121–130 of 145 posts
This article presupposes that Proxima Centauri is not, in fact, made of chorizo. Whereas we have long known that the moon is made of cheese. I think Klein is floating a test balloon to gauge the public's willingness to consume the 'celestial charcuterie' theory of the heavens.
It would be a lot of fun if someone competent with physics explained how celestial bodies would behave if they were made of meat. That'd be a fun Youtube video imo.
After thinking about this for a minute, I think the point wasn’t that people shouldn’t have fallen for this in particular, but to give everything a tint of uncertainty. It’s a pretty clear cut example of “no matter how believable it was, it can still be not even a little bit true”. In many contexts I’d call that a rather unproductive observation, but in the context of fake news, we have many people perceiving differe…
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How does he think dissemination of scientific knowledge actually works? 99.99% of people don't have the education to truly verify breakthrough scientific work. It's a lot of pageantry and ethical training to make the appeal to authority more valid, but it will always at its core be appeal to authority.
Hopefully people involved in the real dissemination of scientific knowledge can read more than 144 characters. He indicated in the same tweet thread what it really was. The fact that people can refence just one part of the thread and have it go viral out of context is pretty symbolic of our modern times.
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I don't think it's fair to say that the joke went wrong. It certainly showed how gullible people are
Why gullible? When you look at images of stars there are plenty of versions. This one looked plausible, backed by a scientist. He fucked up and does not have the balls to face the music
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I don't believe you. And that's the bottom line. In the end you don't get a better informed and critical audience, you get people who don't believe you if you say 1+1 is 2. We live in times where people discuss if earth is flat and rules by lizard people fro the inside of the earth. If you always start from the assumption that the expert is wrong, you have no time to do anything because the world now has so much know…
> I don't believe you. I haven't asked you to "believe me". What you're saying is that you'd rather believe "experts" than not believe them. This is religion, not rationality. > you have no time to do anything because the world now has so much knowdledge you can't check it evrything fast enough. And some point you have to trust people and that some are experts. ...or you can choose to stay agnostic on most claims, an…
Here's the big question. How do you know that the evidence your sensory apparatus reveals to you is correct? What I'm getting at is this. The only experience that is directly available to you is your sensory data. This sensory data is merely a stream of electrical impulses that stimulate your brain.
In other words, all that you really know about the outside world is relayed to you through your electrical connections.
That would mean that...you really don't know what the outside universe is really like at all for certain.
Serious q for any astrophysicists here: could the JWST resolve any surface features of Proxima Centauri? (In infrared of course.) Would be mind-blowing to see if so.
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I think that if there were a ball of meat the size of a star, it would collapse into an actual star, although smaller and more dense. I would really be interested to know what Steller atomic composition most closely matches that of a sausage.
So what your saying is that it would cook itself as it collapses and somewhere in the process there'd be a point where the sausage is perfectly toasted?
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> If people have to be skeptical of scientists they will not believe anything that they say Wait, are you seriously arguing that people shouldn't be skeptical of scientists? I was a scientist at doctoral course level and I sure didn't blindly believe whatever was written in a paper, or said by another researcher: a lot of papers are weak, biased in their protocol, or even straight-up arrangement with reality. This la…
You were a scientist so you have the power to understand. For the general population the choice is between the voodoo man, or a professor. I prefer people to choose to blindly believe the professor (which carries a risk) than the voodoo man (which is always crap)
Do you remember peak ivermectin? There were many articles published by real medical doctors in real journals. Is that a professor you should trust? (I read a few of the articles. Most of them were just awful, and I was ignoring the non statistically significant ones.)
The list of food that babies can not eat before they are one year old changes from country to country, and even from one medical doctor to another. Find a few friends abroad and compare.
What if a military expert tells you that a normal looking truck is a secret mobile factory of weapons of mass destruction? Should you invade?
What about cold fusion, aka low energy nuclear reactions, aka [I don't remember the new name]? I think they are published by people with real degree. (I recommend to ignore the heat measurements because it's too difficult. Look for the data about neutrons or isotopes.)
I'd like too that people follow the advice from serious professors instead of voodoo man, but sometimes the distinction is not so clear. At one point people must choose the expert to follow.
For some topics there are easy rules, like "preregistered double blind randomized controlled trial published in a serious peer review journal or it didn't happen", but each word there need a long explanation of the meaning and a long explanation of why it is there. (And remember to read the details, because some papar have weird exclusion criteria, like dropping the death cases.) (And defining which journal are "serious" is a very difficult task.)
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I don't think it's fair to say that the joke went wrong. It certainly showed how gullible people are
Why gullible? When you look at images of stars there are plenty of versions. This one looked plausible, backed by a scientist. He fucked up and does not have the balls to face the music
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Alternatively, don't believe everything you read.
If we can't believe people who are experts in their field, who can we believe? That mindset damns the entire field of science communication and outreach Are we supposed to take the lesson that we should simply never believe anything? Just give up on the concept facts and objectivity and give in to the chaotic maelstrom? Or are we supposed to go out and build our own space telescopes to verify every piece of informati…