meanwhile in physics: "ok, so like, there are these strings that are like vibrating, maaaaan..."
Idaho and Critical Race Theory
- Thread starter Trunkage
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Physics seems be in large part "Here's a load of mathematical equations showing stuff. What do you mean, prove it's real with an experiment?"
That is kinda unfair considering that physicists try to prove/disprove it whenever someone agrees to fund their multi-million-dollar experiments. 
More a case of "What you you mean you want to know how that knowledge could be used ?"
More a case of "What you you mean you want to know how that knowledge could be used ?"
I...just... if this actually happened it would be a good thing. It doesn't, at least not regularly enough. Physicist get away with not replicating things far too often to, mainly because there is zero money in replication. The best thing I can say about physicist is that they are more regularly attacked by their other scientists. And, this is a personal theory of mine, they are laser focused on a grand unifying theory that limits how physicists tackle problems.That is kinda unfair considering that physicists try to prove/disprove it whenever someone agrees to fund their multi-million-dollar experiments.
More a case of "What you you mean you want to know how that knowledge could be used ?"
I think it's not so much the millions of pounds as the extra 50 years technology to even make the experiment possible.That is kinda unfair considering that physicists try to prove/disprove it whenever someone agrees to fund their multi-million-dollar experiments.
Yep.
To be fair, it's difficult to think of things they could prove with experiments that haven't been done already or wouldn't require absurd expense. "The math looks good, maybe it's that" is about all one can reasonably expect.
I think there is a misunderstanding of how science works. Much of it is eventually dismissed because new data has come out to disprove it. That's how science is DESIGNED. Failure is a feature, not a bug. I think of medicine and what they had 'proven' 100 to 200 years ago. Most of it was nonsense.
Theoretical Physics (or even astronomical)is especially interesting becuase much of what they think about is unprovable with today's technology. The most important part of your quote here is the maybe. Scientists should have a willingness to say maybe on everything they've discovered
People mostly complain about string theory which is hard to fully disprove and therefore hasn't been. But it is not as if string theory is used basis for anything in theoretical physics beside string theory itself. People, even theoretical physicists are actually working with better proven stuff, even if that is oldfashioned, boring and has limits. Quantum dynamics, field theory, noneqilibrium thermodynamics, general relativity, the standard mode... all of those leave more than enough open questions, especially when they interact. And this stuff can be tested, even if that is often still quite expensive.
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Right. I'm just saying though, few people would think me a great biological scientist if I made a huge number of speculations that I never bothered to back up with an experiment. That's not to say biologists haven't made waves with theories that they couldn't defend at the time experimentally, but they don't have the same sort of entire field based on it.
At some point, there needs to be experiments to "ground" work and ensure relevance. The more you noodle off into far-distant theory with nothing but equations, the more likely you're basically indistinguishable from soothsaying.
The problem with woke ideas isn't that the policies aren't good. Rights for LGBTQ+ will do an enormous amount of good both in society and especially towards those that need it in those communities. Sam bee who I don't agree with on many issues said it best, there's a 100% chance a trans person will need to use the bathroom, and gay marriage is basically an economic issue due to the tax benefits.
Ditto for police reform & defunding, immigration, and economic justice for Hispanic-Americans, and African-Americans.
It's that some people including the US military, CIA, Amazon, and etc. are using, and co-opting progressive language in bad faith, and to further their own goals. granted their competitors Russia, and China are even more hellish versions of the US government in their plutocracy, and capitalism due to the income inequality in Russia, and China.
And the global left-wing governments aren't that much better, they side with either side because they are too chicken-shit to start the third side. The lefty-south American government's side with Russia, and China, and the left-Europeans with the Americans.
There are a few ways to deal with this that are realistic.
The problems with abandoning trans rights are that you lose a valuable part of your coalition to the right-wing, and center. I also have this feeling that trans-people are not the new same-sex gay and bi people that then supposedly sided with corporations, and the establishment like said Mayor Pete, and Sinema is. And even then there are many LGBTQ people, for example, trying to reclaim San Francisco from the tech bros, and in Seattle who are on the ground organizing, you just don't see them on TV.
Ditto for police reform & defunding, immigration, and economic justice for Hispanic-Americans, and African-Americans.
It's that some people including the US military, CIA, Amazon, and etc. are using, and co-opting progressive language in bad faith, and to further their own goals. granted their competitors Russia, and China are even more hellish versions of the US government in their plutocracy, and capitalism due to the income inequality in Russia, and China.
And the global left-wing governments aren't that much better, they side with either side because they are too chicken-shit to start the third side. The lefty-south American government's side with Russia, and China, and the left-Europeans with the Americans.
There are a few ways to deal with this that are realistic.
- Form a lefty coalition in the US, and abroad with trans people, and people of color in the coalition, and hold the line against being co-opted, and bad faith arguments.
- Attack the bad faith arguments directly, and the bad faith actors
- Focus on non-political corrected align labor groups(working class, people of color) and abandon trans issues(problems with this)
- Force the social issues, and call the bad faith actors buff while working on econ issues in combination with identity politics
The problems with abandoning trans rights are that you lose a valuable part of your coalition to the right-wing, and center. I also have this feeling that trans-people are not the new same-sex gay and bi people that then supposedly sided with corporations, and the establishment like said Mayor Pete, and Sinema is. And even then there are many LGBTQ people, for example, trying to reclaim San Francisco from the tech bros, and in Seattle who are on the ground organizing, you just don't see them on TV.
More or less agree.THe problem isn't being woke, its not getting the wokeness.
Finding common ground between BLM protestors and lawenforcment? Great, plenty of photos and videos of just that either coming to eachothers aid, BLM using themselves as human sheilds against rioters to protect cops, cops kneeling with them, and so on and so on.
Kylee Jenner giving the cops a Pepsi and everything magically ok? Nope. Not so much.
Lindsi Ellis more recently, and Nastalgia Critic back with Cinderella, both mention how this makes the remakes worse for live action Disney films.
Things like Beauty and the Beast takes away alot of the positives, or dumbs it down of the original. Dumbo is insulting as it doesn't use the little girl's scientific curiosity in any meaningful way, why insulting one's intelligence about animal welfare of circus animals and the circus getting it in the period depicted, but we still fight it today in modern ones.
Or Cinderella, where makeing her more capable ends up makeing her either dumber or browbeat as you are left asking: why doesn't she just leave.
And then the cops attacking those same protestors an hour or so later because cops.
I like to think it’s the fault of the logical positivists and the rest of the Anglo modernists and their obsession with falsifiability as the most important part of the scientific method over replicability. I personally view the latter as more important to forming an accurate image of reality, at some point any framework will have axioms and viewing that as inherently “bad” is impractical and makes for bad science.
Disagree. I'm not sure what the situation is/was elsewhere, but here, you could get a civil union that was basically a marriage in all but name until gay marriage became legalized in the 2010s. If it was purely an economic issue, there wouldn't have needed to be the campaign that there was. Course I can't speak for everyone, but the question of whether same-sex couples can marry is a question of dignity/equality, not economics.
China's actually a more equal society than the US or Russia, at least going by the Gini co-efficient. As for companies appropriting progressive language, I mean, yeah, they do, but it's academic to the topic at hand (unless you're talking about mandated diversity/sensitivity training and whatnot).
The problems with abandoning trans rights are that you lose a valuable part of your coalition to the right-wing, and center. I also have this feeling that trans-people are not the new same-sex gay and bi people that then supposedly sided with corporations, and the establishment like said Mayor Pete, and Sinema is. And even then there are many LGBTQ people, for example, trying to reclaim San Francisco from the tech bros, and in Seattle who are on the ground organizing, you just don't see them on TV.
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Yeah, I can't say I'm fond of that approach.
You're assuming that the groups above automatically align with each other. And while it's true that, for instance, those groups have generally fallen on the left, it's one hell of an assumption that they're going to stay there. In practice, Biden can utter nonsense like "if you don't vote for me you ain't black," and still get 90% of the vote, but in other areas, why do you think Labor is hemoragphing working class voters in places like the UK and Aus? Why did Trump increase his share of non-white voters in 2020 across every demographic, whereas white voters were the only share that increased for the Democrats?
There's no shortage of nonsense that attempts to pidgeonhole certain groups into certain political categories, and at least right now, that isn't working. You can care about the working class, you can care about trans rights, but those are separate issues.
Shh, there are only two political positions that exist, and each includes a stance on every conceivable issue. Any deviation from one of the two allowed positions makes you a traitor to the cause. Trans rights is gun control and if you don't agree with both you are a literal white supremacist.
I'm not sure this "obsession with falsifiability" has ever existed as you think it does.
Firstly, at a certain practical level falsifiability and replication are almost the same thing; at bare minimum they have a vast overlap.
Secondly, the philosophy behind science is complicated: many have tried to sum it up and not really succeeded. Popper is generally influential (particularly amongst scientists), but Popper has also been subjected to substantial criticism. To a certain extent, scientists don't really know the philosophy of science, and most science courses don't teach it as an explicit subject. Scientists thus tend to know the philosophy of their discipline on a very vague level perhaps even without the language and structure to clearly explain it, and have more absorbed it by osmosis by doing science. More to the point, and perhaps relating to the problems that philosophers have had constructing a philosophy for science, I don't think that's really how science developed. It was largely developed not as a coherent practice from the ground up, but by scientists just doing it and applying a pragmatic principle of "Does it work?" at the level of the methodology itself.
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Would you say that it's more time consuming and stressful than working a 40 hour week at minimum wage?
Again, we're talking about a utopia, we're talking about a way of organizing society in the most reasonable way possible. If you think that something is impossible or doesn't work, then why not? What causes it not to work? Why do most people not have the time or mental energy to engage with political issues that will intimately affect their own lives? Can you imagine a society where those obstacles did not exist? Would that society not be more utopian than one where they did?
I feel like the idea that being a politician is a full time job is frankly laughable. The fact that you think a technocracy would be a reasonable form of government, that people who already have full time jobs could also find time to engage in the political process, kind of puts paid to what an enormous lie that is.
Being a politician in our current understanding of the word is entirely about selling an ideological position to a general public who is largely unequipped to understand or weigh the relative merits of ideological positions. Your solution to that is to remove the general public from the process and consolidate power within a group of educated people. My solution is to educate the general public to the point where they are capable of understanding the relative merits of ideological positions. And to preempt the obvious, no, that doesn't mean everyone has to be an expert on everything. Part of being educated in critical thought is being able to tell when you aren't an expert on something, and to successfully identify people who are.
If it's possible to educate a political class, to that degree, then it should also be possible to educate everyone, or almost everyone. If it's possible to have a class of people who can work "full time jobs" and also be politically engaged, then why can't everyone be encouraged and emboldened to meet the same standard?
What is it?
Where exactly was science firmly established?
The word "science" comes from Francis Bacon. But part of the reason we're talking about utopianism is that Bacon's science is a deeply utopian concept (and a very religious one). Bacon was a philosopher, not a scientist. There was no such thing as a scientific education at the time, and there wouldn't be for more than a century. Bacon's "new science" was essentially the idea that experimental empiricism would ultimately yield a superior knowledge and thus superior mastery over the natural world.
But science, at least in the way we understand it, is not just empiricism. Empiricism is a philosophical tradition, and Bacon was a philosopher. Modern science is distinct from philosophy in a way that is institutional, it requires disciplinary specialization that largely did not exist in the holistic academic environment of the 17th and 18th centuries.
And I still maintain that that's an incredibly reductive answer. For one, it equates scientific "race theory" being synonymous with the Nazi interpretation of racial theory. Now, that's not entirely wrong. You can certainly draw a pretty clear line between the way topics like eugenics were covered in public education before and after world war 2, but the point of my comment was that racial theory wasn't confined to the kind of overt racial supremacism advocated by the Nazis.
I'm pretty sure you could make a very convincing argument that we never stopped teaching scientific racism in schools, because we still tend to teach race as if it is a self-evident biological category defined by traits. Heck, for all we can talk about the supposed demise of scientific racism, most people today still believe that race is a self-evident biological category defined by traits, even though that is not actually true. Actually countering racial theory requires more than simply pointing out that eugenics and ethnic cleansing are bad, it requires criticism of the fundamental assumptions of racial theory, something that was actually happening well before the second world war and is still ongoing today.
Again, racism isn't a special thing done by bad people, and operating on that assumption regarding racism will lead to bad conclusions.
Splitting this one in half due to word limits.
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What model of ideological critique are you using to decide that?
To whom?
A lot of people still believe scientific race theory is real. Heck, again, depending on how you categorize racial theory most people still believe elements of racial theory. Given that, one could flip the assumption around and ask why you can't prove that racial theory is pseudoscience, because you can't. Not to the satisfaction of everyone.
Of course, proof is actually a redundant concept in empiricism. We can't prove things about the universe, we can only make observations that seem to be accurate with the information we have, and it's possible for multiple observations to have similar explanatory power. Normally, that's a very good thing, because having everyone agree that something is "proven" can lead to overlooking alternative explanations that might be less probable given current information but actually could be true. The problem with espousing racial science today is not that the side that says race has no bearing on ability totally DESTROYED their opponents with facts and logic and prooved that race doesn't have any bearing on ability in the free marketplace of scientific ideas, the problem is that asking whether race has any bearing on ability is kind of a bad faith question to begin with. Before even getting there, the correct question to ask is what race is and why anyone should care about it.
See, this is the problem.
You don't actually know enough to understand the limits of your own knowledge, because if you did some part of you would stop you here and say "wait, is there something I'm missing", and there is. Once again, you haven't actually thought about this at all, and you haven't understood the basics of what I'm talking about. I'm not talking to you as an equal, this is a pedagogical mode of speech of the kind I would use to explain these concepts to undergraduates, The fact that you don't seem to understand that is a bit sad and kind of exhausting to deal with.
No, I am not talking about experimenter bias. There is a whole stage of this process which occurs before we even get to experimentation, and which you either don't understand or are completely glossing over. This is not just true for the social sciences, by the way, all sciences have that pre-experimental theoretical stage, because before trying to measure something it is necessary to determine the conditions under which we could know that thing. That exercise is what philosophers call critique, and while it may not be explicitly talked about in science it is nonetheless fundamental to a modern scientific understanding of the world. There is no single, universal rule for how we determine good knowledge from bad, it is not something which itself can be scientifically quantified or derived from experimentation, it requires work. It requires a philosophical method which is often so integral to our modern understanding of the world that we tend to do it without even thinking. You've been doing it constantly, which is part of what I've been trying to get you to realise.
What's really bizarre to me is this absolutely incomprehensible display of misguided STEM elitism whereby you seem to want to turn this into some debate of science versus philosophy (going so far as to assert that that distinction magically existed in history when it didn't). It's a pointless debate to begin with, even before you start throwing around anachronisms, because we live in a world where the two are incredibly mutually co-dependent. We are, in fact, very fortunate that science doesn't actually work the way you think it does, because there are few things in history more terrifying and potentially destructive than the uncritical application of scientific principles.
And I know you're really excited right now and leaping to defend the honour of big boy rational science, but maybe calm down. Try to understand what I'm saying, and try to come out with something that isn't just nit-picking. A good exercise to consider might be to ask what is our fundamental disagreement, because frankly I'm having trouble figuring it out. It is, however, definitely not science versus philosophy. That's such an asinine debate I'm not giving it any more time than I already have.
It is not enough to "educate" people. To make good decisions, they need to know what people argue about at the time and they need to actually read arguments of the sides, maybe even look for further sources and then form a opinion. And on every new issue again. And again.
Let's say, to stay properly informed about day to day politics, you need to invest 30 hours every week. Would you think, most of the population could afford this in addition to whatever work they do ? I don't. So no, i don't think your vision is possible at all.
And i can back up that with experience. We had a party trying to achieve that. While we didn't get actual power, we did set up networks to discuss all political issues in the party to form the party line this way. Turns out, it is way too much to handle on the side. Even logging in every day, i wasn't even able to evaluate 5% of the issues even that was to stressfull in addition to a job to actually keep up. It was worse for the party officials who were more invested. Most retired due to burnout in less than a year.
Why do you think it could work ?
I am not sure what your schools are teaching, but i would question teaching "humans don't have races" could be construed in any plausible way as still teaching race theory.
Who cares what people believe ? Race theory predicted differences that could be falsified. And were. Repeatedly. End of story. Yes, it took a while and we learned new things about sampling on the way. People who still believe it are as relevant to its merit as people believing in homeopathy. Just because someone believes in it it doesn't become true
You are right, that is the problem.
I don't see something that i think i am missing, correct. I am not some undergraduate studying this stuff. I am someone questioning its usefulness. And I don't mean the usefulness of the technique "critique". That one is everywhere since basically as long as people can think. People use that all the time without ever having read a single philosophical text. I question the usefulness of critical theory and postmodern philosophy.
They are not codependend at all. Which is why scientists have basically no philosophy and philosophers no science in most university curriculums. They very much don't need it. They also don't really use it, know it or understand it. And it is not just the curriculums, there haven't really been any new ideas from one field gaining traction in the other for quite some time. Or when was the last time you remember that new scientific discoveries changed the philosophical discourse meaningfully ? It doesn't even help. How is that co-dependend ?
And yes, i admit, i might be elitist here and i am fully aware that i am trashing a field i know far less about it than you. Still, shouldn't you be able to convince me of its usefulness ? I certainly could explain to some layperson why my field is useful/beneficial.
And what do you mean with this ?
OK, what is the fundamental disagreement ?
This thread was about no longer teaching critical race theory with taxpayers money. I basically say "that is good, it is not useful anyway".
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