this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
468 points (85.8% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35923 readers
937 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

To clarify here, I don't feel like I'm significantly smarter than most people, but I feel like people have a hard time doing any sort of thinking about stuff. Especially when it comes to verifying "facts."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] -5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

So our brains were crafted to intake "reality" at a specific speed and quality. We can't see things at the atomic, much less quantum reality, nor understand the massive scale of the planet, much less the universe. Most "facts" are more beliefs from what others have suggested to be, than individually researched facts. Even our scientific method is a bit wanting in this area, since if we hear X, how can we prove X? We just need to take other's word that they did the correct process, didn't lie during any steps, didn't have any bad data unknowingly, especially in a culture where reproducibility is not a high priority so most scientific papers are not thoroughly tested and retested

That's roughly our skeletal social structure around "facts", and we're heading face first into a world of deep fakes and misinformation, to an extent never seen before in humanity. So maybe we should all extend each other a bit more patience and kindly help each other through these uncertain times

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Even our scientific method is a bit wanting in this area, since if we hear X, how can we prove X?

by looking at their lab notes and repeating their experiment and seeing if we can make the same observations. if they lied about their process (see the guy that claimed he made a room temp superconductor...) they get caught out.

I think you thoroughly misunderstand the process involved. yeah, there's more emphasis on being first... but no... there's definitely still verification. Oh. and. yes. we can image atoms.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Yeah, I'd second this. The scientific method is very thorough.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Agreed, science is essentially set up as a competition such that disproving important things is also rewarded; reproducibility comes up more for niche fields

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

So thinking on this more, there are many studies that are impossible to replicate, either due to time, money, or team size. Think about weather studies, no human lives long enough, so we have to push the belief back on the original data being accurate. Human studies that span millions of people are also hard for small teams or individuals to replicate. Also hard to have a particle accelerator for most people, so we have to trust the accelerators function properly, the data collected is not malformed and the interpretations are also correct (the last bit is what we could possibly double check if we had direct access)

I love the scientific method as well, but I think we still have some limits. Even if we had infinite time, but without infinite resources we might not be able to replicate everything "scientifically proven" (and even then, due to space time curvature, it might not be possible if infinite time and infinite resources had a fixed physical point, but that is probably Einsteinian philosophy)

Also, please prove me wrong. I'd rather believe the scientific method was 100% true, no joking.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Totally agree that most of the tools are there, but how many trials have you personally duplicated? The average person?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

That doesn't make the scientific method wrong. If someone isn't following the scientific method, that's on them, not the science.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

You're right that science doesn't ever really prove anything per se. The best it can do is come up with a useful model that we can use to make predictions. The neat part is that this is extremely practical. You can take prediction X and apply it in the real world, so you don't have to take someone at face value. For example, you know the theory of electromagnetism is more or less accurate because we have phones that extensively use those principles. And if that isn't sufficient evidence, the present year is literally the best year ever for you to most easily test the theory yourself.