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MononcQc posted:look, I took an outrageous stance to get the discussion going and I don't truly believe this, but let's see if we can argue our way out of a paper bag, because that's what this semantics and pedantry is for. more of a comment than a question, but it does seem as though semantics and pedantry are actually wonderful if you want to confine arguments into ever-smaller and less productive paper bags. Like, a great stance to take if your language game is to nominally agree to play some larger language game, but your actual aim is to frustrate all other players.
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Dec 8, 2023 19:45
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 10:35 |
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Beeftweeter posted:lol hmm elon musk has made me hate the phrase "from first principles" echinopsis posted:I don’t really know what it means when people say this in an educational context, it can certainly mean something like "I intend to explain this topic starting with a thorough treatment of the concepts upon which it rests; if my audience is prepared for the treatment of the foundational topics, they will come away with a strong, primary grasp on my main topic." in the life of a physics student (possibly some math or engineering students) it can mean something like "I can't for the life of me remember all of the possible equations that I might need to use, but I do remember enough of the *derivations* of those equations that, when I need them on an exam, I can re-derive them from fundamental laws and domain-specific constraints or assumptions." in a professional STEM problem solving context, it means something sort of like the above, but maybe more like "I don't have the typical background knowledge of other people working in this field, but I'm going to see if I can use multiple elements of my background knowledge and my synthetic and/or analytical skills to put together an understanding possibly as good, perhaps with different nuances, from others who learned this stuff in school or early in their professional life. " for anything related to politics, society, etc as used by musk it's essentially screaming "I THINK I'M THE SPECIALEST EPISTEMIC TRESPASSER! I KNOW I'M NOT AN EXPERT AND THAT'S GREAT BECAUSE WE ALL KNOW EXPERTS ARE CORRUPT, DECEITFUL, DEVIOUS, AND STUPID" As someone who enjoyed hearing it in an educational context and employed the strategies as a physics student and a STEM worker, I am dismayed that Elon Musk uses it to describe his "theories" about politics etc. Silver Alicorn posted:they mean figuring it out themselves without listening to experts who are in the pocket of big government  Deep Dish Fuckfest posted:everyone who's done what you want to do before is a loving idiot and can't be trusted and since you're so much smarter than everyone else (and especially them) you're going to start from scratch for everything and invent a better wheel that sometimes catches on fire
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Dec 8, 2023 21:38
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paging sagebrush, requesting reflections on the use of the phrase, "from first principles"
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Dec 8, 2023 21:45
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fart simpson posted:nope this is just word games. the point is that people have different, fundamental interests that sometimes conflict in irreconcilable ways. in those situations you can’t really “agree” because what’s good for you is not good for me right, agreement between person P and person Q on some matter X:
terms and conditions apply but I think this not a terrible nor overly labored elaboration of fart simpson’s point. and his statement explains a fundamental (radical? should I say?) cause of many thorny disagreements
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Dec 9, 2023 07:19
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The binary byte units and their abbreviations (mebibyte, gibibyte, etc and MiB GiB etc) are a principled way to say “I know some people measure bytes the wrong way, but not me.”
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Dec 10, 2023 20:09
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Salt Fish posted:Just because you put the letters M-E-G-A into a word doesn't mean its an SI prefix. For example, the megazord is not built out of 1 million other zords. 
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Dec 11, 2023 02:16
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in the ostensibly very technically accurate novel, “The Martian”, the protagonist has more hydrogen than he needs and is thinking about how to make water. He then fails a high school chemistry problem.The Martian posted:Anyway, the reserve oxygen would only be enough to make 100 liters of water (50 liters of [liquid] O2 makes 100 liters of molecules that only have one O each). Why is he wrong? He’s doing volume calculations without considering density. Mass is conserved in these reactions, volume is not. 100L of water weighs 100kg, of which about 89kg is oxygen. 50L of liquid O2 (1.14 g/ml) weighs about 57kg, so fully reacted with hydrogen it could make up about 64kg of water. The “factor of two” between O2 and H2O is entirely Echi’s fellow pharmacists failing to do calculations reminded me of this. prisoner of waffles fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Dec 11, 2023 |
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Dec 11, 2023 02:25
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To take the given numbers, arrange them in what seems to be the most plausible calculation, and get an answer is a true classic of mislearned math (and especially physical calculation) problem solving skills.
prisoner of waffles fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Dec 11, 2023 |
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Dec 11, 2023 02:53
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MononcQc posted:It can be used like a fractal when measuring a country's coast. It's like the semantic version of the CC game where you add more and more people to an email chain until all productivity dies, but instead you break down the discussion into an ever-expanding set of sub-arguments until everyone is fed up and you "win". The fractal coastline metaphor is good, but only if you assume that the players of this game aim to get to some kind of success and are broadly aligned about what success means. In the limit as you add unboundedly many people to such an email chain, all reply-alls eventually converge to one of two stable topics: “please remove me from this list” and “do not reply-all; you cannot be removed because this is not a list”.
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Dec 11, 2023 03:13
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MononcQc posted:I mean do you frame conflict as a fundamentally permanent irremediable thing, or as a transitory state until parties can find a way to either compromise, realign visions, or repair wrongs, and then move on? Well the latter framing definitely fits with the progressive view of history, which has always had a good fit to world affairs in the medium and long term. Now to take a sip of coffee and wake up from a decades-long coma to check the news…
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Dec 11, 2023 03:15
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fart simpson posted:handed down by g*d? well-read undead posted:that only applies to words in the bible. it's open season of the rest of 'em anyway, here’s
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Dec 11, 2023 06:28
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 10:35 |
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hmm, I thought feyerabend’s point was that science can’t be constrained to be any fixed, specific method. That’s different from not existing at all or existing as a single articulable system. “science is more about the notes that you don’t play”
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Dec 11, 2023 17:32
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