Scientists’ words will always be twisted, regardless of what words they use. I agree that some words seem to sow confusion even within research fields, but I worry that attempting to change things may lead to an

A book that has really stuck with me is “Merchants of a Doubt”, which looks at how often the muddying the waters comes from a handful of scientists, who are presumably getting paid a bunch to do so, but not in a way that’s easy to debunk. The problem is that science is muddy by nature, so scientists learn how to wade through mud (ideally) and work around and through it. I’m of the belief that the way forward will require for science in general to become more accessible to people in general, because I think the epistemically privileged nature of science is deepening distrust i.e. we are taught to trust science™ and only scientists are allowed to challenge other scientists. This makes sense, but I think it fosters a sense of distrust in people who I honestly can’t blame for feeling like the system doesn’t care about them.

I’m feeling like maybe blind trust in institutions might just be an untenably bad situation, because I’m a scientist and I don’t know whether scientific education in the model of "scientific communication happens when the Scientists™ come down from their ivory towers and gift the common folk with knowledge, who are not allowed to question or add to this knowledge, unless they become a member of Science™ (or they are a person to whom science is done to

Thanks for this comment, I hadn’t thought about it this way before. I had realised about how being gay is framed as a thing you do rather than a thing you are, because I have a friend who is an ex-benedictine monk, and they explained about how their vow of chastity meant they were basically “one of the good ones”. A large part of why they left was because their rhetoric was “everyone has sinful desires in them and turning away from those is an important challenge”, but the unspoken part was that his gayness made his desires extra bad, like there was just some innately bad thing in him.

And of course they would apply this same logic to gender. As you say, it makes more sense when you try to see it from their angle. I think that’s important to do if we hope to ever refute them

A few posts above this one, I saw a post about how German bridges are falling apart, so your comment has done me psychic damage. Man, things feel grim.

Theme Hospital is one of the greats of an era. (N.b. there’s a mod called CorsixTH which fixes a lot of issues with the original game (mostly age related clunkiness)

You’ve got to be careful with rolling your eyes, because the parallelism of the two eyes means that the eye roll can be twice as powerful ^1

(1) If measured against the silly baseline of a single eyeroll

Oh damn, I just lost the game too, and now I’m thinking about the game as if it were a virus - like, I reckon we really managed to flatten the curve for a few years there, but it continues to circulate so we haven’t been able to eradicate it

I saw some previous news coverage of the Devs saying they’d rather players pirate it than have it spoiled for them, and I went in blind and bought it full price. I don’t generally play this kind of game but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Finland is very good for people who hate smalltalk.

I love stories like this because it makes me reflect on random people I’ve seen who have stuck in my memory for years who probably never noticed me. Makes me wonder if anyone remembers me for something random like this

Social constructivism applied to science argues that an objective, observer-independent reality doesn’t exist, (or that if it does, it’s not accessible by humans, which is functionally the same thing). Under that framework, then whenever we talk about gravity, we’re not talking about some objective truth, but our attempts to model what we perceive as an objective truth. Hell, the only way we’re able to have this conversation at all is because I wrote “gravity is a social construct” and you understood what I was referencing enough to disagree.

Incredible

What is your understanding of a social construct? I wanna make sure we’re on the same page about definitions

I shouldn’t have left my previous statement without any elaboration — that was a pretty inflammatory comment to make and I apologise.

When I say “gravity is a social construct”, part of what I’m getting at is that the natural world is distinct from scientific knowledge we create when attempting to model the natural world, and that our scientific knowledge is, by necessity, socially mediated.

I like gravity as an example of this because of how fundamental it is: even animals have some level of intuitive understanding of gravity — they don’t need to understand what parabolic motion is to be able to demonstrate it when they jump over things.

But also, our understanding of gravity has vastly changed over the years. In the 1800s, astronomers had measured Mercury’s orbit so precisely that they found it to be inconsistent with what Newton’s Law of Universal Gravity would predict, so they figured there had to be another planet closer to the Sun. Turns out there wasn’t though, and it was only after Einstein’s theory of relativity that Mercury’s weird orbit could be explained.

They had good reason to guess that another planet was responsible for Mercury’s orbit though, because the same guy who made that guess (a French astronomer, Urbain le Verrier) had actually predicted the existence of Neptune just a few years earlier; he had used Newtonian gravity to analyse the orbit of Uranus and found that it was slightly off from what observers had been measuring, and deduced that there must be another planet that nobody had seen yet that was causing these perturbations.

These two examples show two different ways that we can respond to experimental observations not matching with our theoretical understanding: sometimes it’s productive to assume our current theory is correct and that our observations are wrong or insufficient in some way, and sometimes we fix the disparity between what we see and what we know by amending our theories, like we did when we learned the limits of Newtonian gravity. Choosing which hypothesis to investigate is how science (and scientific knowledge) is socially constructed.

Disclaimer: I’m a biochemist, not an astrophysicist, so talking about gravity isn’t my primary domain. Many of these ideas are articulated far better in this video essay by Dr Fatima (and I suspect some of my phrasing is subconsciously borrowed from this video — this is bad citation practice on my part)

“vendored my library”

I’m unfamiliar with this phrase, are you able to explain what it means (or point me towards an explanation)? Is it relating to forking?

Anki is incredible for learning, it’s one of my favourite tools.

If you’re able to, make your own flashcards— it makes a huge difference. Bonus tip, if you’re making your own flashcards, it can be useful to use pictures rather than a language you already know for the answer. For example, if I was making a card for the word “apple” in French, I’d have one side saying “une pomme”, and another side with a picture of an apple. It makes it so that the new language isn’t mediated by English as much, and I’ve found I get better at thinking in that language much quicker (especially for languages with grammar that’s different to other languages I’ve studied)

I read this article a few months ago that I found quite interesting: Original link Unpaywalled link

The manufacturer in this blames the DEA, and whilst I don’t trust a pharmaceutical company to do anything other than ruthlessly maximise profits, in this case I’m inclined to believe this depiction of the DEA as the overly persnickety bad guy (because I have even less reason to trust the DEA)

I’d argue that cops existing also counts as “doing harm” to the people who would be cops. I remember a while back when I learned about how cops are trained (stuff that causes them to see everyone as a potential criminal who wants to kill them), I felt profoundly sad because as well as the harm that the cops cause as a result of this, it also just seems like a terrible way to live. I honestly feel sorry for cops

For one, I think that you should be told when you’re rejected from a job. The uncertainty of waiting is one of the worst parts of job hunting in my opinion, and it’s made worse by the fact I can’t just assume that if I haven’t heard anything, I haven’t got the job, because some places have hiring processes that seem to last for months. I get that if you’re offered a job months down the line, they probably hired someone else, fired them and are now moving down their list of next best candidates, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to keep people in the dark for so long.

Wow, I knew chiropractors were quacks, but I didn’t know it was this bad. Thanks for sharing this; I’m sorry that you didn’t have this information when you most needed it.

Gravity is a social construct