Alyx Hinata 🇹🇩🚫💀 @alyx@gameliberty.club

I still like CAD. Which is why I disable adblock for the page. But the amount of ads he has on can't even be satirized. This IS the satire.

@thor @djsumdog @icedquinn
Everything is just turtles all the way down.

@thor @icedquinn
Happiness isn't the goal of science, but it being the general goal of everyone else is enough. Science gives us knowledge, and the people who have happiness as a goal can use or not use that knowledge to improve life.
Easiest example is nuclear energy. Science just provided an answer. The military used that to quickly put an end to a war, energy corporations used that same answer to provide cheaper electricity.

@djsumdog @thor @icedquinn
I personally take Matt Dilahunty's view on it. I don't care if this is a simulation or not. Whether it's a simulation or the real thing, I still want to find out the rules of how it all works, and so far there's been a single reliable way to do so.

@thor @icedquinn
In day to day stuff, sure, quality of life or happiness are good benchmarks to use. Reminds me a bit of Jordan Peterson's view of truth (basically what should be called pragmatic truth). If something works and delivers happiness, it's something worth considering as valuable, even if it's not true in the scientific sense of the word.

But when it comes to applying the scientific method, you can't really use any other value to benchmark your models than accuracy and truth.

@thor @icedquinn
Things have changed in today's media economy. Firstly, it's more important to the media publication to get clicks than awards. Secondly, quite recently a Pulitzer was awarded for made up claims against Trump. So Pulitzers aren't what they used to be either.

@thor @icedquinn
In a way the journalists are payed more for hyping up things (at least currently in the click economy). Which is contrary in my view to good science, cause hyping up things can easily lead to false conclusions. And if anything, a scientists should first and foremost be accurate about his findings. Even if the progress he makes is minuscule, it's more important that it's an accurate "minuscule" that others can rely on to further their research.

@thor @icedquinn
What you usually get is a small number of scientists that happen to be good communicators, and they end up taking the slack. This is how you get Neil deGrasse Tyson being celebrated as the big science guy, when the reality is he probably hasn't contributed anything since forever, because he was forced into being a science communicator instead of a scientist. And then you get the issue of people realizing Neil hasn't been a scientist in a long time, so they won't trust him either, even if he probably still understands the field very well, and could explain to you recent developments.

@thor @icedquinn
True. What science does is find more and more accurate models of what the world works like, but in practice we might never know how the universe ACTUALLY works like.
We find that E=MC^2 is a very accurate equation, but the true algorithm our universe follows might be something outstandingly different and it just happens that E=MC^2 is a very good approximation.

Something interesting I've read recently, a bunch of scientists tried to get an AI to figure out some of the basic theories (equations) that describe our world. They had the AI watch movies of things like pendulums, to teach it how their motion works, and the AI spat out some equations. And the scientists were able to tell that the equations worked, but they couldn't figure out what the different variables or constants actually represented, for example: which variables represented speed, mass etc.
Goes to show that there are many ways to describe the world, there are many ways you can formulate models to describe a phenomenon, but it doesn't mean it completely makes sense or that it's consistent with everything else.

@thor @icedquinn
There a HUGE problem with science reporting currently. Scientists are VERY weary in dealing with the media, because every mainstream publication imaginable completely twists any small discovery and exaggerates the findings of a paper to extreme degrees. I can't even begin to describe some of the bullshit the press claims scientists have discovered, when the reality can be something as benign as wiping your bottom. And this does indeed contribute a lot to the public losing faith in science.

We can take Quinn's early reaction as an example. He found an article describing how some scientists made one of these speculations, and tried to make a model of a universe with varying speed of light, and they made it work mathematically. Quinn did exactly what the media usually does, and took this as evidence that the speed of light isn't a constant, when all that thought experiment proves is that you COULD have an universe with a varying speed of light, but that doesn't mean it's our universe.

Do You Want to Build a Meth Lab?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uty2zd7qizA

@thor @icedquinn
Yup. Pretty much why science ignores these philosophical questions in the first place. Whether we live in reality or a simulation, we observe that our world behaves by some rules, and they can be discovered. So we make the assumption that the rules are going to be consistent and start from there.

@icedquinn @thor
I read a bit more, and I'm actually aware of this theoretical model they build. It's just that mathematically a lot of things can work and be self consistent. They're just not usually consistent with reality. And this model is one of those where it's less tested and provable than string theory. It's the equivalent of a creationist going "but what if the universe is only 6000 years old", but with actual consistent maths. Still doesn't make it true though.

@thor @icedquinn
I think technically nothing is provable. You can't get rid of the "what if I'm a brain in a vat" problem.

@icedquinn @thor
I think this should make it pretty obvious that the guy is just exploring a potential mathematical model, and it's not something measured or proven in any way.
Do I need to read further?

@icedquinn @thor
And calling it a problem is being generous, cause people aren't even sure if the mishmashes is because some measurements techniques are less accurate than others, or if it's something else. Cause some of them do fit with one another within the error margins.

@icedquinn @thor
There's a problem with measuring the cosmological constant, but not the speed of light.

@icedquinn @thor
>except the speed of light has been observed to change
Where?! Cause last time I know of where scientists thought they managed to get a different speed of light, it turned out they bungled their experiment.