TheVat

There's the old joke about a university budget meeting, ends with "the theoretical physics department manages with just pencils, paper, and wastebaskets...but it's the philosophy department that's the most thrifty, they don't even need wastebaskets! "

Haha! My thanks to you and others for replying. I guess I'll keep not using the feature, and leave it to the quality control crew who will hopefully not bias new users overly much. And if I see a DV cast that's saying "Argh, I'm frustrated with you," rather than, say, "misinformation" or "sophistry, " then I might ask about that DV and hope the DVer can address it. I wasn't assuming. Discussion forums are for discussing, is my thought. If you're not invested enough to post, then it's questionable that you're issuing a quality judgement. As @iNow alluded to, the system is predicated on the maturity and restraint of the users -- I'm probably a little too cynical from years on troll-ridden MBs. Seen too many Al Pacino meltdowns... I'm outta order? You're ALL outta order!!

After a couple months of the reputation system, and watching a couple of people get downvotes apparently just because someone disagreed with them, I got a bit torqued and wrote this: The practice of anonymous downvoting here strikes me as mean-spirited and passive-aggressive. If you disagree, why not just say so, and move on without handing out a demerit badge? If you have nothing useful to say, just refrain from upvoting. I think having this judgmental tool to brand others with belongs more to totalitarian China than to a free and civil forum. (I used the downvote once here, a short time after joining, then cancelled my downvote a few hours later, disgusted with meself) JMO, the potential for abuse of such a feature is high. Please don't put a scarlet D on my forehead!

I think some of this tension (admittedly manufactured) over terms could resolve if it's seen that both science and philosophy (analytic Western philosophy seems to be what people refer to) do share some tools in common. One is formal logic. A specific and serviceable definition of truth, based on a logical definition, can be employed in both science and philosophy. If a proposition corresponds accurately to a state of affairs in the world, it is true. A large cohort in both hard sciences and philosophy would agree to that definition and the logical connection there. Rich Feynman and Bert Russell could shake hands. Such a true proposition doesn't have to make an earth-shattering revelation of some underlying reality, it just has to be empirically adequate in its domain.

To all who gave such incisive replies -- I'm not saying we can't just up corporate tax rates and tax on the wealthy, I'm saying the constant tension of real politics is against doing so to the degree that needs to be done to achieve social and green goals. Politics is called "the art of the possible. " Given that reality of an entrenched anti-tax culture (oh, it would be great to be Denmark, but...) in the US, it would be better if we weren't putting so much of the federal budget towards debt maintenance and sending those billions more directly to citizens most in need. But, don't get me wrong, I am not knocking the attempt to majorly increase tax revenue collection, and bring about a renovation process in housing, education, healthcare, etc. and really get people in Podunk to believe their taxes work for them. I admire the Bernies and Alexandrias who idealistically fight for that. But I'm pessimistic that they can counter the current power of shadow plutocrats and their grip on social media and a dark-money driven election process.

It's not lending rates now, it's that we (USA) carry debt in the form of treasury notes that people have held for years. Hundreds of billions. Think how many low income kids could achieve the dream of college with that kind of money. I guess some people think I'm weird being both left of center AND a fiscal conservative on debt. If everyone held the debt, that is, all Americans, much less a problem. Unfortunately we are shipping a lot of those interest payments to either elderly Asians on pension plans or to a small percent of Americans who are wealthy investors. Half of Americans do not have investments of any kind. So we're not really just "paying ourselves interest. "

Reducing national debt, to reduce the drain of debt maintenance, is politically unpalatable to both parties. In a representative democracy, who is going to tell constituents that we need to tax everyone more to fix this? Democracy, as many have pointed out, is not the optimal system for implementing harsh policies that voters (and powerful plutocrats) find repellent. It favors shortsighted feel-good measures. Unless politicians take on the task of educating their constituents rather than pandering to them.

It is not debt per se that is the problem, it is debt maintenance (interest payments to those holding treasury bonds) that threatens to become a larger and larger part of my nation's annual budget. If the USA is paying $450 billion per year on debt maintenance, that is $450 billion of collected revenue that cannot be used for things like education, housing improvement, roads, environmental protection, etc. When debt maintenance becomes most of the budget is when countries tend to undergo an economic collapse. This snowballs when the debt is defaulted on and citizens, some of them holding the debt in the form of bonds, lose that bond income. So, yes, we need to fix this and bring back fiscal responsibility. Neither US party is much interested in doing this.

I like van Fraassen's anti-realist position of "empirical adequacy," which @Davy_Jones has acquainted us with. From SEP.... In contrast, the constructive empiricist holds that science aims at truth about observable aspects of the world, but that science does not aim at truth about unobservable aspects. Acceptance of a theory, according to constructive empiricism, correspondingly differs from acceptance of a theory on the scientific realist view: the constructive empiricist holds that as far as belief is concerned, acceptance of a scientific theory involves only the belief that the theory is empirically adequate. This sounds to me how a lot of scientists view their work. A theory is empirically adequate, but few would mistake it for a declaration of metaphysical realism. What is a wavefunction, really?

My favorite historical tidbit regarding the scientific method is that Francis Bacon may have died from conducting a scientific experiment in the preservation of meat, by going outside and stuffing eviscerated fowl with snow; he became quite chilled and developed fatal pneumonia. (a close second, in favorite historical tidbits, is that his mother Anne's maiden name was Cooke... in marrying Sir Nicholas Bacon, she thus became....)

I hope all participants have read at least the Summary Reports of the IPCC, and other basic literature on this extremely complex topic. Doing so should make clear that many scenarios of stressful changes happening at an unprecedented rapid rate have graduated from future scenario to present reality. I'm probably a little weary, from other science forum experiences, of having to do massive literature hauling and pull-quote dumps to educate people on what's presently going on and then realizing they will never read the material or do anything but cherry-pick anomalous data sets that do not fairly represent global trends. Also key is that it's not just the degree of temperature rise, but the rapidity with which it happens, which has all kinds of effects on how flora and fauna are able, or not able, to adapt to changes in their particular ecological niche. The last time the Earth got this warm, the warming process that led there took place over millennia, not decades. And there was also not a species of machine-making hominins who were engaged in other environment-altering activities on top of the warming and introducing novel sorts of perturbation due to things like deposition of diesel soot on the cryosphere, massive methane release, forest clearing, etc.

My point was not that there couldn't be philosophical considerations of the physics, but that one feature of philosophy is that it can allow us to consider which branch of philosophy is of the most value in determining a course of action. While the physics of atom bombs is well-understood and the making of them is more a matter of refining engineering principles, the more pressing question might be whether they should be made or not, and whether engineers should assist governments that ask them to design them. Hence my suggestion that the branch of ethics is relevant here.

I would suggest that, rather than start with multiple claims on several disparate topics for which contrarian claims are offered, Just pick one -- perhaps the one you feel has the most empirical foundation -- and we could address that. The rate of wildfires claim, for example, possibly has factual errors so far as the USA is concerned.

I would think the role of philosophy would not be about the "how" of building a nuke, but rather the "why"? As in, why would this ever be a good idea?

To paraphrase Mark Twain, metaphysics is for contemplating, epistemology is for fighting over. BTW, there are exceptions to the earlier "It may be worth noting that, logically, to know that one is getting closer to the truth requires knowing where that truth resides." The measurement of how much soda is in a bottle, for example. You don't know its volume, but as you keep pouring the soda into a volumetric cylinder, you know with certainty that you are getting nearer and nearer to the answer. There are many observations in science that are analogous to this. It also illustrates the transition from belief to true belief (aka "knowledge"). I believe there is a half liter of soda in the bottle. When I'm done pouring, I know there is a half liter.

It may be worth noting that, logically, to know that one is getting closer to the truth requires knowing where that truth resides. If you approach something whose location is unknown, then you only do so by accident. There is certainly the feeling that one is closing in on the truth, but that's a feeling resting on a web of beliefs, about what all those pretty, regular patterns we observe mean. Our beliefs about what constitutes genuine knowledge need constant inspection, which is where the tools of philosophy are handy.

I think of it as the timid, bashing a strawman. Part of this arises from viewing philosophy as a unitary academic field rather than an array of subjects that range from austere metascience* and ontology to more worldly ethics and political philosophy. And linguistic philosophy, too. Every field can benefit from a meta-discipline that steps outside of the field and considers it's methods, scope, aspirations, symbolic systems, and epistemic stance. As others note here, many fine scientists have engaged in meta reflections, whether they called it that or not. And I can think of very few physicists who have never engaged in a little epistemology as regards the inferences they can make from many indirect sorts of observations. *(when I use the term "metascience, " I'm trying to show the contours of something a little more than metaphysics -- it's all that is "meta," which includes epistemology and, in fields like cosmology, some ontology as well)

No. 😁 I was interested to learn that gravity can be described without a curvature tensor (Môller gravity, with torsion) and I hope those more capable might explore the epistemological implications. My hope is that scientists generally do not have to carry the burden of "math is reality," at least not the way Max Tegmark does.

3 Gorges project concentrates an enormous mass of water, 42 billion tons, in a small area. Wind installations do nothing remotely comparable in shifting large masses. Turbine blades are presently difficult to recycle, but they last decades and produce an amount of KwH which, if produced by fossil fuels, would involve far more CO2 release, as well as potential methane release from leaky extraction operations, and groundwater pollution. Say hello for me to your pals at the Heartland Institute!

The GOP has currently moved beyond the Hubble radius as it is observed at the pale. I think it says something that even the online platform Epik, notorious refuge of the vilest extremists you can imagine, has now forced this Texas RtL group to disable it's tipline. Epik, folks.

Yep. Just removing offense can move the goalposts much closer, in so many workplaces. (kind of the reverse of some groups, like men shooting hoops, where offense can be actively promoted as a communication style) I look back at 20-ish me and marvel at his cluelessness, and remarks where clearly I wasn't "reading the room." Sometimes when an engineer walks in and asks for a hardness tester, you don't playfully fish around in a drawer and produce a hammer. (got a laugh from a cute coworker, though)

Thanks, and that last sentence is as concise a description of the equivalence principle as I've ever encountered. Now I can stop wondering why you get the special hat. I used "preference" loosely, so the semantic point is a fair one, given that I did not mean Al selected GR on a whim. <g>

@studiot At this point, I would love to delete that post, lol, and apparently sending false implications regarding orbital motion. FtR, I know that the near-earth area is not a closed cosmos packed into a compact Reimannian sphere in which I could with a large telescope inspect my bald spot in back. That would be a cool sci-fi story, however. I'm also aware that orbiting objects, though they may have constant speed, do not have constant velocity and are therefore under acceleration. I was indeed trying to whimsically point out that some usages of the term "force" can be misleading, pointing to why Einstein and others preferred to categorize gravitation as geometry.

Yes, as the last paragraph of my post alluded to.... In the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric, it can be shown that a strong constant negative pressure in all the universe causes an acceleration in the expansion if the universe is already expanding, or a deceleration in contraction if the universe is already contracting. This accelerating expansion effect is sometimes labeled "gravitational repulsion". It seemed to me that perhaps this vacuum energy was what Serg was driving at, but at this point I really have no idea.

Oddly, I find points of agreement with both Zap and Pete. (sorry, I should tag all names.... @zapatosand @Peterkin). Organizations can find useful metrics with such tests, but there may be some who place unwarranted confidence in them as long-term portraits of a human personality. As someone once said to me, in another context, "sure it's a crutch. But who doesn't limp sometimes? " When I'm having a nice sit-down with someone, I am not limping (unless they are so introverted as to be a black box mystery), but with only a set of very brief encounters, some kind of rough map might be helpful. My feel is that such tests are snapshots, not portraits. (I'm sure an old Meyers Briggs test aficionado would make something of the "feel" in that sentence...) That said, any test that can give some hints as to introversion/extroversion and to receptivity to new ideas, to name a couple, can certainly save you from some social pitfalls and cliff edges. Life experience has taught me how to recognize people who don't do casual humor or banter, a skill I wish I'd had earlier (the recognizing, that is). Or certain introverts who, when working, find interruption quite distressing -- also nice to know a little earlier. And some artistic temperaments deeply value quiet and verbal economy, and making a few words count for much. (this post veers ever farther from that virtue)