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100% Flat Earth Proof
- Thread starter Big-G
- Start date
Redneckerz
Banned
I believe there is a thin layer between giving slack to a certain degree and being clear that one users behavior won't change. In other words: One should not write 16 reports before the staff understands the issue, when 8 is also sufficient.
Intent is what sets you and me apart from one another. When a users intent is not on being productive but being purposefully obtuse, then i feel that should be remedied.
On a cloudy runny sunday i may decide to believe in a flat earth given how it never stops raining then and i need to have some kind of reason for it.
Wings 嫩翼翻せ
so it's not nice
Agreed. The rest is left up to individual discretion.
EDIT: I realize now I embedded my response in the quote. It was very early.
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WhiskeyDiver
Member
Whoever it is, I'm sure they'll go full on stupid at some point and get the ban-kebab.
guggnichso
Banned
I really, really don't know if engaging them, ignoring them or banning them is better. I mean, with Angular Whatever, he showed clear signs of being an outright troll. For me there's no doubt that this dude was just out having fun and so on. But with people really believing this shit? There's a study done on antivaxxers showing that engaging them and giving them real actual data and facts just cements their beliefs.
Personally, I think switching off any form of social media would be beneficial to humanity at large. Let fringe beliefs die out at some weird bar somewhere.
Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
An authority argument is not a good argument, but what on earth is wrong with scientism?
SKM1
Member
Because scientists are just a fallible as anybody else and you can't blindly trust them. Trust the scientific method instead.
Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
But scientism is belief in science (i.e. scientific method), rather than belief in scientists?
SKM1
Member
Yes, you are technically correct. But it's not hard to see that if you have an excessive belief in science, you can conflate it with science as an institution and not as a method. There are other definitions of scientism though, and the one that comes to mind is trying to apply science in domains that are outside its range, such as ethics. In this case, trying to apply science to belief is scientism.
Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
If the belief is saying anything about nature or its workings, then it is a scientific question though. If it is a moral belief, then of course, the scientific input is limited (one could at best discuss why that specific moral rule might have developed).
SKM1
Member
Yes but in order to be able to question something using the scientific method it has to be put in a testable form, using the language that has been already established by science and as such that process is incredibly limited and cannot serve as a complete epistemological means.
In that sense, science has to be thought of as a tool and nothing more than a tool, that has to be carefully and precisely applied. One should also remember that scientists are formed as scientists. It's a profession just like any other and so it's common to find that scientists have lots of deficiencies in many other areas. They tend to develop a worldview in which everything is a problem to be made into a model and understood, and that approach will inevitably fail in many cases.
So, in my view, that's the problem with what at least I call scientism. It makes prevalent a view of the world which is fundamentally incomplete.
You could also make an analogous critique on reason. I very much like the way Ortega y Gasset put it in his little book "The Problem of our Time", somewhere around 1920. He tells you the story of the discovery of reason starting from Plato and how humanity would dedicate itself to understand reason itself and then reach its limits. So reason is seen like a Island. Huge island but limited nonetheless. And belief is what will set you free from those limitations.
A careful analysis will make self evident the idea that without belief it is impossible to even act on the world. You have to believe that things are as they are. There's a sense of identity. You believe in your own self and in what your eyes see. So much so that it just becomes a truism. And in those dynamics lays science and not the other way around.
I see my response is getting too lengthy but I just find this whole thing fascinating.
DunDunDunpachi
Banned
You may want to read about a priori knowledge, specifically Immanuel Kant.
SKM1
Member
I've not read Kant yet but I hope to do so in the future when time allows. Reading a bit about what you mention, I'd say it's a good example of things not taught to scientists, which make it hard to acknowledge science's scope. I'll say also that for precisely defined problems I'm very rigorous. At the other end of the spectrum I tend to get too mystical, I confess. It's a fun life though.
DunDunDunpachi
Banned
For sure, that's why I recommended Kant because I think it's right up your alley. I'd also recommend Wittgenstein. It's unhelpful to think of science as the lens through which we view all of reality. That's a very... inhuman way to proceed through life. So it's a good panacea to read wise people who remind us about the strict borders of our "reason".
SKM1
Member
Thanks for the recommendations. I did watch some lectures on Wittgenstein but find reading the original works very daunting. Guess I'll give it a try later!
DunDunDunpachi
Banned
The only thing holding you back is not trying. Really, most of this stuff is way more readable than you'd think. You just have to take it slow. Sometimes I have to think out loud -- "so when he's saying {term] conflicts with [other term], what he's really trying to point out..." -- puzzling it out verbally.
Reading philosophy is easy. Being patient enough to understand it is hard, because patience is generally hard.
SKM1
Member
I think it's mostly a sense of how it could consume my time, though I admit it's irrational. I'm very used to digesting complicated ideas, mostly in theoretical physics, and it's just like you say. Thinking out loud. In this case I at least have a career as my carrot
Redneckerz
Banned
Don't worry, there is still O OnThePathToWisdom to discourse with.
It is blatantly obvious that Angular got his fix through his shitty takes. They can't read proof which tells me they should go back to kindergarden.
But that would be a waste of money for the kindergarden, so just forfeit his internet and hope his BS is not going to infect others or be contagious.
No herd immunity can save that.
''Oniiiiiii-chan! Does wearing this outfit make me look as flat as a planet????''
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Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
Science is the only way we can get actual knowledge. But that does not mean that science necessarily allows at each point of time, a yes or no answer to any given question. Because scientific methods may yet to be developed or crucial information be found or progress in other areas necessary to verify theses. But then we just do not know yet, end of story.
Well, it requires one distinction: Science is the only path to knowledge, but many things in life are not specifically based on knowledge, especially moral decisions and other inter-human relationship issues.
It is incomplete, but how is it problematic to have an incomplete view of the world, if no means exist to receive a reliable full view?
I do not think reason is such a limited island. It is of course dependant on information, but given an infinite amount of time (and resources) I am pretty certain that almost everything could be solved by a combination of research and reason. And those things that cannot (usually because they are in the past and information is lost) just will always be holes in the knowledge. It is neither necessary nor desirable to fill this with unfounded belief.
I would not agree on all of this. I believe that eyes are a sensor to this world, but I also know that eyes, together with what the brain does with the sensor information are not a completely reliable source of information. Belief in the own self is circular, because the own self is just defined by a certain experience. Basically, there is nothing to believe, because you take a phenomenon and ascribe a name to it. What nature that phenomenon takes is not that important here, but then again, we do know where the self is situated (the person's brain), so there's that.
Geki-D
Banned
Pathological contrarians. Flat Earthers are generally all the same, just like Angular; Everything that's a well known scientific fact and a well established event in history is "a lie", it's all a conspiracy. One to undermine themselves and their beliefs (generally religious) and only them, with their greater intelligence can cut through the fakes and deliver the truth.
Conspiracy theorists on this level are what happens when mentally ill (often overly religious) people get access to Youtube & internet forums. There seem to be more people because more people have internet connections now and unfortunately the mentally fragile are actually being convinced by some of this crap they see out there.
SKM1
Member
I very much disagree with almost everything you said, at least in spirit.
" I am pretty certain that almost everything could be solved by a combination of research and reason"
This is false. The simplest counter example is the throw of a dice. You cannot predict it, period. Not because you lack information but because the problem itself admits no real solution. Here's a good talk on the topic:
And most phenomena in nature are of this sort. So at the very least you cannot base your actions on pure knowledge. You can only do so in certain "islands".
The sense that life as a whole is understandable from a scientific point of view is a product, in my opinion, of confirmation bias. The category of problems which can be completely solved is very small in comparison to the world itself. When you get farther from that category you progressively lose precision until you reach a point where you are effectively unable to make predictions. What we try to do as humans is to find those islands which enjoy regularity and thus are describable with laws.
Nevermind the fact that reality itself as we describe it is a hallucination:
This is confirmed from a neurological POV and also from a physical POV. Physical phenomena as we perceive them are dependent on us as observers. One remarkable example is the passage of time. The passage of time hinges on the distinction of two states with different levels of entropy, and the measurement of entropy depends on our inability to completely describe a system. This is not conjecture but stablished science.
The Eastern philosophers also had much to say about life and as far as I know they have the best understanding. So there's this concept (in Hindu philosophy) called Maya: Illusion, play, act. That's what life is. And everyone has a role to play. It's funny that Shakespeare said something along those lines and I thought it was a clever metaphor, but when you get down to it, it turns out as very real. So when you see a bunch of people Larping or something like that, recall that you are doing the same thing and for some reason, which I would like you to consider, you think that what you're doing is normal. That the belief that you have a past and a future is normal. And all sorts of things. Those experiences cannot be explained by science. They can be described to be sure and maybe explained away as "evolutionary adaptations". That's a nice way of taking away the wonder of life.
If one wanted to go deeper into this business then one would arrive at the conclusions of Wittgenstein. We are limited by our language. This is one of those self-evident things that one has to say from time to time. Every model of the world that you could have hinges on the language in which it is formulated. And that language at its core is undefined. So for instance when Newton famously formulated his theory of gravity he had to employ a variable for time. He did not know what was time and he left it undefined, just implying that it was a universal quantity which determined the flow of motions in the Universe.
He was wrong, and yet he made predictions. This quirky thing of hiding our lack of knowledge in bubbles and nonetheless making fantastic predictions is a staple of modern physics. The passage of time depends on it as I mentioned earlier but not only that, our physical theories are formulated in the language of Gauge Symmetries. What it means is that our theories do not only describe our physical world but actually a bigger one with much more information, which from our point of view (as humans) is redundant. A simple example is the theory of the photon. In our "covariant" theories it has four degrees of freedom, meaning that you need four numbers to describe it. However the theory itself has a mechanism by which it imposes a constraint killing 2 of those degrees of freedom and we get the physical photon.
I will quote a more sober and experienced physicist than myself (David Tong):
So still one could say that the problem is the theory has spurious information and is therefore meaningless but yet in this way it is so clearly described...? And it goes for Electromagnetism, Gravity, you name it. What's going on? One wild supposition is that actually the constraints that kill the spurious information are actually a feature of the observers. This would put a clear limitation to our appreciation of the world.
Anyways I don't pretend to settle this debate. I just want to point out that your points made are very naive.
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Grinchy
Banned
I know a guy who loves guns who adamantly argues that the government is responsible for the Las Vegas shooting. He's always scared that the government is trying to come and take his guns so they must have pulled this stunt to push everyone into voting to pass new legislation.
Some people are just extremely willing to believe very stupid shit as long as it scratches the "govt is lying to us" itch.
Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
(Idealised*) dice rolls are already solved. A solution does not necessarily mean that you can say in advance what the result is, but that you can accurately describe the result. If it is a random event, identifying it as such and describing the random variable is solving the issue.
I will have to watch your videos later. But all that you describe here, is either not a question of knowledge, because it is merely a matter of pespective, or it is open to scientific exploration. The differences in perception and the role of the observer are open to be analysed by science. Whether our perception of reality accurately describes some higher meaning of reality (whatever that is supposed to mean) is a semantical issue, because in the end, what we perceive as reality is what we call reality and that is what is to be analysed scientifically.
I agree, the language used to describe reality is a limiting factor and this is why I said, that additional scientific methods may have to be developed over the millenia that will follow.
The rational thing to do here, is not to take a definite stance on these additional variables, until it is explored properly. There are different possibilities for them, but one, from my mathematical point of view, is, that the actual object may be accurately described by a function that can be extended to a larger domain, where the larger domain offers a more elegant way of formulating the formula and the necessary restrictions then allow to precisely capture the required function. It could also be that the function on the larger domain actually describes reality and the restrictions chosen are acutally only there because we project reality in a certain way. Many other different possibilites are there, but neither goes contrary to the claim that the scientific method in general can be used to determine and describe all objective aspects of reality.
* I say idealised, because actualy dice throws could probably be predicted accurately by analysing all variables that go into the throw; they are not truly random.
SKM1
Member
But then we get back to the issue of how our understanding is fundamentally incomplete and yet we can still move on and act in the world. The only "rational" way I see of getting around that is to deny knowledge as truth but to use it as a tool. So for instance when I say that we know how particles behave, at heart I know that particles themselves do not exist. They are just excitations of matter fields. But I act as if they existed, allowing me to move forward and make predictions, construct things and that constitutes a belief.
At this point of the conversation I think we find the root of the divergence. It is my belief that we operate using models that correspond in different measures to the world. Those models however are not reality (in itself). So my posture is fundamentally anti-realist. I'm definitely not a materialist, and I think that reality as a phenomenon independent of us as humans does not exist in the sense that we could in any ways conceive of it. In other words, I put the belief in objective reality in the same footing as the belief in God. And for that reason I will not deny any of them, even if I don't actively believe in them. The only thing I trust are my senses (and I regard reason as a sense), be that as it may.
As for the dice problem, it's the same thing. At what point do you say that your model is faithful to reality? I don't think it can be done. It would require infinite information.
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Marsellio23
Member
Why has this topic become popular? Do many people believe that the earth is flat?
Mihos
Gold Member
Nah, it is just fun to argue.
Big-G
Member
It was mostly one guy debating (who did believe in flat earth)
strange headache
Banned
Scientism is a pseudo-notion, nothing more than the expression of an irrational fear that science will inevitably supplant metaphysical inquiry. This is failing to acknowledge the fact that science can never become ideology or faith as the scientific method prevents any kind dogmatic truth.
Ultimately, science will be able to explain all the phenomena in the world insofar as they pertain to how we perceive it. Much like Laplace's demon our world is inherently explainable, because we cannot perceive the world other than being fully deterministic. When it comes to the Noumenon, i.e. the things that go beyond our limited capacity of human understanding, we will never be able to know anything.
This is what Kant ultimately intended to convey when he made the distinction between the Phenomenon (the reality as perceived by the apriori structures of your understanding) and the Noumenon (the reality that exists independently from us humans). Science is very aware of that distinction, which is the reason why scientists never make metaphysical statements in the name of science. It is also the reason why anything goes when it comes to metaphysics, or as Kant would say:
In any case, since science is a purely rational and empirical approach, it can never degenerate into ideology, otherwise it simply stops being science and becomes pseudo-science. Or as Aristotle would say, science is an intellectual virtue and not a moral virtue, as such it does not allow excess. In other words, there can never be too much reason, too much education, too much knowledge, too much truth or, in essence, too much science.
Big-G
Member
Didn't even pay attention to them tbh
SKM1
Member
Science itself by definition is not dogmatic. Scientists however as people are just as fallible as anyone else. That's why they're held accountable by the scientific community.
I don't claim that science is negative in any way whatsoever. My concerns are purely ethical. Everything you said is true and even seems like a truism. One would be a fool to deny what is evident.
My whole concern is resumed in the "ought from is" problem. Also the nature of belief as a psychological phenomenon. And how pursuing fact and reason alone can lead to a pathological life.
The whole debate could be turned to ethics. I'm not currently interested in ethics but in its interplay with truth and science. That's not quite clear.
strange headache
Banned
Sure, I agree with that statement. But that is, as you mention, not a science problem, but a people problem, hence why I merely took issue with the notion of "scientism", because it falsely attributes a human fault to the domain of science. It's a notion that's often thrown around by religious people in order to attack science and make it look like a religion, when in fact the epistemological approach of science is fundamentally different from religion.
SKM1
Member
As far as I understand the term, and I could be mistaken, it refers to a the application of science outside its well defined domain. The implication is that since it is being applied carelessly, it stops being science and is now pseudo-science. So in that way it might be a disingenuous term, in the same category as toxic masculinity.
This is obviously a human problem. Many people will justify their opinions using science and reason as shields thereby becoming, quite ironically, dogmatic, and betraying the "spirit" of science which is free inquiry and rigorous work.
So what has become a necessary activity for me is to deconstruct arguments to their core (to avoid falling prey to red pill rhetoric, for instance), and at that point you arrive at a no-go zone, where you need axioms. That's what I understand as the limit of reason. Kant's words are very appropriate if you conceive reason as an island (though it might be a better analogy to say it's like a group of continents ). My proposition is that yes, there are dark oceans with strong currents that will drive one mad or drain your time, but there are also clear skies through which one can fly; and that I cannot demonstrate. For me that's the ultimate truth and ideal.
I like how Krishnamurti thought about these things:
As for religion I don't have any animosity towards it. I admit it might be because I haven't dealt with religious rhetoric in years so I largely don't mind them. As for the concept of religion itself and belief, I have a deep appreciation for it, considering that I have never in my life been religious and can jut look at it like a picture, bloody as it might be.
PS: The reason I'm always referring to my own thoughts is that they're just that. I don't have the patience to delve into a debate within the framework of philosophical canon.
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Sakura Doritos
Member
I believe this falls in to the Speed Trap Towns bucket. If a town makes its revenue by being overzealous on speeding tickets then they are likely to abuse the position they hold over everyone who is held accountable to the doctrine that empowers the police.
Omega Supreme Holopsicon
Banned
The scientific community itself can become dogmatic. That is why some say
Scientists will cling to their preconceived notions, and dismiss anomalies or exceptions, and ridicule controversial alternative theories.
A new generation of scientists with an open mind will try and find the truth of controversial theories.
That is why things like determinism are still controversial to some.
Of course that has nothing to say about flat earth, as flat earth would basically demand either brainwashing of scientists or replacement with NPCs within some sort of simulation, a simulation generating evidence of sphericity left and right. As too many fields and too much evidence supports the spherical nature of the earth.
SKM1
Member
Oh, yes! I'm well aware of that. I'm still procrastinating on reading Thomas Kuhn on that topic. I'm also of the opinion that science will see a revolution in the coming decades, but that's just a hunch. I have my own suspicions and pet theories but I'm not at the level of developing rigorously yet. They have to do with information theory and it's suspicious that Ed. Witten started working on that topic.
strange headache
Banned
That's certainly a reasonable critique to make. I'm just not a big fan of the term, because it is often wrongly applied as evidenced by philosopher Daniel Dennett:
Indeed, phrenology would be such a concrete example where "scientific" appearance is used as a cloak to hide discriminatory views. The recent crop of race realists do the same, shrouding themselves in an air of science in order to make their identitarian views fashionable for the masses. They have a dogmatic set of convictions and work their way backwards, presenting circumstantial evidence as causal proof, leading to a nasty case of confirmation bias. Creationists often do the same in order to maintain their biblical narrative. Gender activists, flat-earthers, etc... are also guilty of this.
As long as science maintains the necessary tools to counter these pseudo-sciences through the scientific method, I can't really put the blame on science itself though.
Scientists can become dogmatic, but not science itself. As evidenced by Einstein's vehement opposition to quantum physics, which he later came to regret deeply in light of Bohr's better arguments. As with any scientist, I can understand that they might become a little blind towards valid criticism after working for many decades on proving a certain theory. That's why proper peer reviewing within the scientific community is important.
Which is only proof in the pudding that the scientific method works as intended and does not tend towards dogmatism.
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SKM1
Member
The history and evolution of scientific thought is itself a beast to behold and study. I don't know if science as an organic phenomenon of humanity has some intended purpose but it's indeed fascinating that under its wings we've discovered so much and gave purpose and respect to the curious bunch.
Just got The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn. Already looking great.