/sci/ - Science & Math

>persuit of truth
Jesus Christ, I really try to like Musk, but I imagine a world where people with power don't fall for naive realism that may have seemed conclusive for only a few decades in history.

>>11647341
>that first sentence

I don't think that it's possible to get more Reddit than that.

>>11647341
>“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says 'science teaches such and such', he is using the word incorrectly.”
>t. Richard Feynman

elon is absolutely right. sadly what passes for science nowadays is credentialism - "experts said it, i believe it, that settles it." even when these brainlets get it right like with evolution, the are no different than the bible thumpers who believe the clergy because they are the authority.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c-Cf6O0ogI

>>11647341
>“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says 'science teaches such and such', he is using the word incorrectly.”
>t. Richard Feynman

elon is absolutely right. sadly what passes for science nowadays is credentialism - "experts said it, i believe it, that settles it." even when these brainlets get it right like with evolution, they are no different than the bible thumpers who believe the clergy because they are the authority.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c-Cf6O0ogI

How can a 10 year old be rigerous?

>>11647341
What about a Nobel Prize winning biologist?

>>11647381
>sadly what passes for science nowadays is credentialism
Credentialism is a receptor-based problem and has little to do with the emitter. Scientists can even warn against this form of naivety and most people would be unable to follow the command. Man is a social creature. Whether or not he believes someone is much more determined by his social standing and authority than the rigor of his thought or the soundness of his argumentation. That's why you get so many people to believe utterly stupid stuff.

>>11647341
"Science" is one subset of empiricism which is one subset of epistemology.
We should always try to understand everything in all ways, not doing so is bad mental hygiene.

>>11647387
watson is dangerously based

>>11647459
not actually doing any research or publishing anything in a field you have no experience in, then running the media circuit because you love attention and can't deal with being ignored is pretty based.

>>11647469
>>11647459
>>11647387
>Muh racist scientists.
Based, based, based, based.

>>11647481
>racist
he claimed there was a link between race and intelligence, does that make him racist?

>>11647341
10yo genius solves decades old scientific mystery, his ideas laughed at by academics, then promptly stolen and published by a professor. Nobel prizes commmence, many such cases. Sad

>>11647341
if you take his definition of science, then theoretcally, yes. a nobel prize winner could slip up or let their ego or agenda get in the way. likely? no.

of course, "science" can mean different things, as this anon points out >>11647381 . science is often referred to as an institution, which isn't consitent with elon's definition.

>>11647341
Theoretically. Which is to say, no.

>>11647496
The problem with his definition is not only the under-determinedness of the word "science".

If I try to gain knowledge from reading out the remains of a coffee mug, or look into a glass ball, then this, in an equally valid way, is pursuit of truth. The pursuit lies in the practitioner. And having fixed the method, it can be refined to be as rigorous as one can get.

The scientific method (which for some reason doesn't even make it into his definition) has a track record of leading to innovation - we can say we have a cell phone today that we wouldn't have without science. But this empirical reflection on the success of the method is just an observation and doesn't tie to truth.

What we may observe is that Science, is, among other things, a pursuit that was very helpful for humans in many regards. And reading out the coffee mug is a useless regards. If we say that usefulness is truth, Heidegger will fuck out asses.
Sure, what one may of course do is taking a Rick & Morty stance that knowledge can just mean the capacity of making more and more reliable predictions about more and more things - i.e. reducing the world to the material and really just giving up any notion of truth that can't be captured by our method.

>>11647496
The problem with his definition is not only the under-determinedness of the word "science".

If I try to gain knowledge from reading out the remains of a coffee mug, or look into a glass ball, then this, in an equally valid way, is pursuit of truth. I'm pursuing truth in a retarded way. The pursuit lies in the practitioner. And having fixed the method, it can be refined to be as rigorous as one can get.

The scientific method (which for some reason doesn't even make it into Elons definition) has a track record of leading to innovation - we can say we have a cell phone today that we wouldn't have without science. But this empirical reflection on the success of the method is just an observation and doesn't tie to truth.

What we may observe is that Science, is, among other things, a pursuit that was very helpful for humans in many regards. And reading out the coffee mug is a useless regards. But usefulness is not truth and to project that we're steadily approximating a true aspect of the material notions we are investigating is already taking a realist philosophical position, a bias.
Sure, what one may of course do is taking a Rick & Morty stance that knowledge can just mean the capacity of making more and more reliable predictions about more and more things - i.e. reducing the world to the material and really just giving up any notion of truth that can't be captured by our method.

>>11647484
You aren't asking in good faith. I already know you are the type who is fond of racism.

>>11647341
>Can a 10 year old kid be more right than a Nobel Laureate?
Yeah, obviously.
Science has been totally fucking wrong all the time, just look at stuff like Newtons laws, various models of the atoms, etc., etc..
A 10yo child just guessing random things is eventually bound to be more correct.

>>11647341
He is correct but the people on this board are actual brainlets that just learnt to do math by memory, if they know the origins of science they would know it's just a subset of philosophy, with reason alone a smart man can understand nature.

>>11647381
>sadly what passes for science nowadays is credentialism
Nah. That is pop-science.
Credentialism emerges when you have lots of people with very low information about some subject, but very strong opinions about what should be true.

In general, if you know nothing, or almost nothing, about a subject listening to what people have to say who know much more is the correct thing to do.
Imagine if you were a programming beginner and your friend litters his code with goto's, telling him that "the Professor said you shouldn't use goto's" , while being technically an argument from authority, is also a legitimate reason not to do something.
The issue arises if *politics* come into play, then "truth" suddenly becomes pretty much irrelevant and people just listen to the authorities *they agree with*, even if the opposing view might be held by significant part, or even a majority of experts.

>>11647341
Democratization and politicalization of science is bad. We don't need democracies in science, we need the absolute truth. Voting for truth and popularization of truth is useless metric that should not be the mainstay of discussion.

>>11647658
I love racism does that somehow make you more qualified than me as a scientist? You are a retard but I don't hold it against your idea until I show how retarded they are using logic and data

>>11647345
You're reading into it too much. He's just subtly encouraging the average person to approach science with rational thought.

>>11647692
>Nah. That is pop-science
Which to most people is what passes for science.

>In general, if you know nothing, or almost nothing, about a subject listening to what people have to say who know much more is the correct thing to do.
Except how do you know who knows more about a subject without knowing the subject? This is where this falls apart you can only presume to know that and can be lead astray so it is exactly the wrong approach. The only correct approach is to examine the evidence yourself and till that point take everything with a grain of salt. Consider the following scenario. I don't know much about ancient aliens, I have simple reasons as to why such a thing is ridiculous like limit to speed of light, the vastness of space, weather balloons and birds caught in IR, etc. Meanwhile some crank who knows all the "theories" and can recite everything will seem more knowledgeable than me to someone with absolutely no background looking over this themselves. To them the ancient aliens "theorist" looks more like an expert than I ever will.

>>11647341
Yeah, he can. But don't forget the old saying about keeping an open mind, but not open enough that your brain falls out. Unless you have a really good reasoning behind your claims (like, let's say, a solid work of research which results contradict mainstream science), you should stick to what specialists say. They very likely know better than you.
It's a shame that some people use the "appeal to authority" card to get away with their bs.

I mean yeah, right is right.

>>11647341
Yeah but they might have a hard time typing up all the proofs and having access to the labs to acquire data.

>>11647896
Just don't focus on experts sigular or small in number and look for what the general consensus of scientists in the field is.

>>11647665
>with reason alone a smart man can understand nature
You probably don't mean what you say, but what you say is literally what Kants Critique Of Pure Reason rejects.
You probably have a view that pertains knowledge is obtained by (not only reason, as you say but) one that in some way or another mixes both reason and sensory input data. So what's your view?

>>11647381
then how should it have worked
there is not a single living soul on earth that is an expert on all fields

>>11647484
No. By the very definition of the word racism, he is not a racist.

>>11647632
>The scientific method
Doesn't exist. Read Feyerabend.

>>11647664
>newton's laws
>wrong
not applicable in all situations doesn't mean they're "wrong"

>>11647484
no but you have to understand that the people who are so bent over diaspora of intelligence between racial groups are just trying to appeal to their confirmation bias that whites and smarter than niggers. what do you gain from studying this? its no different than studying the link between race and vision. who cares.

>>11647496
Nobel disease is a real phenomenon.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
Though why Watson is on that list is anyone's guess.

>>11648925
iirc the general consensus back in January regarding the kung flu was that it's a nothing burger. so can't rely on that either.

>>11650382
just be smart. you don't have to be an expert on everything, just have to know when you do and don't know something and have a good bs detector.

>>11650567
Would explain outcome discrepancies so we wouldn't have to have AA policies around anymore.

>>11651105
AA is about decades of systematic racism retard, not biological intelligence.

>>11651204
Asians were systematically oppressed over decades too but are now richer than whites on average. Perhaps the reasons blacks can't get themselves out of poverty has less to do with environment and more to do with intelligence than anything. Not saying it is the reason but it could be given that wealth in the US is very permeable. Compound that with the fact blacks get such a tremendous leg up with AA. So perhaps it's about time we studied intelligence between races and what effect it has on wealth accumulation, not only the other way around. If you are right that this is all about "systematic racism" then such a study would find nothing. But until that study is done the question will remain unanswered and you'll have /pol/ assuming it will be answered in their favor because of suppression.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-why-90-of-rich-people-squander-their-fortunes-2017-04-23

>>11647632
well, by that standard, you have to accept that some day, the current scientific method has to die.
Just look at religion, religion had a very important function in the development of civilization, because it enabled so many things that where previously impossible. such as shared goals which transcend the need to eat, shit, drink and fuck.
That system did its part, and it was time for it to die. just as today you have "scientists" mock ideas which are not backed by Nobel tards, everyone just wants their name to be remembered, that is essentially what science has become. a fucking nihilist festival of ego and retardation disguised as "rigorous truth seeking".

>>11651204
Asians were systematically oppressed over decades too but are now richer than whites on average. Perhaps the reasons blacks can't get themselves out of poverty has less to do with environment and more to do with intelligence than anything. Not saying it is the reason but it could be given that wealth in the US is very permeable. Compound that with the fact blacks get such a tremendous leg up with AA. So perhaps it's about time we studied intelligence between races and what effect it has on wealth accumulation, not only the other way around that omits intelligence as variable. If you are right that this is all about "systematic racism" then such a study would find nothing. But until that study is done the question will remain unanswered and you'll have /pol/ assuming it will be answered in their favor because of suppression.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-why-90-of-rich-people-squander-their-fortunes-2017-04-23

>>11647341
What he mean by this?

>>11650567
Everyone should care and there are many scientists who do see the point. We are just learning about important physiological differences between males and females because for the longest time it was standard to only use male mice and macaques. These differences are medically relevant. Similarly, we’ve learned things like there are differences in birth canals among women across the world and even certain genomic regions which are unique among Black Americans that we never recognized because the first genomes were from White men.

Unfortunately we continue to know very little because it is still taboo to research differences between races.

>>11647387
Dumbass who stole everything he ever published from a woman. It's literally a scientific fact you cannot be racist and be smart.

>the only example /pol/ has is one crazy sexist thief.

>>11647484
Today? Yes

>>11650971
>real phenomena
>rationalwiki
>entirety of the explanation consists of unsubstantiated claims
Seems like crankery to me

>>11652038
lol nope. franklin's lab took photo 51. but she didn't have the brains to figure out what she was looking at. she was just a lab monkey, watson and crick actually came up with their model by using it. they were the brains. she was the lab monkey tech. and actually she didn't even take the photo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9Yn3i-DMKw

>>11647345
realism already won 100 years ago
cope or defeat it

>>11652038
lol nope. franklin's lab took photo 51. but she didn't have the brains to figure out what she was looking at. she was just a lab monkey, watson and crick actually came up with their model by using it. they were the brains. she was the lab monkey tech. and actually she didn't even take the photo.
https://teaching.ncl.ac.uk/bms/wiki/index.php/Watson-Crick_base_pairing
>In 1953, James D Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA using X ray Crystallography. They worked out that DNA was a double helix using Rosalind Franklin's X ray diffraction pattern [4]. At first, it was thought that DNA was made up of many chemicals, which proved too difficult to analyse, but the researchers persisitence led to the discovery of complementary base pairing [5].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9Yn3i-DMKw

>>11652143
She was two months out from publishing her paper on the theory of DNA structure. Watson went to a seminar she gave and grabbed her structural determination from crystallography. They had a working model with severe defects with most of that chemical information being pulled from a russian biochemist Levene.

Don't get me wrong, they did a lot of work. But a lot of it boils down to them talking to a bunch of people. Getting chemical information from a Russian and structural data from Rosalind. The video tries to imply there was no professional backstabbing going on but glosses over their contentious relationship with a quick "uh they didn't get along" and "departmental troubles". They took unpublished work from her lab in a field they were both competing in and used unpublished work from another Russian lab to put together a solid theory. From all that I've heard from other biophysicists is that Crick was a nice down to earth guy who was super smart, Watson was never considered the best type for either. The major dispute was over the fact that her data was shared by another, which was then used to generate a valid model to publish before theirs without consent.

They misrepresent the fact that they were both working on this separately and were completely stuck on the particulars of how nucleic acids were rearranged. They scooped her paper by publishing the ideas they both were working model then going backwards to "support it" with experimental data. The nobel prize also generally takes years on years to be awarded.

The major problem is that she died before they were even close to being awarded. That is because she worked as an x-ray crystallography back in a time where that was a very short lived occupation.

Frankly, I think she deserved to have one a nomination of the Nobel prize in the chemistry section as watson and crick was more biological section anyways.

I think the maker of that video really missed out on how she said she wasn't a feminist.

>>11652228
>She was two months out from publishing her paper on the theory of DNA structure. Watson went to a seminar she gave and grabbed her structural determination from crystallography.
that sounds like a convenient excuse. she didn't even take photo 51 btw, that was gosling. and she didn't have any theory on the pairing which was the biggest hurdle in the structure. knowing there was a sugar backbone was levene, not rosey.

>But a lot of it boils down to them talking to a bunch of people.
who was talking to them about the pairing? that was them.

>>11652228
>Don't get me wrong, they did a lot of work. But a lot of it boils down to them talking to a bunch of people.
The same thing could be said about Einstein putting together relativity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_priority_dispute
And Witten with m-theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory
There is a lot of work putting together the works of others into something cohesive like this. Also Watson and Crick were responsible for the base-pairing.

>>11652228
>x-ray crystallography back in a time where that was a very short lived occupation.
what the heck why

>>11647341
older folk tend to get deluded and full of themselves, so yeah

>>11652426
What the hell do you mean why? It's X-rays. If you're hanging around high energy particles, your shits getting fucked up

>>11651234
>Asians were systematically oppressed over decades too but are now richer than whites on average
Because of recent immigration being highly selective. If you swapped out, say, the Indian American population with a random selection of Indians, performance would massively drop. Or if you examined, say, descendants of pre-1965 Asian immigrants, you would likely not see any outsize performance.
>perhaps it's about time we studied intelligence between races and what effect it has on wealth accumulation
There's too many confounding variables to wealth for that relation (if any) to be isolated, the well-documented practice of redlining being one example.

>>11647341
Quality of reasoning lmao... Science is not philosophy..

>>11652155
Colttaine's videos blow my my mind each time.

>>11647381
>even when these brainlets get it right like with evolution
lmao

>>11652147
Won in what sense?
In the sense that it's what most people believe? In the sense that it's the more efficient underpinning idea when it comes to developing technology?

>>11647341
If he haven't learned all deductions and just heard about experiment, maybe yes.

>>11647341
Considering Elon's quality of reasoning is piss poor maybe he should have gone for that nobel prize instead.

>>11652499
>if you examined descendants of pre 1965 asian immigrants you would not see any outsize performance
why is it that we can examine these millenial zoomer asians and they're still smarter on average?

>>11654468
Largely first/second/(more common) third gen.
If instead you examined the Hmong, mostly the descendants of impoverished refugees, they tend to be far poorer and less educated than the US average.
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/fact-sheet/asian-americans-hmong-in-the-u-s/

To further show the power of selection, immigrants from Nigeria are more highly selected than those from Somalia (who arrive mostly as refugees), and outperform them, as well as outperforming the general population in educational attainment.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/24/key-facts-about-black-immigrants-in-the-u-s/

I thought he was going to say some faggy reddit thing, but really its the truth. The Renaissance happened because people decided deferring reasoning to the church was a terrible idea. Deferring to modern day "Scientific" institutions is no better than to the church given how politicized they are. Science always has been about evaluating things for yourself. ____ _____ ____ _______

>>11647341
"Could a ten-year-old be more correct than you, Elon?"
"No. No. Fuck you."

>>11652038
peak delusion

>>11650382
>That diagram.
If you do a master's degree or a PhD and do not gain any knowledge outside your speciality then there is something very wrong. I don't believe whoever made this diagram knows many researchers.

Secondly I have never met scientists so deep into their own navel that they even for a minute believe the second to last diagram. It is instead a completely different group that screams "The science is done!" and even believe it.

>>11650469
>Feyerabend
Appealing to authority, or got a specific reference you want to cite?

>>11652499
>Because of recent immigration being highly selective.
Not sure the Chinese immigrants in the early 1900's were highly selective, yet their descendants have done well. How does that fit your world view?

>>11647341
Isn't this the whole reason /sci/ thought of an exam of competence that would allow you to be classed as an adult?

>>11652426
>>11652486
Even today this is high risk work. I got irradiated twice thanks to defective equipment in the 4 years of my PhD studies.

>>11647341
Yes, but it's really unlikely.

>>11651234
>giving a shit about muh ivy league
neck yourself, racist

>>11650567
We should care because many of our policies are based on the idea that races are equal. If one group is really 1 sd dumber than the rest, then some policies that work for one group won't work for the other.

>>11647847
What's the point? Chances are they won't achieve shit