What is Something Scientific that you just don't believe in at all?
EDIT: Let's cool it with the downvotes, dudes. We're not out to cut funding to your black hole detection chamber or revoke the degrees of chiropractors just because a couple of us don't believe in it, okay? Chill out, participate with the prompt and continue with having a nice day. I'm sure almost everybody has something to add.
Dark matter. Sounds like a catch all designed to make a math model work properly.
You’re not wrong. According to the current scientific understanding of the universe, that’s exactly what it is. They just gave it a badass name.
Do you want slightly darker matter? Cause that's how you get slightly darker matter!
Yeh, that's how the scientific method works.
Observations don't support a model, or a model doesn't support observations.
Think of a reason why.
Test that hypothesis.
Repeat until you think it's correct. Hopefully other people agree with you.
People are also working on modifying General Relativity and Newtonian Dynamics to try and fix the model, while other people are working on observing dark matter directly (instead of it's effects) to further prove the existing models.
https://youtu.be/3o8kaCUm2V8
We are in the "testing hypothesis" stage. And have been for 50ish years
"Repeat until you think it’s correct. Hopefully other people agree with you."
Dark Energy has entered the chat.
For those with time to spare: study all you can about neutron stars (including magnetars and quark stars), then go back to "black holes" (especially their event horizons and beyond) and there's a good chance you'll feel like a lot of aspects in BH theories are mythologies written in math - all of it entertaining, nonetheless.
For those who seek extra credit, study zero-point energy before reflecting on cosmic voids, galaxy filaments, galaxies, gravitationally bound celestial systems, quantum chromodynamics and neutrinos. Then, ponder the relativity between neutron stars, zero-point energy and hadron quark sea.
Yeah, it's legitimate science being done, but some people treat it as sacred and would fight you to no end because they say Dark Matter is some certainty, rather than approaching it with the proper scientific skepticism or with a statistical outlook.
For the most part believers in Dark Matter are cool, but a vocal minority practically worship it as the only possible truth.
All of physics is a "math model". One we attempt to falsify. And when a scientist does prove some part of the model wrong, the community leaps up in celebration and gets to working on the fix or the next.
Dark matter started as exactly a catchall designed to make the model work properly. We started with a very good model, but when observing extreme phenomenon (in this case the orbits of stars of entire galaxies), the model didn't fit. So either there was something we couldn't see to explain the difference ("dark" matter), or else the model was wrong and needed modification.
There's also multiple competing theories for what that dark matter is, exactly. Everything from countless tiny primordial black holes to bizarre, lightyear-sized standing waves in a quantum field. But the best-fitting theories that make the most sense and contradict the fewest observations & models seem to prefer there be some kind of actual particle that interacts just fine with gravity, but very poorly or not at all with electromagnetism. And since we rely on electromagnetism for nearly all of our particle physics experiments that makes whatever this particle is VERY elusive.
Worth observing that once, a huge amount of energy produced by stars was an example of a dark energy. Until we figured out how to detect neutrinos. Then it wasn't dark anymore.
In short, you're exactly right. It's a catch-all to make the math model work properly. And that's not actually a problem.
My personal dark matter theory is that 80% of all stars are surrounded by Dyson Spheres.
I know, I was so hype a few years ago when a new gravity well model supposedly eliminated the need for Dark Matter, but recently it's been in the news as a scandal that also doesn't fix everything.
Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). It's been the dissenting voice in the modern Great Debate about dark matter.
On one side are the dark matter scientists who think there's a vast category of phenomenon out there FAR beyond our current science. That the universe is far larger and more complex than we currently know, and so we must dedicate ourselves to exploring the unexplored. The other side, the
On the other you have the MOND scientists, who hope they can prevent that horizon from flying away from them by tweaking the math on some physical laws. It basically adds a term to our old physics equations to explain why low acceleration systems experience significantly different forces than the high-acceleration systems with which we are more familiar -- though their explanations for WHY the math ought be tweaked I always found totally unsatisfactory -- to make the current, easy-to-grock laws fit the observations.
With the big problem being that it doesn't work. It explains some galactic motion, but not all. It sometimes fits wide binary star systems kind of OK, but more often doesn't. It completely fails to explain the lensing and motion of huge galactic clusters. At this point, MOND has basically been falsified. Repeatedly, predictions it made have failed.
Dark matter theories -- that is, the theories that say there are who new categories of stuff out there we don't understand at all -- still are the best explanation. That means we're closer to the starting line of understanding the cosmos instead of the finish line many wanted us to be nearing. But I think there's a razor in there somewhere, about trusting the scientist who understands the limits of our knowledge over the one who seems confident we nearly know everything.
There's no scandal. Some people who are leading proponents of MOND theory recently published a new paper using what might be the best scenario we currently have to detect MOND (wide binary stars), and their more precise calculations...are not consistent with MOND. They published evidence against the very theory they were betting on.
Great example, and this brings up a great point about this topic - there's a difference between what's a scientific pursuit vs. what is current established scientific understanding.
Dark matter is a topic being studied to try to find evidence of it existing, but as of now there's is zero physical evidence that it actually exists.
You would like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbmJkMhmrVI
I am curious if the opposite of dark matter could be true; while dark matter inside galaxies would explain galactical motion, couldn't the same be explained by something repulsive BETWEEN galaxies? If the latter were the case, it would also explain dark energy.
The observations of systems like the Bullet Cluster imply that dark matter is actual material -- baryonic matter. Stuff that exists in specific locations and has mass. Modifying the math of the physical laws does not explain these observations without absolutely going into contortions where dark matter explains them quite elegantly.
I'm with you here, I don't understand dark matter and dark energy and the expansion of the universe. We see shit moving all the time in the universe. I'm still not convinced we just don't understand the motion of the universe outside our envelope of observation and it's explainable with conventional matter and energy. Im trying to learn a lot tho. I'm gonna watch that video someone posted to you.
I mean that is pretty much correct. We don’t know what it is, but we can see it’s effect
Even more so Dark Energy
Interesting tidbit for you. You'd think if it was a math model not working properly that could be explained away with adjustments to the model that we'd be wrong looking at all galaxies. And yet there are galaxies out there that appear to be missing dark matter!
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/mystery-of-galaxys-missing-dark-matter-deepens
https://www.space.com/galaxy-no-dark-matter-cosmic-puzzle
It doesn't solve the problem but, it adds to the intrigue I think.
Can we not push more anti science rhetoric please
This is like the second or third post I have seen in the past week talking about “belief” in science. Science isn’t about belief, it’s about understanding. Maybe this post should be, “What facts are you questioning because you don’t understand the underlying data?”
Chill science should be questioned otherwise it's not science
The top comment is a proper debate about leading scientific theories, and the most downvoted comment is somebody who thinks the moon landing is faked, both of which have healthy and honest debate with goodwill from both sides.
This entire post is about Skepticism, which is an integral part of Science. To shut down the conversation would be Anti-Science.
Chiropracty isn't "scientific".
It never was.
My mum has a severe bad back and she had to go on a fortnight physio retreat thing. There were a couple of people there that had a mild back problem, went to a chiropractor and ended up with severe chronic pain. Ill never forget that and have never been to one because I don’t see it as worth the risk
That mothers shouldn't co-sleep with infants. Every other primate I know of co-sleeps with their offspring. Until very recently every human mother co-slept with her infants, and in like half of the globe people still do. Many mothers find it incredibly psychologically stressful to sleep without their infant because our ancestors co-slept every generation for hundreds of thousands of years.
I would bet money that forcing infants to sleep alone has negative developmental effects.
The reason for this is that we tend to sleep deeper now than our ancestors. Because of this, we are more prone to roll onto a baby, and not wake up.
It can still be done, you just have to avoid things like alcohol, that stop you waking. You also need to make sure your sleeping position is safe. Explaining this to exhausted parents is unreliable, however. Hence the advice Americans seem to be given.
Fyi, if people want a halfway point, you can get cosleeping cribs. They attach to the side of the bed. Your baby can be close to you, while also eliminating the risk of suffocating them.
Maybe if you can avoid stuff like alcohol (easy for most) but also you can avoid sleep deprivation - way harder with little to no maternal leave and forget about paternal leave here in the US.
If you (Royal you, not parent commenter) can live with yourself if a tragedy occurs on your watch while you are flaunting medical advice, then go ahead and risk it, but otherwise yes! Buy the bedside attached crib!
The other thing is SIDS, if the baby can't lift their head from a suffocation position they suffocate.
We have ours sleep in a cosleep crib beside the bed so you get the closeness and can make contact in the night.
What I've heard was that it is to build independence for the child, so the parent can leave the child to sleep and do something else. It depends on the age I guess.
I’ve always thought the classic Hunter - Gatherer gender division of labor was bullshit. I think that theory has gone out of fashion but I always thought it seemed like a huge assumption. It seems so much more plausible to me that everybody hunted some days (like during migration patterns) and gathered others. Did they even have the luxury of purely specialized roles before agriculture and cities?
Another reason I think that is because prehistoric hunting was probably way different than we imagine. Like, we imagine tribes of people slaying mammoths with only spears. It was probably more traps and tricks. Eventually, using domesticated dog or a trained falcon or something.
You can read the dawn of everything book which is a very interesting take at a lot of those assumptions which are indeed false. This book goes deep into the ideological bias scientists have when interpreting evidence.
The hunter-gatherer gender division is actually proven wrong now.
Also, hunting mammoths was a very rare activity. I would expect it to be some kind of desperate activity in fact. People weren't more crazy than we are, they would rather live than to be trampled by a mammoth.
That makes sense. There were tons of other smaller creatures around, why would you mess with something that's like a boar up sized 30 times.
I always assumed that hunter gatherer division was mostly down to the individual, some traits make some better at hunting than others.
I struggle to locate static objects, I for the fucking life of me just can't see it. I'll be looking for something and either look right over it or walk past it multiple times
But if I go outside and look in the trees I can spot all the squirrels within seconds. Not like that's a talent or anything special, but my point is that I'd starve if I had to look for food in the brush, and likely I imagine these types of traits are what defined who did what job, meaning who was good at what, and likely considering lots of hunting was endurance based and not skill based at all, then most adults probably participated to some degree.
I've also gone shroom hunting and had to come back empty handed because I can't see the god damned things.
i'm rather convinced that stuff like ADHD and autism was at least co-opted by evolution (if not outright created by it) because tribes with a certain percentage of it had an advantage.
For example ADHD seems great for foraging, that provides the stimulation that is desired and the ability to completely lose track of time is pretty nice to stave away boredom from trudging through the forest for hours on end;
and autism is pretty obvious in how a defining feature is having special interests that you LOVE doing and get extremely competent in.
I myself have autism and i have no doubt that in a hunter-gatherer tribe i would have been having a blast creating tools and stuff like wicker baskets and trying to improve them as much as i can.
When you start looking at older debunked theories that lasted for a long time you can see the human bias in them. Not just a human bias but a a western bias.
Two that stick out for me:
Trees compete for sunlight - I think it makes sense to us humans because we compete for resources but in truth trees are way more 'community' based
The male alpha wolf - It's how the western world has been organized for centuries so it's easy to see that in a wolf pack even though its not true.
Hunting was mostly running a marathon while tracking until the animal collapses.
No reason to believe women didn't participate in that.
I don't think I ever heard that hunters and gatherers would have been divided by gender.
This has to be a troll comment. I'm utterly bemused.
I am pretty sure that modern archeology agrees with you in at least some ways (know an archeologist, not an archeologist). I don't have any specific evidence for mammoth trapping but there are these really interesting stone funnel traps that were used to trap gazelle herds https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2011/04/ancient-gazelle-killing-zones.html
Also consider how long humans have walked the earth as hunter gatherers. Agriculture goes back to around 10.000 BCE. The entirety of time between 300.000 BCE and 10.000 BCE was likely (mostly) spent as hunter gatherers. Imagine in how many ways local roles and culture could have differed in that time!
Haha, if fucking mammoths were scared of falcons then they deserved to go extinct
Op: what are some inherently enraging opinions that fly in the face of everything we know about logic?
Also op: omg guys stop downvoting these inherently enraging opinions. I implicitly made that rule ...triple stamped it no erasies!!
I'm going to give you a couple examples:
I think talking about these things in a welcoming environment can both alleviate certain less scientific beliefs while also giving a great idea of how the general public views certain topics. Also it's fun. There is a guy in here who thinks maybe a dude can fight a bear, not that they should.
Yeah to be fair a few of the responses were that. I just don't know a way to keep away the oxygen consuming idiot opinions like the woman so proud of doubting the moon landing.
Basically if you've got a logical explanation I can get on board with your idea as a hypothesis, but some of these replies are not that and are insane.
aspartame
This reminds me of the research on saccharine that involved massive doses of it in mice. The belief that pumping huge amounts into a mouse can substitute for lower levels over long times always struck me as odd. Most systems, especially biological ones, have a critical level where systems fail. An example is the body's ability to process toxins like alcohol in the liver. If you overwhelm the enzymes in the liver you get far different results than if you gave low levels over long periods.
Of course, a French study later showed at large scales people who consumed aspartame were slightly more likely to develop cancer in the following decades
If we're gonna be correct about this, the study showed that there's potentially an increased risk of developing cancer but there is a lot of data that still needs to be analyzed, so it's a bit early to draw conclusions.
cut funding to your black hole detection chamber
I knew you'd come for my fucking black hole detection chamber you swine
Curses! You've found me out! I'LL GET YOU NEXT TIME! MYA~HEHEHE!
First they came for the black hole detection chambers and I said nothing because I was researching Computer sciences.
Then they came for my HPC clusters
Yes we should be out to revoke chiropractors' degrees, but I'm not sure why that's coming up here since you asked about science specifically. Which chiropractic is not.
No one should be ok with people who run around pretending to be doctors and occasionally paralyzing babies and crippling people by trying to work magic. It's also revolting that any of it is covered by insurance and health plans, which materially takes real resources away from real medicine for people.
I was making an obvious strawman with that statement to poke fun about how defensive people were getting.
The idea that animals do not have feelings. I don't believe complex thought is necessary for emotion. You can take away all our human reasoning, and we would still get mad, or sad, or happy at things.
It's definitely NOT science that animals don't have feelings. Maybe 50 years ago.
Now, there's a concerted effort to discern thoughts and emotions in animals.
I don't think there is a scientific concensus on this. We are constantly finding previously unknown similarities between the minds of other animals and humans. I've put together a small lemmy community on animal communication and digital bioacoustics, it is somewhat related to this stuff.
If anything I think emotional response is the least advanced part of a human mind. However, if we're talking about brains of sharks, small lizards, or ants then I think emotion would be a word with a lot more nuance than whatever it is they do.
The range of what "emotion" can cover is very broad as well. Like feeling good or scared and shame or respect.
I have remind my partner that dogs don't share all of the complex emotions we do or at least it's a lot easier to deal with them if you act like they don't.
I.E. my dog is never going to care if feeding is fair, and they aren't going to listen to you out of respect about it. They will however eat a certain way because the like being obedient and knowing their place in the pact, but that takes repetition, rewards and punishments.
that comes from religion not science
Bees play with toys and do happy actions when given toys. I'm of the opinion that some form of internal experience extends at least as far down the brain size scale as at least some bugs, and might extend into single celled organisms and plants.
It's scientifically proven that rats giggle when tickled:
It's very widely accepted in science that animals feel an array of emotions.
The moon not being made of cheese. The moon is in fact made of cheese. I do not care how much a bunch of nerds insist that it is not made of cheese. I am objectively correct about this and anyone who disagrees is wrong.
I call on the FDA, USDA, or whatever agency to use their power to add lunar regolith and all otger moon constituents to the accepted definition of cheese. I also suggest all other countries to just take our word for it since only us and the nazis have set foot on the moon and who are you going to trust? Us or the nazis?
nazis
I'm dying 💀
Lots of stuff from both social sciences and economics.
Social science suffers greatly from the Replication crisis
Economics relies largely on so-called natural experiments that have poor variable controls.
Both often come with policy agendas pushing for results.
I take their conclusions with a grain of salt.
Economics is purely based on assumption, at it's core. There's no proof the assumption is true, and recent trends seem to point towards it being false.
Economics assumes people are rational spenders.
But the "economy" is often just represented by the stock market, which is both not rational, and not a good measure of the economy. It's a great indicator of how much wealth is being extracted from the working class, but it's shit at representing how most of the money is being spent.
Economics all makes sense when you understand that they are being paid to produce data backing up the position of the person paying them.
Social "sciences" are the epitome of opinions being pushed as fact via the appeal to authority fallacy. Much of what falls under that label are baseless belief systems built upon towers of lies
We don't need more anti science rhetoric in this world. Why even start this thread?
IQ score is a sham - the tests are quite fallible, and historically they were used as a justification to discriminate against people who are poorer or with worse access to education. Nowadays, I see it quite a lot in the context of eugenics, where some professors and philosophers attribute poor people being poor due to their low intelligence (low IQ score), and that they can't be helped while rich people got where they are due to their intelligence (as in they have a high IQ score on average).
Science articles that reference paywalled journals you can't actually read. Most of them are probably making stuff up because they know no one will be able to call them out on it.
First, let me start off by saying that I agree with what I believe your actual premise is (or should be) - that articles in science journals should not be behind paywalls. I’m strictly against the practice, I think it’s a massive scam, and so does everyone I know who does research. I have paid to open source every paper I’ve published. Well, not me personally. But thank you taxpayers for funding me to not only do my work but to make sure you have access to it too. I’ll talk about this more at the end.
With that out of the way, I’d like to mention a couple of things. First, the scam is on the part of the academic journals, not the researchers or the journalists writing the articles. It’s not part of some scam to hide the fact that the journalist is making crap up. If the authors were unwilling or unable to pay the fees for open sourcing their papers ($3-5k when I was doing it several years ago), then you’re either going to be in an institution that has a subscription to the journal or you’re going to have to find some way of acquiring it.
Search for the exact title in quotes. Sometimes the Google Scholar engine will return with the default link to the pay walled page, sometimes it’ll have a link to a prepublication server. Arxiv is one of the more popular ones for physics, math, and computer science of all stripes. Step 2 is to go to the institution web page of the first author. Very often, researchers will keep an updated list of their publications with links to the PDFs. If that still doesn’t work, you can write the author and request the paper. We love those emails. We love it when people read our work, especially when they’re so excited that they wrote to request a copy. None of these involve copyright infringement. That prepub that you get is the same paper (usually but you can confirm with the author if that’s a question), but possibly without the masthead and layout from the journal. It’s still cited the same.
So, why are so many journals behind a paywall? Because the publishers want to monetize what today should be a cost free (or minimal) set of transactions. Here’s what happens:
As you can see, the role of the publisher is very small in the overall amount of effort put into getting an idea from my head into yours. At one point publishers had an argument that the small circulation numbers for things like The Journal of Theoretical Biology justified their $21k/year institutional subscription price.
And I shouldn’t have saved this til the end, but for the one person who skimmed down to see where all of this was going:
Any science article / press release that cites a paper whether or not you have access to it at least is citing something that has undergone peer review. Peer review can only do so much and journal quality has a wide range, but it’s about the best we have. If it’s a big enough deal to actually matter and the media in question has wide enough reach to care, then it will get back to the author who can then clarify.
Appreciate the thoughtful and in-depth response. My worry is more that a science article's editorialized interpretation of the paper may be wrong or misleading, than that the public isn't very able to scrutinize the quality of science in the paper itself. Waiting for a possible email response from a researcher is pretty much always going to be a little too high effort for someone wanting to spend a few minutes comparing claims in the article and claims in the paper to potentially call bullshit on discrepancies between them in an online comment.
Thank you for the write up, very interesting!
To add onto that, whenever a newspaper says "based on the findings of researchers at [Random University]" but they don't list the citation anywhere at all. That is just evil, but somehow industry standard.
I've had a field day while writing my thesis recently, realising I could bypass the paywalls by accessing the papers through the university proxy. It's still bs, though, because it leaves this stuff only accessible to researchers and not your regular people who may be interested.
Though like PrinceWith999Enemies said, many paper writers will happily send you a copy if you email them about it.
Unfortunately, most scientific papers are behind paywalls, especially the most prestigious journals. So this doesn't make much sense.
??? That's exactly why it makes sense though?
I am out to revoke degrees from chiropractors.
Giving them a degree is like calling myself a writer because I post bullshit comments on Lemmy.
I tend to take things very literally so I will say: it's got a lot more hoops than that comparison. Anybody can become a writer if they have the bare minimum tools, imo. They can't all be good writers but that hardly matters given the low risks.
To play the devils advocate, almost everywhere these days regulates chiropractors requiring licensure with an organization who themselves require degrees and comprehensive knowledge testing.
For example, Doctors of Chiropractic (admittedly a 3 to 5 year program just like most entry level Engineers) are licensed in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia and many U.S. territories. They are also regulated in many other countries throughout the world. Just a random specific organization, the California Board of Chiropractic Examiners require:
As well as a bunch of associated fees and insurance requirements.
So, no, it's not as easy as publishing comments on Lemmy.
Do I think there should be non-medical doctors twisting people's necks and giving X-Rays? No, I goddamn don't, but we can say that without bullshitting.
I'm probably going to get eviscerated for this, but that sexuality is purely genetic. I think that for the vast majority of people, sexuality is way more fluid than not, and much more influenced by environment than people would like to think.
I also don't think that has any bearing on people's right to choose.
It's not thought to be genetic otherwise it would be heritable and its clearly not. It would also have self extinguished before too long if it ever got a foothold in the first place.
It's likely a construction issue having something to do with something that happens in the womb rather than to do with the blueprints.
As a member of the LGBTQ community, I fully agree.
I’ve believed that we are a mix of nature and nurture for as long as I can remember, and it stands to reason that sexuality is a part of that. I also think the vast majority of people are far more sexually fluid than they would admit due to cultural stigma. Not everyone is bi, but I do think there’s a bell curve.
That said. I do also believe that people are born the way they are and the nurture aspect is more of a determining factor for how they express not who they are. I was raised and socialized as a straight male but realized in my 30’s that I’m queer and non-binary. Realizing that put so much context to the struggles I had growing up on a Christian environment and solidified for me that this is who I am, despite how I was nurtured. But had I not gotten out of the religion, I’d have never changed and just silently suffered and struggled until I died. My expression wouldn’t have changed who I am, only how I acted.
You can believe what you want to believe, you didn't say it in a hateful way at all.
I'm curious about what your opinion would be of trans people going through HRT though. When starting hormone therapy you are warned of potential changes to your sexuality. I am transfem, and prior to transitioning I was bi. Since starting HRT, I tend to have an aversion to men sexually and am more lesbian aligned now.
I guess that is fluidity and environmental factors, but biological factors even still.
Other people meanwhile experience the opposite effect (which is what I expected) or none at all.
Not who you asked, but I feel it's more of a social thing in myself. HRT has biological effects, but I don't think I'd be doing it in the first place if gender wasn't such a construct to begin with. I believe the sexuality changes are mainly social as well. There's the transmasc meme that T makes you more gay, but I don't think it makes us gay so much as make us more attracted to gay/bi men who actually validate our gender identities, whereas pre-transition, many of us avoided straight men who simply viewed us as female.
I don't know about transitioning, other than I probably would have thought I was trans if I'd been born later. I'm glad I wasn't told I'd have to go through surgery and hormone replacements to be what I truly am. I was able to define my gender for myself.
But I don't think anyone can judge another person's choices like that. I just look forward to the day when people are allowed to freely make choices about how they live their own lives. I don't think either political side is terribly flexible. (Though certainly, the right is far more rigid.)
I've seen too many people ostracized for changing their minds about being trans or changing their sexuality by people they thought were open-minded friends. Or people hated on for changing their faith by those who pretend to follow a loving God. It's painful all around. We shouldn't have to agree with someone on every point to celebrate and adore them.
trans people going through HRT
Not op, but I went a bit through HRT, then desisted (primarily because of financial issues, then because I didn't identity with the opposite sex anymore). IMO transgenderism is understandable because many gender norms seem socially constructed, but transexualism (including HRT and surgeries) is a mental disorder or a maladaptive coping mechanism or immaturity leading to people not actually understanding and not accepting their bodies function, and I believe social contagion is true. It is pretty concerning minors are allowed to HRT since they bodies including their minds didn't fully develop yet (which goes until age ~24). There's a ton of detrans who regret going through transexual procedures.
I am transfem, and prior to transitioning I was bi. Since starting HRT, I tend to have an aversion to men sexually and am more lesbian aligned now.
I don't think this has anything to do with you going through HRT. It just shows how your natural hormones and nature are still strong enough to do what is natural. It's just immaturity; time went and you matured, even with HRT. Most natural women are actually attracted solely to men in comparison.
Don't believe in, or can't understand?
I don't believe we understand the fundamental nature of time, or the universe - we are limited by our bodies, can't perceive or even think about everything that probably exists. But I don't distrust the math or research that scientists are doing. In terms of how it is presented to us laypeople I think profit has poisoned the message, it is impossible to be current and knowledgeable in the way you'd need to be to pull apart all that messaging.
If you mean what do you understand but still not believe? I am still not convinced radio is not magic. I understand how it works but what the heck? Magic.
I made a laser radio once - hooked up the transmitter half of it (AM) to a laser pointer, then beamed it across the room to a photoreceptor which then turned that back into sound played from my phone. Was a cool way to learn a bit of electrical engineering
I dunno, man...sounds an awful lot like magic to me...
I'm incapable of coming to terms with the scientific fact that a 194cm male could not take a grizzly bear in a fight
I can respect that, but stay out of the enclosure.
Maybe if he was 195cm ?
Sorry to disappoint, but I am 200cm tall and I would get annihilated in an instant.
Is your height 194 by chance?
have you seen a grizzly bear? those things are huge, and strong. a black bear or something maybe, but no way can people believe their stronger than a grizzly
Psychologists branding everyone with a disorder. You can spend a whole lifetime trying to understand yourself and you won't. 4 years of schooling and a book full of labels doesn't give you any extra magical understanding of everyone else.
You know I felt this way for years. I felt that way through psychopharmacology in pharmacy school, and I felt that way during our psychiatry and behavior lectures in medical school. I felt like psychiatry was minimizing behavior to these boxes was far too reductionist. Then I spent a month in an inpatient psychiatry facility as a third year medical student.
While I completely agree that each individual is unique and people are more than their diagnosis, you'd be absolutely shocked by just how similar patients' overall stories, maladaptive coping mechanisms, and behaviors are within the same psychiatric illness. I can spot mania from a doorway, and it takes less than five minutes to have a high suspicion for borderline personality disorder. These classifications aren't some arbitrary grouping of symptoms: they're an attempt to create standard criteria for a relatively well preserved set of phenotypic behaviors. The hard part is understanding pathology vs culturally appropriate behavior in cultures you don't belong, and differentiating within illness spectra (Bipolar I vs II; schizophrenia vs bipolar disorder with psychotic features vs schizoaffective)
4 years where? To become a real psychologist (not a therapist) in most places you need a PhD or a PsyD. In total, you probably do at least 8 years of schooling.
Not to mention that that "book full of labels" is constantly reviewed and was made based on consensus from psychiatrists, which are medical doctors with a lot more than 4 years of schooling.
Ok me and several others are constantly reviewing the pirate anime One Piece. It takes a long time to complete and we've collectively decided that it's better than every other show and probably something that happened for real.
I feel that, I feel like diagnoses is one of the least important parts of psychologists' work. And if they assign medication based solely on that limited scope, then there is clearly a problem.
EDIT: To clarify, I think medication should be used to treat specific symptoms when there are no contraindications, I think it is wrong to assign medication based on a broad categorization.
Psychology isn't science so no harm being doubtful about parts of it.
I saw a study that concluded toilet seats in public restrooms were actually one of the cleanest surfaces in the restroom. Don't dispute that - it just means that the entire area lands somewhere in the spectrum between disgusting and eldritch nightmare. Due to the finding that the toilet seats were cleaner than most other surfaces in the restroom, it further concluded that it was perfectly safe to just plop down bare-assed onto that nastiness.
Abso-fucking-lutely not. The toilet paper bird-nest is a must. A few layers of splash protection toilet paper in the water before I even sit down is a must. 'Ick' factor aside, there are enough contact acquired pathogens to justify extreme caution in environments like that. I ain't risking ass warts over some hypothesis, study, full-blown peer reviewed theory, or anything in between.
Not just compared to the other surfaces in a restroom. I believe keyboards and phones both lost to toilet seats in that comparison too.
I could see it in Quantity but not the qualities of the pathogens. A disease contracted from a toilet that has had contact with blood and feces versus a grimy membrane keyboard shouldn't even be a contest.
It's probably bad form to bring this type of comment over from reddit but in this case I can't help myself.
Username checks out.
Look, as long as you don’t hover-squat or use other techniqies that make it more dirty, you can autoclave the toilet before using it for all I care, so long as that means you actually sit down. I hate seeing poop stains on the rim. That said I will usually sit down without a buffer.
There is something to be said for using squat toilets instead of sitting toilets in public bathrooms, so long as there are properly cleaned sitting toilets for the elderly and disabled (I have seen some shocking disabled public bathrooms over the years)
Full moons do not have an impact on people with mental illness, make weird things happen, increase work load, or increase the chance of going into labor. I have worked in three separate hospitals in three separate states and the consensus is: full moons bring out the crazies and the babies.
It's not true. Your observations may be affected by confirmation, bias, or other things.
https://www.dukehealth.org/blog/myth-or-fact-more-women-go-labor-during-full-moon
However, barometric pressure can apparently induce labor
The first part is what my husband tells me.
I do recognize that Medical Laboratory Scientists are a very superstitious lot especially funny since our degree and certification include Scientist. Don't say it's slow or quiet because it's getting to get stupid busy (and everyone will blame you). Don't run quality control more than required because you are tempting failure and will have to do a look back of all the testing to make sure it was accurate. We jokingly put an elf on the shelf out that had FDA written on the hat and the FDA showed up for an unannounced inspection a week later. I'm a Lead and every time I bring my Lead work to the bench with me, we get so busy with patient samples and orders that I can't touch it. All are definitely confirmation bias situations.
Unrelated - kind of - but I believe there are two documented cases of obscure programming bugs that manifest according to the phase of the moon!
Statistics shows that the belief is wrong. It's funny I think that despite the hard numbers the people working there still strongly believe it.
There's something up with the placebo effect.
Sometimes, people just get better. Your mood affects your heart rate, your blood sugar, your mobility even. Thinking you are getting better helps you get better. This isn't controversial, the placebo effect has long been understood and accounted for in experimental design.
"Fucking magnets, how do they work?"
In my head, "dark matter" and "dark energy" are the names we've given to the limits of our understanding. At some point in the future the news is going to break that an Einstein or a Feynman or a Hawking will publish a paper titled "So we figured out what's causing the thing we've been calling dark matter this whole time."
But that's literally true and fully acknowledged by the physics and astronomy fields. It's why those things received the names "dark." Because currently we can't see what's causing those effects. And there are currently physicists and astronomers who spend their time researching these effects in hopes of publishing that exact "Hey! I figured out what it is" paper. Then we'll praise that person, add their name to the pantheon and fail to acknowledge the hoards of other people who contributed to the foundational research that allowed them to finally figure it out.
Same as it ever was.
Yes, I completely agree. Dark matter and dark energy are supposed to make up over 90% of the universe, yet we failed to detect them yet? No way! Those are just fill-ins, because our formulas are obviously not working that great on a grander scale.
The idea that SSRI antidepressants work by increasing serotonin levels. If that were the case, why don't they start working immediately? Instead, most people don't see positive effects for several weeks.
Plus the idea that SSRIs work, period. They only work slightly better than placebo, and they count them as "working" as long as they help with a single symptom. So if they don't help your depression at all, but they do help with your insomnia, they put that in the "it worked!" pile. That's why suicide risk sometimes increases on SSRIs. They do nothing for your crippling depression except increase your motivation, so before you were depressed and couldn't accomplish anything, and now you're depressed, but also have the wherewithal to follow through on your suicide plan.
I have been having some mental health issues, and I was reading about this the other day. I was going through wikipedia with the various types of antidepressants, and it seems that SSRIs are just barely better than placebo, or even in studies not even better than placebo.
I know there are multiple classes of antidepressants out there. Are there any that do a better job, even if they are not as common?
actually studies have shown SSRIs make you more depressed than placebo
I was listening to a sleep scientist the other day and they were saying that one thing we know is that depressed people have more rem sleep on average, and SSRIs decrease the amount of rem sleep.
If it is something sleep based that goes some way to explaining why it takes time to have an effect. Building up or wiping out a sleep debt can't happen instantaneously.
That’s interesting… because I always thought that REM sleep was the most important part of sleep, and more was better.
In fact, I read an article once that suggested that REM sleep was when our spinal fluid flushed all the waste material out of our brains at night (which leads to the types of dream that occur during REM sleep), which is also a process that prevents brains from being clogged with waste material.
I always thought that our brains being filled with waste material was part of depression, and that flushing out that waste material would help our brains function more correctly.
Sounds like the opposite - like, our depressed brains are depressed because they think too much?
Serotonin hypothesis never really held water. Congrats on guessing right, probably, we'll only see in some years from now https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/how-antidepressants-work-last
They can't work immediately because the body isn't producing enough serotonin to have an immediate effect, nor would you want that. Over time serotonin reuptake is slowed and eventually this has a cognitive effect. That doesn't help everyone but that doesn't make them ineffective.
we should totally revoke the degrees of chiropractors. And the ones of psychoanalysts while we are at it.
I'd start with the quacks that have infiltrated the WHO and have publications on it. It's ridiculous.
Baby formula is not as good as mothers milk this gets debunked like every two years and then they change the formula and claim that bs again.
Anything I think is ideologically motivated. Having a study to cite doesn't make you right if the study is bullshit.
Psychiatry and psychiatric drugs. But it is hardly scientific anyway
The problem with psychiatry is that it's expected to have quick fixes like other schools of medicine. Often the conditions are chronic and the treatment is long term at best which makes it slow and expensive. Drugs can help in the short term but they're often not able to be replaced by correct treatment due to funding.
It's a statistical science. While other branches can be all like "splitting atoms will definitely give you an energetic reaction" psychology is like "this helps in 60% of cases so we're gonna try it on you ".
To be fair here, technically throwing neutrons at matter has only some probability of causing it to fission, and statistics tells us how many do. It’s just that there are so many more neutrons and nuclei than there are people, so we can say with statistical confidence that under such and such conditions, y will occur when x happens.
Not that different. Just more samples and observations.
It took me awhile to accept it. But apparently planting trees on the wrong area could actually contribute to global warming. E.g. Planting on areas, traditionally has no trees, while reforesting would contribute to lowering temperature.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-021-00233-0
I learned that from a recent documentary of the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park from Vice.
The prompt is dangerous and indulgent for anti-science idiots. You don't "believe in" science... Science is. You can choose to believe in fairy tales, conspiracy theories and other made up shit like religious dogma, don't causally equate the two categories - ESPECIALLY not while naming science directly. Maybe say, "what's a thing that you can't believe it's real?" If you need to post.
I see your edit, but it's still a bullshit post, OP.
It’s got to be Dark Matter. So many astrophysicists have spent so much time thinking about this stuff and all they’re really sure about is that there must be much more matter in the Universe than we can see, and yet we never actually seem any closer to knowing what it is. In conjunction with Dark Energy it just leaves the layman with the awkward possibility that maybe our model of The Universe is just fundamentally flawed somehow.
For me it's the origin of the universe. This shit has to be a simulation.
That simulation, so to appear believable from the inside, would have to be based on the real universe, or would look to simplistic//trivial from the outside. So, this pushes the question to a more complex situation, but doesn't seem to help to resolve it. Right ?
That simulation, so to appear believable from the inside, would have to be based on the real universe,
Would it? What if the real universe is nothing like the simulation? Couldn't a completely unknown species have created the simulation and just imagined a fantasy world inhabited by strange little creatures called humans?
Carbon capture 🥀
I mean, carbon capture works but if people are not willing to pay 5$ extra to prevent the CO2 from being emitted then they sure as hell are not going to pay 50$ to capture it. And capturing will almost always be more expensive than not producing it.
Okay yeah that’s true. I should have been cognizant that not being economically viable / efficient enough does not mean it’s impossible/I don’t believe it’s real. Definitely works.
Yes, an absolute scam. Perfect for a demonstration project for a big polluter to point at to discourage legislation that would threaten their business model. Not useful for reducing carbon emissions at scale.
EU carbon permits shot up from €20 and have been hovering under €100 a tonne post-COVID. ~€200 is when existing direct air capture starts to become competitive. If it can be scaled at that price, we might be closer than we think.
For me it's Colloidal Silver. It's been used as antimicrobial in wound dressings in the past but I just don't trust it at all. The reason it suddenly resurged was during the Covid Pandemic a bunch of televangelist snake oil salesmen started endorsing it. If a product contains silver I won't use it at all, and furthermore I reject brands that sell it. I would even rather bleed than purchase a CVS bandaid.
Colloidal silver sold as a cure or "supplement" is absolutely a scam and potentially harmful (it can and has permanently turned people blue/gray). But silver itself is incredibly useful as an antimicrobial and is commonly used in bandages in burn wards.
Silver isn't the only metal that is effective against bacteria, but other than brass and gold most other options are either toxic to humans in some way or not as effective.
TL;DR: bandaids with silver are fine, colloidal silver you put in your body isn't.
Silver in these bandages simply acts as a catalyst which uses oxygen from the air to oxidize bad stuff : it's like having a tiny source of peroxide.
Cool, it's overuse is still bullshit preying on the feeble minded. Even the FDA has had to step in several times the last 2 years because of how crazy it's been getting.
Interestingly I really only know about because it's "popular" in the biohacker space for helping with cavities (as in AFTER you have cleaned a cavity you can use it to seal and protect it from further damage). Cheaper and more accessible then proper dental care.
Pretty sure these uses are snake oil, where it does have use is blocking male phenotype expression in flowering plants. I use it to make feminized cannabis seed.
Silver nitrate is used medically as a cauterizing agent for wounds. Had to apply this when an inch deep 2 inch diameter abdominal wound healed to surface level after packing and changing gauze on it for 3 months, else it would have kept "healing" itself outward.
Birth order effect on personality.
It smells like predetermined horoscope nonesense.
Pretty sure there is study that corroborates the claim. Being a middle child, the idea of us being black sheep seems to be true. Though the black sheep stereotype complements my personality anyway, as I have always been a maverick.
Which is why it's scientific and I still don't believe in it.
One of my fields of study is adjacent to psychology, and I've rubbed elbows with some of the people who have publishedsome of those studies.
My conversation with the lady had her analyzing my every mannerism as if it all stemmed back from my childhood.
Nonsense and tea leaves!
Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
I know in print journalism, you will certainly start noticing trending words go viral through the journalism community. Like the word “slammed” showing up in headlines repeatedly. Or the word “tony” to describe something ritzy/expensive that was trending a couple of years ago.
Did anyone else notice a reporting trend years ago where everyone was "tapping" everyone? They used it to mean a newly elected/appointed person recruited or perhaps sometimes consulted someone else, but it was around the time the term was also hot in pop culture where, of course, it means something entirely different.
I keep hearing about this one lately.
It's actually the simulation. It's not coincidence, it's not that we just noticed that thing and it's everywhere. It's the simulation running out of ram.
Not sure why you mentioned chiropractors, I thought this was about scientific things.
That consciousness arises from matter as some emergent phenomenon. Integrated information theory, micro-tubules, or whatever: no.
I believe consciousness is fundamental.
How do you mean fundamental?
They probably mean that consciousness does not arrive from matter - that there is some other thing that causes consciousness, like another fundamental particle or whatever.
Essentially they are arguing for the existence of the "soul" or "spirit" in some fashion or another. Definitely unscientific as we have no evidence of such a thing.
That's not scientifically proven though, just an idea.
i agree, but i dont think any scientist seriously believes they have the answer to this debate. (i may be wrong)
I don't believe scientific progress is analogous with human progress or can be used to "decode" morality, ie the science vs religion dichotomy I don't believe in. I don't think science or "reason" guides human societies for instance. This belief is a result of studying Hume and moral philosophy. I think science tells us what is but not what ought to be, and that gap is irreconcilable through science alone, yet it can inform our sense of right and wrong. I disagree with objective morality as well, so the popularization of this science=objective morality idea that Sam Harris has attempted I disagree with entirely. I'm much more aligned with Patricia Churchland's ideas here, and her popularization she outlines in her book "Braintrust." I don't think, as some do, that measuring brain activity decodes human morality, because I don't believe such a thing exists. I don't believe human society is controlled and determined by rational actors, I have a more Darwinian and Maxian view on that. When people profess things like "politics should be scientific" I likely agree with their sentiment but I think "science" is not the reason why, and more of a distraction/lazy way to assert being morally right about something, which science can't actually do because it requires an appeal to human notions of morality, which science cannot determine as it has no measure of which values we ought to hold.
I mean, define "scientific". A currently-held, consensus theory? Because it's easy to find theories that were developed in accordance with scientific theory, held for a while, but discarded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories
In physics, aether theories (also known as ether theories) propose the existence of a medium, a space-filling substance or field as a transmission medium for the propagation of electromagnetic or gravitational forces. "Since the development of special relativity, theories using a substantial aether fell out of use in modern physics, and are now replaced by more abstract models."
Reminds me of Electrogravitics, those old coots were silly.
The Big Bang Theory, ... and this despite the fact that I believe the universe is expanding now. This expansion is still accelerating so the small acceleration itself could result in the expansion (speed distribution) without having to postulate an extremely rapid acceleration at time zero and other ludicrous extreme physical conditions.
... and yes I know also about the cosmological microwave background's perfect black body curve and such observations.
Is there a competing theory you find more compelling? "I don't know what happened" is fine, but if there's something else I haven't heard of that could explain the facts as we know them I'm interested in learning about it.
Some interesting developments here :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics#Relativistic
... still not really satisfying for me.
(this is for @FooBarrington as well)
Cosmic Inflation is a good one to read up on if you never have. Because the slow acceleration we observe right now in the expansion is actually vastly inadequate to explain what we see now, so the big bang theory currently involves spacetime itself having to go through a few phase changes that are hard to wrap your head around.
Oh, nooow I see why people just say it was god.
How do you explain the CMBR?
I believe one of the theories for a multiverse is that Inflation never ended, it is just a continually ongoing process in which out universe "bubbled" out of it. Other universes would have bubbled up too, and we "should" be able to see evidence of collisions between those other bubbles and our own bubble in the CMB, which there has been a little bit of success in finding.
They problem is that the universe is bigger than the speed of light allowed for. One thing I have seen on YouTube from HistoryoftheUniverse is that inflation was possible because it was the inflation of the universe itself which would not be inherently restricted to the cosmic speed limit (C)
The Monty Hall problem.
You are given a choice of three doors, let's call them 1, 2, and 3.
Behind one of the doors is a fabulous prize. Behind the other two are joke prizes worth nothing.
You are asked to pick a door. It doesn't matter which one you choose, because it's not opened inmediately.
Instead, the host opens one of the doors you did not pick to reveal the gag gift.
He then asks you if you want to change your choice.
What are the chances of winning? Should you choose a different door, or keep your existing choice?
The math says, your chance of winning if you stay with your choice is 1/3. Revealing the contents of one door does not change that, it's still 1/3.
Switching to the other door gives you a 2/3 chance of winning. Not 1/2 or 1/3.
"If the car is behind Door 1, you lose. If the car is behind Door 2, Monty would have opened Door 3, so you would switch to Door 2 and win. If the car is behind Door 3, he would have opened Door 2, so you would switch to Door 3 and win. The odds of winning with the “Switch” strategy are two in three, double the odds of staying."
Obesity modeled as a disease that should be treated with drugs like Ozempic. I’ll buy that it’s like that for some very small set of people, but I can’t shake the assumption that drug companies are exaggerating so they can sell more, and most of their customers are just too lazy to try proper diet and exercise.