@St_Rev Just about to launch a long rant about this! :)
@St_Rev I was going to do a second whole rant about how the natural numbers are bad actually, contrary to “God made,” because you can multiply them, and you get division that way, and if you have division you get primes, and if you get primes you get number theory, and that is AWFUL,
@St_Rev whereas the reals are wonderful, people are scared because they encapsulate actual Lovecraftian infinities with tentacles, but you get continuity with them, so you can do calculus, and calculus is great, calculus is actually the foundation of THE WHOLE MODERN WORLD,
@St_Rev modernity is just “NEWTON ALL THE THINGS,” and so far as we know the tentacles never leak out so it’s OK, and yeah yeah Gödel so we can’t be sure that sometime maybe one of them will break open and the universe will be overrun with shoggoths, but FOR NOW the reals rule,
@St_Rev but that would have been silly, and anyway I have to spend the day working on my mother’s taxes
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∑ Fascinating indeed! This is how MOST research works, but I didn’t appreciate quite how true it is in math (or at least current number theory). Lots of tasty morsels in this thread; h/t @DRMacIver
🧪 Science also USED to be like this and isn’t any more: “Mathematicians’ intuition about what's true is mysteriously really good, so publishing false results is quite rare.”
🧪 A few decades ago, most published science was more-or-less true, even though there were often glaring gaps or outright mistakes in experiment. [My informal observation; I don’t have numbers on this.]
Now most published science is more-or-less false, even when done “right.”
It’s so weird reading twentieth century philosophers. They were genuinely panicked about the loss of epistemological foundations. Not as an academic intellectual thing, but as “oh my god what am I personally going to do!”
It’s impossible to fully recover that feeling now.
I just barely grew up in modernity, as it was collapsing around me, and I can sort of remember feeling that panic myself in my 20s, but the shape of it is barely discernible through the fog of time.
I mean, seriously. This is from 1988, at least a decade after modernity was over. It’s practically the TVTropes definition of Wangst.
Meditation and science are two of the things I value most. It’s hard to know when too much “this can be extremely bad” publicity becomes counter-productive. Both can be extremely good.
It’s seems we’re close to the point where every reasonably clueful lay person understands science is in trouble. Then tweeting more of that will be counter-productive.
We’re still a long way from every reasonably clueful lay person understanding that meditation can kill you.
I'm never quite cynical *enough*. The only part of the report I didn't anticipate was their putting machine learning in there. In retrospect: of course they did, how could they have passed up that opportunity?
The UFO report certainly tried to be as vague as possible, in order to allow people to continue believing what they like.
My reading was “Yeah, we haven’t got anything, but if you give us LOTS more money, it’s imaginable that we’ll find something.”