Ask and answer stupid questions here! - Page 313

On July 18 2015 04:53 Fecalfeast wrote:

I've used avast! for a while and it's decent.

On July 18 2015 09:49 Cascade wrote:
Wow, those tweet! :o

So he is openly
- denying climate change
- racist
- sexist
in just two tweet. >_> And some people vote for that??

I guess it worked for Berlusconi, but then you kindof have to own all of media to pull that off I think.

On July 18 2015 10:16 [UoN]Sentinel wrote:

The one where he said something like "how can Hillary satisfy a country when she can't even satisfy her own husband" was hilarious. I'd never vote for that guy, but I guess people are having fun/protesting the system that way? Kinda like you have elections in student government with write ins if you don't like the candidates, some smartass writes "Adolf Hitler" on his ballot and convinces his friends to do the same, and voila, the Fourth Reich is born in some high school in the northeastern US.

On July 20 2015 07:11 Sent. wrote:
I can't see streamer race icons on the right sidebar after I log in, is this a bug or something related to my profile settings?

On July 21 2015 09:27 whatisthisasheep wrote:
Did Lebron James get his acting role in Trainwreck by the director seeing how well he flops in the NBA?

On July 22 2015 02:39 Bloody wrote:
When I use ccleaner everything gets out of sync. I can't play because I can't hit the targets (playing fps) nearly as good as before I used ccleaner. I need to reinstall all my drivers to get my computer back to normal again. Have anyone else noticed a change to the worse after using ccleaner? I use the default ccleaner settings + I remove IIS log files which only include PnkBstrA.log and PnkBstrB.log.

On July 22 2015 15:26 Najda wrote:
Idk if you guys have ever wandered around on youtube and ended up in the free energy section, but it's basically a ton of people trying to use magnets to create a perpetual motion/free energy machine. Why do so many of these videos exist? Do people think they're going to disprove the laws of thermodynamics in their garage?

On July 22 2015 17:08 Cascade wrote:

Yeah, this baffles me as well, and what you describe isn't even the start of it... It seems like in almost any field where there is a scientific consensus, there is a community of people spending incredible amounts of time and effort on the assumption that everyone is wrong, and they are they only one that understood the greatness of their idea. it is a bit like the lotv forum in that way, except that there is no scientific consensus in there. My personal experience is mainly from theoretical physics, but I got the impression you find these people in any field, to different degrees.

I'm not saying everyone should blindly believe everything that an expert says, definitely not, but if there seems to a be well established consensus amongst experts, and you lack proper education in the field, you kindof should think long and hard before you start spending years and years into an idea that goes against that consensus, or you risk wasting a lot of time. Go and have a chat at someone at the local university or something. If they dismiss your idea as silly, and you feel it is unjustified, go ahead and go to another university for a second opinion. Ask experts online. Even send a few emails, apologising for disturbing. Corollary: don't ask other people without education with their own highly controversial ideas. But eventually, if almost everyone keep telling you that your idea isn't as great as you think, maybe you should get the point?

In the end I think it is a matter of an unwavering confirmation bias, blinding any sense of objective analysis. Most of these people (I assume) aren't really trained in doing science, and most of them don't know much about confirmation bias, or don't think it applies to them (which infers that they don't know much about it). The more you work on it, the more emotionally invested you get, and the stronger the confirmation bias. This happens to everyone.

A minority of them will be pure quacks in it to make money. *cough* *e-cough* *meow*

Anyway, it still baffles me.

On July 22 2015 17:26 Simberto wrote:
The fact of the matter is that most sciences have a least a hundred years of very smart people thinking about them under the hood. Some, like physics, have a few thousand. At this point, the bulk of knowledge is simply so great that the surface is so well tested that to come up with something new and exciting, you basically need to go deeper and already have a lot of education in the field to understand the surface.

Things like newtonian physics or laws of thermodynamics have been around for a while. If there was an obvious and easy way to disprove them with household appliances, there is a pretty high chance that it would have already happened.

This does not mean that you should simply believe in authorities. Luckily with science, you don't have to. You can look up the experiments and explanations that lead to the common believe (Even online at this point). But if you are too lazy or too stupid to understand those, chances are that you did not suddenly come up with something entirely new and genius. Once you have understood the common theories, you can try to disprove them.

On July 22 2015 18:32 Oshuy wrote:


You can always take the sum of all the observations that have been made and consider them as points in a multi dimensional space of some kind. An accepted theory will match within an acceptable margin with any point it has been measured against and predict values in its domain of application for study/analysis/use. However, it will always remain one out of an infinite number of representation for all those other points.

There is theory, perfectly valid for anything we know, with the only difference that if I drop my coffee right now, instead of falling it turns into a unicorn that races through the wall and out in the sky beyhond... And now I have to mop up and buy a new mug.

All jokes aside, the reason why one specific theory matching observations emerges is still an interesting one.

On July 22 2015 19:11 Cascade wrote:

It is just a matter of understanding nature better and better. Accurate understanding will generalise better than ad-hoc understanding. Let me make a nonsensical example.

Observation: It hurts if I run into a rock.
Theory 1: It hurts to run into grey things.
Theory 2: It hurts to run into hard things.
Both describe data so far.

Experiment: Run into a red brick wall.
Observation: it hurts to run into a red brick wall.
Theory 1: conflicts with observations.
Corrected model 1.1: It hurts to run into grey things, or things with square patterns.
Theory 2: accurately predicted observation, does not need to be corrected.

Experiment: Run into a bouncy castle with square patterns.
I think you can guess what goes her, but it'll have to involve a theory 1.2.

As we continue and do more experiments, it is "easy" to separate the theories that actually describe nature from the theories that just happen to describe the data it was made to fit. So I think that the one theory we are left with that describes all the data is the most likely to actually describe what is going on in reality (if you allow me to take a positivist view here). We cannot know for sure that model 1.1 (and the 1.2 that will be needed...) isn't actually the true model ("true model" here refers to the models that predicts all future observations), so some kind of leap of faith has to be made to say that it is reflecting nature.

Many would point to Occam's razor here, but I think what I am trying to say is slightly different, and a bit easier to swallow: A theory that successfully predicts observations is more likely to continue to predict experiments than a theory that has to be adjusted for each new observation. So after our experiments above, we would start leaning towards theory 2 over theory 1.2. Not beacuse theory 2 is simpler (as would be Occam's razors argument), but because it successfully predicted an observation, while theory 1.2 hasn't predicted anything, only described existing observations. Of course, someone may have come up with theory 1.2 already after the first observation (I don't see many paying attention to it at that point, but let's pretend...), and at that point we would be equally leaning towards theory 2 and 1.2. Until we perform more experiments, that eventually will force 1.2 to be modified again, putting out of favour.

Anyway, what I am trying to say is that the reason some theories stick around, is that they actually describe some aspect of nature. There, one sentence.