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.
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debunking some propaganda about the immune system and gene therapy - When I asked them for the reason why their paper was retracted from the journal they said it was political, nothing to do with their results or the robustness of their study.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.
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.)
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.
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."
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.)
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.
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.
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.)
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...
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."
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.)
Brace yourself for
NO SUCH THING AS A VIRUS 🦠
😁
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/
Really interesting. Thanks.
“ Brilliant they might not be, but they're literature and minimally numerate.”
BWAAAAAAA..,,HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
What a pompous midwit!
Really?
Please elongate:
1. E=MC2
2. Quantum mechanics
3. Quantum entanglement
Anyway, science is racist and bigoted!