics, you can do basically anything. The habits of thought developed in the course of a physics education find ready application in a wife array of fields. Physicists themselves often don't realize this; having spent so long in the academic silo, and having grown so accustomed to their cognitive toolset, it's easy to forget that those tools are in fact extremely rare in the general population.
As another example, the German database software corporation SAP was founded by a physicist, who furthermore prefers to hire physicists to this day, precisely because their ability to analyze problems and identify solutions is so much more effective than what tends to be found elsewhere.
Brace yourself for
NO SUCH THING AS A VIRUS 🦠
😁
Oh yeah. I've run into that one.
Aggressive idiocy is everywhere.
The problem with this stuff is that it's a pendulum swing. Right now the academic ignorants are running the show but I'm not too keen to be ruled by ignorant cavemen, either, and at some point they will take over.
One of these losers with a Punisher skull avatar issued vague threats toward me for defending the concept of viruses. My subscriber list went substantially down when I wrote my Coley's toxins post. I can't prove that it's because I insinuated that viruses can cure cancer, but if I was a betting person, I'd bet that is the reason.
Idiots are everywhere and unfortunately a different crop of idiots will take over soon and it's the new crop we will then need to protect ourselves from. Not sure which crowd is worse, quite frankly, when viewing from a broader historical lens.
Hail SMOD!
Human idiocy truly is infinite and 'viruses don't exist' is a contemporary example.
What's SMOD?
Sweet Meteor of Death
😂
The strongest and smartest humans are still pretty stupid. Sheesh, I almost sound like an environmentalist wacko elite wishing for a virus to take out humanity. haha
If you take even the most elite female athlete of today, her bones are 15% weaker by comparison to a paleolithic female. If you brought a human from 40k years ago to the present day, I'd wager they'd be more intelligent on average than today's humans, too, since there is no mind-body dichotomy.
So take this lady and make her 15% stronger, faster, and maybe smarter. (Possibly.) Pretty impressive to think about. Though, she is closer genetically to the paleolithic than the rest of us are because Maori only recently underwent colonization (I'll go out on a limb -- no pun intended -- and assume the same is true for males.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYUoK8dcR-E
The modern lifestyle may be good for reproduction, but it doesn't seem very good for our bodies or souls otherwise.
So maybe it would be better if the human race goes extinct, or "regresses" to the Stone Age so the whole thing can start over, than to become fat Wall-E cyborgs operating remote controlled drone weapons in recliners, while sipping on meals in cups delivered by drones.
Even in civilizations that decayed, there aren't completely similar parallels. Some days, I think we'll scrape by with only 5% global population loss and then recover. At other times, I think it will be a lot worse. The problem is, my predictions on this type of thing have been wrong before, so I got the sense that I was off-base.
The thing that worries me is this. Some people in Rome were probably fat, but they couldn't stay in their recliners and have their food delivered to their doorstep. They still had to walk to the marketplace, and I don't think it was selling plastic food.
I believe the same was true of paleolithic males, although, I do wonder if the comparison being made is typical cro-magnon to typical agriculturalist - i.e. peasant - or if the same comparison to e.g. nobility (with their high protein diet) would give the same stark results.
Certainly agree that the Wall-E future is a failure mode. Like wolves turning into toy poodles. Sheer body horror really.
As to the Romans, I'm not so sure the ones rich enough to get fat did have to walk to the marketplace. They had slaves to run those errands, and if they absolutely had to go in person, slaves to carry their palanquins.
What I wonder about is the motivation of the highly educated peddling this...
Are they sincere, and if so, what do they really mean... or are they placed to tarnish dissenting movements...
I first thought their idea might be redefining what a virus is / shifting it into a bit of a different context than normally seen in, but it seems not to be the case, and when pressed for giving their alternate explanations for transmission, they get evasive or/and angry...
(Talking of e.g. Drs Stefan Lanka and Andrew Kaufman)
Good article John. will be linking as usual @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
This has nothing to do with this fine article. I just want everyone to be aware of this petition
Sign the World Freedom Declaration – Oppose IHR amendments
Here’s a link at Off Guardian
https://off-guardian.org/2022/05/21/sign-the-world-freedom-declaration-oppose-ihr-amendments/
or here
https://healthfreedomdefense.org/wfd/?
Will also be linking today on my site. In the News ( Virus Edition ) section. @
https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
Thanks, man!
Really interesting. Thanks.
“ Brilliant they might not be, but they're literature and minimally numerate.”
BWAAAAAAA..,,HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
What a pompous midwit!
Thanks for pointing out the typo. There's always one that sneaks through....
Really?
Please elongate:
1. E=MC2
2. Quantum mechanics
3. Quantum entanglement
Anyway, science is racist and bigoted!