It’s worse than that imo. Calling bullshit on scientific findings is frequently treated as heresy.
There its more about reputation of a source than the actual facts, because few have the ability to evaluate the latter. Actually, if they spent even a little bit of time and thought they might actually be able to, it's just that almost nobody does. When the interest in "science" is to read publications for the general public, but never touch any of the by now quite numerous deeper equally easily available resources e.g. in the form of courses. For example, sooo many people interested in quantum physics articles - how many bother, even after years, to just go e.g. to edx (https://www.edx.org/learn/quantum-physics-mechanics -- or, archived, https://www.edx.org/course/quantum-mechanics-for-everyone specifically) and just take a course?
At the very least the class should be able to get through the two-slit experiment, EPR, and Bell's tests with a clear point being that nobody currently understands "how" entanglement works at the physical level.
I always found the name weird because it didn't seem particularly geared towards engineering needs.
Your comment is seriously trivializing that experience. Studying quantum mechanics is a multi year effort of serious study for them, not just taking a course on edx.
> ...the basic ideas of quantum mechanics with a method that requires no complicated math beyond taking square roots
A 6 week online course, taken at your leisure.
Please do read comments before you reply, next time. I don't need another reddit.
It's not about putting in years of effort for a Master in Physics - it's about using the effort already invested, but instead of always not-learning, just START taking even the most basic course. I linked one, and such are very easy to find.
Sorry, but such an arrogant reply makes me a bit mad. I provided good links and you ignored everything - thereby helping to support exactly my point. People are lazy, even with good resources available at their fingertips, or even in front of them, not reading what the author wrote but what their own brain after lots of processing and filtering very freely interprets into it.
False^
From the faq:
> Q: What level of math is needed for this class?
> A: High school algebra and trigonometry.
the average person does not have this level of mathematics mastered
I’m sure the content is good, but I have no way to evaluate that without actually going through the course. I still highly doubt it’s claim that you’ll learn qm “better than Einstein” from it.
The people that complain about scientific findings being held in to high esteem usually have no clue about the topic they're talking about and are petulant that their uninformed opinion based on their feelings isn't taken seriously.
The people who insist that anything "peer reviewed" * must be / needs to be gospel are outside science, almost by definition. A few have credentials but are not functioning professionals; some see themselves as lay champions of science; others see themselves as wise lay critics of science. None of them have almost anything relevant to say about how science is doing, because they literally don't know what's under the hood.
*OMG
Be prepared for disappointment; be prepared for vicious attacks. Expect that the power structures of the establishment will make things uncomfortable to you. But continue on, humbly collecting your data and showing your thinking.
I've watched several key paradigms fall after 20-30 years of dogged work.
Fields that lack reproducability, replace this (i.e. truth) by community consensus which is enforced, in parts, by threats.
Fear was made into a virtue, and every government body on earth discovered powers they didn’t know they had. It would play out same or worse, no one learned anything.
COVID 1 managed to die out before becoming a pandemic. That's one reason people treated SARS-COV-2 as harmless until it already was a pandemic.
Epidemiologists and public health planners learned a lot from both. But when SARS-COV-3 comes around, they will still not have learned how to deal with the large numbers of people who will say it's not a problem even after it has caused the death of millions.
If you look at China, that is basically the worst nightmare of anyone who expresses doubts about how much we should trust the government to handle a pandemic. The situation is much different from ours no doubt, but it cannot be said that it's totally unreasonable to be scared of a government using a crisis to enforce authoritarian policies (what about terrorism? or drugs?).
IMO this is the same problem as the current left vs right divide in America: no one wants to concede that the other side might have a point. Instead, they'd rather make snide comments about how the other side is a bunch of children/stupid/racist/whatever, instead of understanding that other humans may have been raised different and have different opinions. There is no attempt to resolve, just overpower.
Consider a similar scenario: climate change. Either this is a real, serious thing that needs to be dealt with, or it is a hoax. Whichever one it is, many millions of people constituting at least a large minority are wildly deluded.
There's not a ton of room for middle ground. If climate change is not real, then it is a vast power-grab on an utterly unprecedented scale that would justify any efforts to thwart it. If it is real, then the widespread belief in that power grab is a dangerous delusion.
Public policy responses do need to take everything into account, including people who believe things that are wrong. But science allows only so much flexibility there, and when the scales have been upped to the point where the alternatives are "numerous deaths" or "a vast hoax for perpetrating harm on millions", there's not a ton of room for middle ground.
Resolution is not always possible. I wish it were, but it is not. Somebody here is behaving very, very badly, and it may be more effective to simply ignore them -- assuming you can figure out which one they are. If they complain about being ignored, there's no alternative to treating it as a deadweight loss.
In my experience, even my very pro-vaccine friends eventually became more and more unsure whether the government was doing the right thing as the pandemic went on. The fact that we're debating this topic but not climate change also shows it might have more merit than it.
Also as a small-scale experiment: whenever I post these kinds of opinions my comment score does a funny dance where I can see a lot of people are up/downvoting, but the comment score basically stays at 1. That shows that HN itself is pretty split on this issue!
Yeah, I do need some more explanation before understanding this one. Are you talking about the use of social media for propaganda? If that's the case, I have some news for you, the pandemics only destroyed it, it was being used that way for years already.
> destroying small businesses in favor of large corporations
And that one is completely vague.
* Despite taking literally daily tests, I was not allowed into any establishment inside Germany since I did not have a vaccine pass. The only place I could go for months was the supermarket -- it got so bad I left Germany temporarily get away from the measures.
* Lockdowns and curfews abound. My grandparents (not in Germany) were not allowed outside the house except for 1 hour a day, and they had to write down their route exactly in case the police checked them.
* This is from the people, not the government, but the amount of people who would blindly say "trust the science behind the vaccines" is.. insane. Do they understand the concept of science at all? You cannot prove there are no long term effects of a newly developed vaccine, also using a newly developed method of creating vaccines, without an experiment. No matter how smart the scientists are. Trust is not a thing in science. (The same can be said of COVID, but then _let me make my own choice_, based on my own risk factors)
From "What makes Germans so orderly?" https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20200531-what-makes-germa...
On the high-speed train gliding smoothly from Berlin to Düsseldorf, a young man started chatting to me. He eventually asked, “What are some of the cultural differences you’ve noticed between Germans and Americans?”
As if on cue, a middle-aged woman hovered over us and gave a harsh, “Shh!” with her finger pressed against her lips. She pointed to a sign of a mobile phone with a cross through it, indicating that we were in the Ruhebereich, the quiet carriage of the train.
“You must be quiet,” she said, before returning to her seat.
“That,” I said to the man sitting next to me. “That’s different.”
From "The lines a German won't cross" https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/weekinreview/05KULISH.htm...
As their eyes alight on the small sign that goes with it, which reads “barefoot zone” in German, grown men freeze as though they have hit a force field, or had an electric shock administered for being foolish enough to try to pass it still shod. But I can not say what the repercussions would be. This being Germany, I have never seen anyone wearing shoes on the far side of the line and certainly would not risk it myself.
These are articles published in respectable, mainstream, western news. I'm not alone in thinking that German society is somewhat stricter than most other western societies.
You are right in saying Germans love to follow rules. The restrictions in Italy were also not as hard as in Germany. I gave the example of Germany since that's where I lived during the pandemic, but Poland for example I heard was similar to Germany, and much of Eastern Europe was _worse_ (since for them it was properly life or death -- all the doctors left, and the medical infrastructure is in shambles).
edit: actually, those restrictions did get tightened, like in Germany: https://italygreenpass.com/new-decree-on-super-green-pass-re...
Italy is not associated with strictness or rules, obviously.
edit2: Germany also counts natural infections as 3G+/Superpass. I didn't get naturally infected for a _long_ time.
https://italygreenpass.com/how-do-i-get-a-green-pass-for-tra...
>Italian citizens and permanent residents can get a super green pass when they get vaccinated or recover from Covid. The green pass is the equivalent of the EU Digital COVID Certificate, issued to EU citizens and residents as digital proof that a person has either:
- been vaccinated against COVID-19
- recovered from COVID-19
- received a negative test result
I don't disagree that governments have imposed restrictive COVID measures, especially in Europe. I just am pointing out some limitations and caveats in your examples that makes them less damning than they seem as supposed "abuses of power". At a high level, I agree with you.
Edit: the shift from "use of power" to talking about "abuse of power" was itself a strawman by marcosdumay. We all got baited.
About the cultists repeating "trust the science" or even better, the attack "you don't believe on the science!", yeah, those are about as stupid as the people doubting the main vaccines are safe up to now.
* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-19/london-pu...
* https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-55424855
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/boris-johnson-...
* https://www.elmundo.es/espana/2020/03/13/5e6b844e21efa0dd258...
* https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/poland-in-covid-19-lock...
* https://www.wsj.com/articles/italy-bolsters-quarantine-check...
I could do this all day. I find it hard to believe that you genuinely don't know about any of that.
Not the U.S. though right? I guess Europeans had a much stricter lockdown.
You're right though, I genuinely didn't know it was so strict in Europe and Australia.
Where did those last after the emergency?
The real bitch of it is, that if we would now be facing a much more dangerous virus, people might not take it seriously enough due to covid turning out to be not as dangerous as initially thought.
** Try to avoid insults like
fake quote> They are a bunch of liars _or_ morons
in spite you think they are a bunch of liars _and_ morons
** Avoid oneliners
Try to expand the explanation to 3 or 5 paragraph. Explain clearly what they did, what they claim and the difference. I try to use a ELI25 level (the reader has a technical degree, but not in the subject).
** Explain if it break some physics rule
Some articles make claims that break a physic rule. Some even give a wrong explanation about how they are somehow not bounded by the rule. Explain what they are breaking it. Try to give a high level explanation (like it breaks the conservation of energy) and a low level explanation (exactly in which part they are miscounting the energy).
** Expect to make a few mistakes.
I always make a mistake in a detail. Luckily most of the time someone will make make a comment fixing it. Acknowledge the error, thanks the comment, and remember it
** If it's bad enough it will be reposted :(
The good part, is that you can reuse your comment, with all the fix contributed by other users, and perhaps improve it a little.
In the age of twitter, you expect paragraphs? Your comment is longer than a lot of news coverage, or at least, what passes as news coverage these days. You can try to be the change you want to see in the world, but this is like arguing with a fence post. As the audience becomes predominately younger, the trends of the times will come with them. You can "educate" till you're blue in the face, but being the internet, it's not going to listen.
Because in my experience a large portion of the HN crowd comes here for the civil and nuanced debate.
> To a first approximation, the internet is wrong about everything anyhow, so for sanity's sake we all need to learn how to let go. Believe me, I know that's not easy, but it's what we all have to do if we want a forum that doesn't suck.
It's about a personal insult in that thread, but I think it can be extrapolated to comment length. I agree that many news coverage are bad, or just a copy&paste of the press release. It's difficult to change the world, but at least we can try to have a nice discussion here. And part of the trick to get a nice discussion is to encourage comments of the correct length, not too short, not too long.
Just yelling "bullshit" certainly is, and hn has a bit of a positivity bias, nonetheless, comments that say something is BS and explain why are usually reasonably well recieved.
Interestingly, it also has a bit of negativity bias. This means that any story, however anodine or ground-breaking, will have:
- a group of people using some motivated reasoning to show how obviously terrible the thing is and how clever they are;
- a group of people arguing that the thing is the best since warm water and is going to solve everything (if only reality would behave).
This makes a lot of discussions simultaneously very interesting and utterly depressing.
If you unconditionally accept bullshit but require an explanation in order to reject it, then you're going to wind up believing a lot of bullshit.
Generally i go with the imputus is on the person making the claim. I want the original person to back up their claim before i will care, but i also want anyone counterclaiming BS to also back up their claim before i care.
Also in an ideal world you shouldn't just passively consume arguments on the internet, but do actual reading on the subject. Neither side on an internet debates actually owes you anything.
I disagree, the person trying to convince you of something always owes you an explanation.
Actual reading on something, while a good thing, never resolves an argument because you can't replace the person you are arguing with's premises with a generic premise from somewhere else and come to a reasonable conclusion.
Oh definitely not. I’m happy to make one post explaining my position… then walk away.
I discovered and internet superpower… it doesn’t bother me if you are wrong.
Nope, nobody owes you anything on the Internet.
You shouldn't believe them, of course. But you need to have the tools to figure it out for yourself.
If a comment explains why something is bullshit in a way that readers can learn from, and is reasonably free of extraneous noise such as personal attacks, fulmination, and so on, that's a positive contribution. The trick is to (1) add correct, relevant information, and (2) avoid poisoning the ecosystem—like a healthy immune system that can go after pathogens without destroying normal cells.