• 6 Posts
  • 122 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle


  • AccountMaker@slrpnk.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyzCan I still use this salt?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    29
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    24 days ago

    From what I heard, salt is usually packaged with iodine or some substances that prevent clumping that expire over time. So after some time the salt won’t have those anymore, but it should be safe to consume. Salt cannot spoil because bacteria cannot grow in salty places.

    Don’t know how plastic containers relate to that sadly.




  • I did stop to think whether to use that term or not. I still chose to because (at least in my experience) the way such people explain away the consensus is by giving political/economical motives to the scientists that uphold it. ‘Global warming isn’t man-made, they are just paid to say that’, ‘Vaccines don’t work, they just say that to sell more of them’, ‘Scientists have to fit the woke agenda’ etc.

    For that reasoning to work you would need a huge connected network of researchers all hiding the actual truth and spreading lies for nefarious gains, and that’s a conspiracy if I ever heard one. Ofc there are people who just think they’re smarter than all of the scientists combined, but I mostly encountered the former type.

    Thus I’d like to coin the term, negligible science.

    Paul Hoyningen-Huene calls it facsimile science in the paper I mentioned and gives an overview of their characteristics, it’s quite a nice read.



  • This is very much a known concept in the philosophy of science, especially under Feyerabend who mentions ‘counterinduction’ often as a tool to prevent scientific thought from stagnating into a dogma because it might turn into a system where every fact that might prove it wrong is discarded right away. Like how the heliocentric system was opposed to almost every fact given by science at the time.

    But this is a method (for a lack of a better word; ironically, Feyerabend’s whole point is that there is no strict and rational method) of actual scientific research by competent researchers. Someone with no more than the most basic understanding of biology, ecology and climate rejecting the consensus with no findings of their own to provide makes them a conspiracy theorist. ‘The Earth moves around the sun because xyz, and you can prove it’ in a geocentric society is a counterinductive questioning of the consensus. ‘Vaccines don’t work’, ‘Masks don’t work’, ‘CO2 isn’t making the planet warmer’ is 100% of the time a conclusion found on the internet with at most one or two shallow arguments disproved decades ago (see Paul Hoyningen-Huene’s: “Systematicity is necessary but not sufficient: on the problem of facsimile science”)







  • Seriously, I never would’ve guessed that my most unpopular opinion on lemmy would be “murdering people vaguely connected to your problem because you’re angry is bad”.

    This wasn’t an ideological act or whatever, the assassin’s mother was brainwashed and financially ruined her family, he was angry because of that (so because the church caused his mother to ruin the family, it’s a personal grudge against the church because it affected him), wanted to kill the head of the church, but couldn’t, so 20 years later he settled for Abe since he was accessible and supported the church (as the party did before him).

    The assassin could’ve exposed and drew attention to the church and their connections in various ways, instead he shot an old man at the end of his career. I am all for exposing corruption and malpractices, for taking away influence and power from those who have too much, but arbitrary killing is disgusting. Shall we applaud every broken and desperate murderer if the target they could get their hands on was bad enough by some criteria of the day? I hope this is people just trying to be edgy.



  • I forced myself to watch through the first season of Breaking Bad, the second was meh, but starting from the third and until the end it became the best series I ever watched. The same happend to a friend, he wanted to stop watching, I told him to go on and at the end he loved it.

    Better Call Saul also got better as episodes went on.

    The Foundation series had terrible pacing in the first season, and they massively improved on that in the second.



  • When people had analogue technology (radio/phonograph) there was no solid concept of the universe being a simulation

    I’d argue that Neoplatonism is very close to the idea of the world being a simulation. “The One” is a creative power that made all things, itself being beyond existing. That neatly corresponds to the idea of a machine simulating us, as it itself is not simulated, but simulates.

    Even Plato can be seen in that light. There exists a world of perfect forms, and this is but a projection = There is a reality the simulation is based on and computed. Our souls know everything in their pure states outside the bodies = The class is on the same level as all other data until you instantiate it.

    Of course nobody talked about computers, but the general idea was there. The simulation theory could be seen as just fleshing out the technical details, but the architecture was there for a while. Not that I necessarily agree with either, I just think that the simulation theory is not really a new concept in its core.