You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

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buckethead
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You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

Post by buckethead »

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8V8rtdXnLA[/youtube]
Socrates wrote:If I am the wisest man, it is because I alone know that I know nothing.
However,
Isaac Asimov wrote:when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.


TomFurman
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Re: You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

Post by TomFurman »

I think that is Soupbone talking. I could be wrong though.
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Sua Sponte
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Re: You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

Post by Sua Sponte »

This guy's a smacked ass. Pay attention kids. This is why you don't get a degree in philosophy.


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Re: You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

Post by dead man walking »

you have no idea how wrong you are
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Sua Sponte
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Re: You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

Post by Sua Sponte »

Probably.

But you have to take pause with a guy, ignoring for the moment the irony and paradox of his thesis undermining his own credibility, who misses the point that he can deliver his message because the species that got it wrong figured out how to wiggle some electrons here, detect that wiggling at great distances, separate it from all the other wiggling electrons, or propagate light modulated using statistical coding schemes that make his words and his image decipherable, so it can be presented to an unknown audience who now knows they get it all wrong. His message at best is that we have to get it wrong before we get it right, ignoring entirely that we have the ability to figure out what's right and what's wrong.

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Re: You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

Post by Turdacious »

So positivism is horseshit? Not new, but always needs repeating in different ways. Good nontechnical lecture.
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DrDonkeyLove
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Re: You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

Post by DrDonkeyLove »

I don't care how wrong I am as long as I can oppress you for being wrongerer.
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Re: You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

Post by dead man walking »

Sua Sponte wrote:Probably.

But you have to take pause with a guy, ignoring for the moment the irony and paradox of his thesis undermining his own credibility, who misses the point that he can deliver his message because the species that got it wrong figured out how to wiggle some electrons here, detect that wiggling at great distances, separate it from all the other wiggling electrons, or propagate light modulated using statistical coding schemes that make his words and his image decipherable, so it can be presented to an unknown audience who now knows they get it all wrong. His message at best is that we have to get it wrong before we get it right, ignoring entirely that we have the ability to figure out what's right and what's wrong.
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nafod
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Re: You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

Post by nafod »

Sua Sponte wrote:Probably.

But you have to take pause with a guy, ignoring for the moment the irony and paradox of his thesis undermining his own credibility, who misses the point that he can deliver his message because the species that got it wrong figured out how to wiggle some electrons here, detect that wiggling at great distances, separate it from all the other wiggling electrons, or propagate light modulated using statistical coding schemes that make his words and his image decipherable, so it can be presented to an unknown audience who now knows they get it all wrong. His message at best is that we have to get it wrong before we get it right, ignoring entirely that we have the ability to figure out what's right and what's wrong.
If you replace "less wrong" with "more useful" then we can see the march to better and better theories.

The stuff about what we think about ourselves is priceless. So 90% think we are in the top 50%. :yawinkle:
Don’t believe everything you think.


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Re: You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

Post by Sua Sponte »

nafod wrote: If you replace "less wrong" with "more useful" then we can see the march to better and better theories.

The stuff about what we think about ourselves is priceless. So 90% think we are in the top 50%. :yawinkle:
It's a myth that hard science leads to the practical, more useful as an absolute. Steam engines taught us more about thermodynamics than thermodynamics taught us about steam engines. And thermodynamics can be rewritten in term's Shannon's information theory, a theory derived to define the practical issue of transmitting and detecting information in the presence of ubiquitous noise, which may end up teaching us more about life than biology can. This all matters because the speaker is just flat out wrong that Newton was proven wrong by QM and relativity. Both of the latter can be shown, quite rigorously, to reduce to classical mechanics in the domain of validity that Newton proposed classical mechanics. That's not a trite distinction. If you believe Newton was wrong, then don't drive across bridges or get on planes because those are designed using Newtonian principles. Dirac's equation doesn't get solved when an engineer designs the suspension on your car. The -speaker-, not Newton, got it wrong.

Turd, the mixing at will the ideas of one's self and physical law is not positivism. Entirely different levels of abstraction and, here again, the speaker got it it wrong. Horrible non-technical presentation.

It surely seems we all see ourselves as above average. Damn good thing, too. If we had any idea how hard the things we've tried over the millennium were, and that half of us are below average, we damn well wouldn't have tried them. We'd have froze to death during the ice ages knowing we stood no chance and many similar situation through our evolutionary past. Then we'd be like the other species that didn't "get it wrong" but only because they never were cognizant enough to use intellect to adapt.

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Re: You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

Post by Turdacious »

Sua Sponte wrote:Turd, the mixing at will the ideas of one's self and physical law is not positivism. Entirely different levels of abstraction and, here again, the speaker got it it wrong. Horrible non-technical presentation. .
How you mix the ideas of one's self and physical laws that you think you understand to predict the future is the nature of positivism; that other ideas come along that improve/alter the current way of thinking, or that other factors are involved that you don't understand or know about are both important. That, as I understood it, was his point. I'm assuming that he was presenting this to liberal arts types in a college, and his type of thinking is something they need to be exposed to.

Is his my favorite explanation of this idea? No.
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Re: You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

Post by Sua Sponte »

From Webster: a theory that theology and metaphysics are earlier imperfect modes of knowledge and that positive knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations as verified by the empirical sciences.

Seems we are using differing definitions.

The only thing liberal arts types will take from that is what they've always taken: Einstein was wrong and except for the part where he said everything's relative.

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Re: You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

Post by Turdacious »

Sua Sponte wrote:From Webster: a theory that theology and metaphysics are earlier imperfect modes of knowledge and that positive knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations as verified by the empirical sciences.

Seems we are using differing definitions.

The only thing liberal arts types will take from that is what they've always taken: Einstein was wrong and except for the part where he said everything's relative.
Hopefully they'll question some of the other philosophies they've been taught. Is it likely? Probably not, because the koolaid is strong with them.

I tend to use a broader definition of positivism that is more in line with a wiki history of influential positivists and trends in positivist thought. That and I spent a lot of years reading obscure Catholic philosophy which nobody here wants me to bore the forum with.
"Liberalism is arbitrarily selective in its choice of whose dignity to champion." Adrian Vermeule


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Re: You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

Post by Sua Sponte »

Fair enough.

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nafod
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Re: You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

Post by nafod »

These theories are typically used to explain or predict. Explanations really aren't necessary, predictions are where theories earn their money. You can have some pretty crazy theories that actually lead to useful results over some domains. See chiropractors for a ready example. Similar for describing how a wing generates lift. Bunch of different explanations that give useful results. None in of them are THE TRUTH as it is easy work to demonstrate where they fail.


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Re: You Have No Idea How Wrong You Are

Post by Andy83 »

I know you are all bullshit because I got an A+ in history when I was a freshman in college.
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