Phi for All

I think the medium itself is a bit dangerous for learning. I don't think we have as effective a filtering system when it comes to audio/visual input as opposed to the written word. Or perhaps we're more apt to be emotional when more of the senses are engaged. If I'm reading a scientific article and it slides into sensationalism, I'm more likely to catch it and start being more skeptical about any claims it makes. If I'm watching a video, I'm more likely to let it slip rather than interrupt the flow of the presentation.

For those who don't understand science, it often seems like an emotional dismissal when someone who does offers a quick refutation, but it's not. I don't know what you do for a living, but as an analogy, imagine going to a home builder with your new invention, a tool that drives two screws into a wooden stud at once, saving half the time! But the carpenter immediately tells you they aren't interested, and explains why nails are better. You can't understand why he's not thrilled, but it's because you don't understand why home builders don't use screws in studwork. You explain why screws hold the wood tighter together than nails, and he tries to explain why that's not good for framework that needs to swell and shrink a little. The builder is taking you seriously, he's not just emotionally throwing your idea away. He simply knows why it won't work, and you're not listening.

There's nothing to forgive, really. Any guilt you might feel is built on a False Dilemma fallacy, that we can only do one of these things, or that these are the only options. It's also wrong to think if we didn't invest in one, we'd automatically invest in the other. But it's a commonly used argument since it narrows available choices, which is often the reaal agenda.

USNO isn't NASA, but I understand how you misunderstood that too. Have a good day.

! Moderator Note Normally, Appeal to Authority is considered fallacious reasoning, but I'm going out on a limb here and I'm going to argue that Dr Swanson's capabilities in mathematics exceed your own by several orders of magnitude. The US Naval Observatory thinks highly enough of him as a physicist to let him run the atomic clocks that GPS uses to achieve such incredible accuracy. It's clear you aren't really listening, which means discussion probably won't work to fill the gaps in your knowledge. It's a shame, we've had lots of folks like you who learned a great deal from discussion, but discussion is a two-way street that requires as much listening as talking. If school didn't work for you, and we know discussion isn't a strength, you should try something else to combat ignorance. Three pages is too long to be this obstinate about learning. If there was any science happening in this thread, I'd leave it open, but it's actually creating a negative learning experience, obviously. Don't bother to open any more threads like this, please.

Conspiracy as a subject in online discussion format, especially science discussion, isn't viable, imo. It's too full of conjecture and subjectivity to yield anything meaningful. The nature of confirmation bias works against the conspiracy theorist as well. They start out suspicious and skeptical, and when shown evidence that refutes them they become even more convinced they're right. How do you use critical thought and reasoned arguments when they have the opposite effect on the listener? To me, it's like discussing the supernatural. If there was any real evidence for it, we wouldn't think of it as supernatural, it would just be natural, and we could assess it normally. And if there was actual supportive evidence for a conspiracy theory, it wouldn't be considered a conspiracy, it would just be a theory, and we could assess it normally.

! Moderator Note Zodiac, it's pretty clear you've based much of your concept on misinformation. There's also a great deal of basic science you're ignoring as well. You should be asking questions instead of trying to claim mainstream explanations are wrong. You've made up a LOT, so your ideas make perfect sense, but only to you. You can't explain them to anyone, despite how clear they are in your head, because they aren't well grounded in science. For this thread to stay open, you're going to need to step up the rigor and support your ideas with evidence, accuracy, and reasoned thinking.

If you'd bothered to read the article instead of just the discussion about the article, you'd see that Germany's policy has more to do with the stability of the migrant country as a whole rather than what their ethnicity is. Ukraine is a big place, and only parts were in turmoil, so they had more of an ability to relocate their own. Other countries were far more war-torn, and so they got a bigger percentage of their people relocated. I suggest, from the evidence, that you gravitate towards some very slanted information sources where regressive tendencies are actively preached in an atmosphere of fear and suspicion. The quality of the data on which you choose to base the information you disseminate is poor, and by definition is going to produce some stilted, biased, and fundamentally flawed conclusions. You should insist on better quality, considering the abundance of reasoned, critically thought-out perspectives available to those willing to do more than dredge up the muck when they dig for answers.

I've known many people with wicked skills they're not that interested in pursuing. If the skills are marketable, a lot of those folks end up doing that for a living just because it's less of a struggle in life if you're making good money. But it's easy to be miserable in that situation because everyone loves you for skills you couldn't care less about. That's not the kind of hard work that makes you value it more, is it? I think everybody has a "what I find most interesting", and I think it's an underused resource in our modern, high-density civilization. I would consider it a super-smart investment to find out how We could help you arrange your life to take advantage of the fruits of your passion. I would rather have you spend your time applying maths to our lives in the ways you find most interesting than have you spend a minute worrying about choosing between food or medicine. If you suddenly decide you want to take a break from physics to focus on your blind-sketching talents for a change, I'd rather you didn't also have to worry about basics like rent and who's going to watch your kids while you're blindfolded. What I find contradictory is making you do something for a living you don't care for. You shouldn't have to forget your passions just to live like a normal person. If you wanted to fly airplanes and travel the world and do many extravagant things, you're going to have to figure out how to make a LOT of money, but someone who just wants a modest life should be able to pursue their passions, and I'm willing to invest in that as a taxpayer to help the world change for the better.

Aside from using the extreme end of the scale like a scarecrow, this argument doesn't address the way the world has changed. Can't I (and others) find value in working "smart" instead? Shouldn't some things be made as easy as a society can possibly make them so the society can focus on things that are inherently difficult? If putting food on the table, or staying healthy, or being part of your representative government weren't such a struggle for so many, rather than making society valueless, don't you think it would encourage the vast majority to find real challenges for their hard work?

Even in the Lounge we require evidence to support a scientific stance, so if you're going to discuss this part any further, please start with evidence that silver has any positive effect on the human body, at least enough to counteract the documented negative effects. And NO, we don't want to hear subjective anecdotes about individuals. Virtually everybody here is highly skeptical of unproven coronavirus remedies, and we take science very seriously. Just know that you're stumbling into misinformation territory, and trespassers will be shot down on site.

! Moderator Note Invention is NOT about making things up. Please stick to science you can support with evidence and critical reasoning.

! Moderator Note We're four pages into a discussion about your speculative idea. This section is all about making sure the underlying science is sound in your reasoning at each step before taking the next. The members see a flaw and they want that fixed before we bother talking about anything else. I hope you can appreciate that they're more than willing to learn something brand new, just as they're more than willing to help fill gaps in your knowledge by answering questions. What they aren't willing to do is waste the meaningfulness of discussion on flawed premises. Everyone has ideas, and most are wrong. We want to make sure nobody's time is wasted while giving your idea its best shot at finding a foothold in mainstream science. Please be patient and understanding.

It only seems plausible to you because you made it up from things YOU misunderstood. My evidence? Go back and read where the members have corrected your science. How do you, an engineer, justify building on a poor foundation? You can certainly afford Khan Academy for maths and physics. And I really only say this because I don't think your approach is healthy. You have a chip on your shoulder about certain aspects of your knowledge that keep you from successfully filling the gaps in it. You should attend those conferences. I got a chance a few years back to go to the International Astronautical Congress and it was amazing. I've said this before to many smart people like you. It's a misconception that scientists aren't dreamers and inspired thinkers, that they just plod along with their maths and their experiments. Much of what you may think is not understood is due to working with theory rather than proof. Theories aren't answers, they can be improved. What you're doing is taking bits you've learned (many from pop-sci, where they take objectivity and rigor and replace it with misleading vividness and emotional buzzwords) and using them like paving stones to create a path you can take to your conclusions. That's what you're supposed to do, but without the interconnecting information, you've stopped placing the stones next to each other. Now you're putting them farther and farther apart and taking bigger and bigger leaps to reach your conclusions. You think it's intuitive but it's really non-rigorous and makes large assumptions (toroidal black holes, time travel). Does that make sense? A limited analogy, certainly, but one that resonates, I hope.

I doubt that highly, given their very limited application. I've seen some major misunderstandings stem from taking analogy too far. This is some heavy confirmation bias against maths, I suppose. I can sympathize, but when in Rome, you should speak Italian, or Latin. And btw, Einstein got better grades in Algebra and Geometry than he did in Physics. What I remember reading was that Physics only took him so far, and he had to go back to Maths to shore up his best works. Where's that Bingo card....

! Moderator Note Please do. This is our Speculations section. You need to defend assertions like this with supportive evidence, examples, and reasoning. Math is the language of physics, so any maths you can add to increase clarity and understanding is much appreciated. Be rigorous, and explain where/why you're changing any accepted definitions to mainstream science. Don't just mention studies, cite them. Link to research you think supports your ideas, to give the members a chance to check your work.

I've been here at SFN for 16 years now, and I've never heard a professional scientist say this. Plenty of them can say, "We don't know", but none of them is willing to let faith ("We just know that is the way it is") be the explanation for any phenomena. What "competing theories" are you talking about here? Just an observation, but you don't write like someone who has studied and understood these concepts for 20 years. You write like someone who has picked up bits from popular science articles, but lacking formal science study (something I'm guilty of as well), you've used your imagination to stitch together the parts you understand with stuff that just makes sense to you. It's pretty common, but it's a horrible way to learn science. You assume it needs fixing simply because you don't understand it. Asking questions is much better than guesswork.

Pass by, relative to the rest of the galaxy? Sure, we'd practically have to duck. But if you were to tell a friend you were going to "pass by" his house later, and then only got within four million miles, well....

! Moderator Note Since you've given us enough to start a discussion without having to watch the video first, I'll leave it for those who want a reference. Please don't start any more threads with only a video, since that's against our rules. And please note that in general, it's very difficult to discuss video as precisely and meaningfully as the written word or math. Nobody wants to have to watch it over and over to quote it correctly.

Bmpbmp1975 has been banned for spamming, after an obscene number of warnings. We only needed one thread misunderstanding vacuum decay, thanks very much.

I think this takes unfair aim at the subsection. We designed Speculations so anyone willing to work rigorously towards a non-mainstream explanation of a particular phenomenon could discuss their reasoning and present supportive evidence. There's nothing preventing anyone from presenting a compelling enough argument to persuade the membership into a productive discussion, maybe even get the thread moved into a mainstream section. Such rigor is the antithesis of being a crackpot though. By the normal definition, a crackpot simply has strange, crazy-sounding ideas, but in science, a crackpot is defined as someone who's too lax in their methodology. More lazy than crazy.

! Moderator Note OK then. Until you can present this in written form, it can't be discussed meaningfully here. Reviewing videos is NOT what we're interested in here. There are other places though, and we wish you the best of luck. Again, come back when you have your questions available for written discussion. Thanks for understanding.

! Moderator Note That would be against our rules. One thread per topic. Also, if you're just posting this because you didn't get enough hits on YouTube, that's against our rules too. We can discuss the science of building this computer, but we will NOT be discussing your video. That's not what we do here.

I hope no governments consider your reverse-terraforming proposal. If possible, it's even more short-sighted than most governments are these days. Even if we give up on maintaining Earth's ecosystem, space colonization isn't going to be solely about changing humans to adapt to other systems. That's not what humans do. We can change systems to better suit life as we know it. Your argument seems like a false dilemma fallacy. We have more than the two choices you've laid out, to decrease pollution or recolonize. We're currently using a third option, which is to keep industrial contamination at levels that balance economic and health concerns. Many folks aren't happy with the proportions (for various reasons), but to reduce our solutions to two seems unnecessarily confining. Also, with outer space policy what it is, I think we have a MUCH better chance of revitalizing our environment than we do getting the world to agree on what to do with the rest of the wealth of the solar system. I'm excited about the prospects of colonizing other planets, but it's something we definitely need to understand and regulate unless we want all those villainous sci-fi plot lines to play out. If we aren't smart, compassionate, and united in our efforts, the first big group to leave the planet could own the rest of us in a fairly short time.

We used to have a card generator, quite some time back: