Moderator: Dux
However,Socrates wrote:If I am the wisest man, it is because I alone know that I know nothing.
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.
Really Big Strong Guy: There are a plethora of psychopaths among us.
Mao wrote:Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party
the internet is an illusionSua 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.
Really Big Strong Guy: There are a plethora of psychopaths among us.
If you replace "less wrong" with "more useful" then we can see the march to better and better theories.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.
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.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%.
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.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. .
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.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.
