Now for applied mathematics on the other hand…
Meanwhile, Psychologists:
Not a science.
What makes something a science?
A methodology with reproducible experiments and results.
Psychology is as much as science as medicine was a science in the Middle Ages.
That doesn’t mean we should stop pursuing knowledge in the field, but to call it a science at this point in its development is just disingenuous.
A methodology with reproducible experiments and results.
And why don’t you think psychology fits this?
Various meta analysis have found that the results of 50%+ of all studies in the field are non reproducible. It could be as high as 70%+.
Again this does not mean that it isn’t a valid field of knowledge, it just not a science yet. People somehow take offense at this because I guess they feel like I’m invalidating the field. I actually only invalidating the validity of their findings so far which is more like a “sorry, try again until you find the fundamental rules of your field”. There’s also this pervasive attitude that all fields must be a science in order to be valuable which is just not true.
The term “social science” reeks of insecurity to me because other than using the scientific method, they are not a sciences at all, but I guess academics needed a way to to defend themselves from the bullying physicists.
My personal opinion is that psychology ignores biology too much, and insists on humans as purely socially constructed beings. If they started looking more at how our biology is the fundamental mold for our psychology, they might start making real progress towards being a science. But then maybe it wouldn’t be psychology anymore.
Im asking these questions to asses what you actually understand science to be.
The term “social science” reeks of insecurity to me because other than using the scientific method, they are not a sciences at all, but I guess academics needed a way to to defend themselves from the bullying physicists.
Do you have a degree, or better yet a terminal degree in a science field? What is your actual academic experience in doing social science experiments?
I have a degree, but not in science. Does that make me unqualified to state that the field of psychology, and most other social sciences lack the epistemic rigor of something like physics or biology and therefore are not real sciences?
I’ll repeat it, psychology is a science in much the same way that medieval medicine was a science. It may one day become an actual science much like medieval medicine became a science.
What is your field?
It lacks predictability and reproduceability. At least to a certain extend. As long as every diagnosis is “this most likely is” or even “could be”, it is not science.
But you can still look down on economists, who are somewhere between crystal ball readers or tea leaf interpreters and random number generators on that behalf.
Economists aren’t trying to predict the future. That’s a misconception that is done away with in the first few days of intro.
Economists set option prices. That is literally trying to predict the future.
Edit: To be fair, I shouldn’t say “economists” in general. There are plenty of good economists out there that understand that economics is not a predictive science, I know a couple personally. But there are definitely some economists out there that think their degree lets them predict the unpredictable.
But math does change, and it has a lot in the last 1000 years.
Has anything changed in Euclid’s Elements?
We discovered one of the postulates was really interesting to fuck with.
It’s better to say that we’ve discovered more math, some of which changes how we understand the old.
Since Euclid, we’ve made discoveries in how geometry works and the underpinnings of it that can and have been used to provide foundation for his work, or to demonstrate some of the same things more succinctly. For example, Euclid had some assumptions that he didn’t document.
Since math isn’t empirical, it’s rarely wrong if actually proven. It can be looked at differently though, and have assumptions changed to learn new things, or we can figure out that there are assumptions that weren’t obvious.
The number of hypotheses we’ve proven, mostly. Also, we have this whole field of non-Euclidean geometry. And the modern Pythagoreans are a lot more chill about people knowing the irrationality of Pi.
Yeah but I mean revision not additive change. From what I remember nothing in elements is wrong. I don’t think anyone proved that last postulate
Nothing is wrong, it’s just more incomplete than a modern book.
But if you’re at the 101 level, sure. It works fine.
Nope. Thats why I gifted it to my son, who studies math.
Yes, some of the shit he wrote was basically meaningless (the “definitions” before the axioms) and we would just leave it out.
Not sure, I’ve only gotten to the middle of the third season. No spoilers, please!
Math doesn’t change, we just learn more about it.
The mathematical knowledge we had thousands of years ago is still true, and it always will be.
Math doesn’t change, we just learn more about it.
Isn’t that true of almost all the sciences?
The difference is that if something is proven mathematically it’s 100% certain and will not change. In other sciences you may be taught things that later turn out to be flat out wrong.
Not if it’s later shown that your set of axioms lead to a contradiction.
In that case have fun re-proofing everything with new axioms.
Not here to start shit, genuinely curious what people think about Gödel’s incompleteness theorems in relation to us being able to “know” math
Not a mathematician but the way I understand it, is that it merely shows that there are unprovable problems, not that nothing can be proven.
Bingo, I was taught in genetics class in the 1990s that RNA played a role but DNA was the primary driver and now my understanding is the current consensus is RNA is the primary driver.
When I was growing up, Minnie was the primary driver, but now the consensus says that it’s Adam.
A lot of sciences find core assumptions were not complete or based on the wrong thing. Health practices that have been around for millenia, like like food safety and sanitation, were successfully implemented using the wrong causes because they addressed the real causes. While they were not called science, they still used the same practices of comparing outcomes in the ways available at the time.
Bloodletting was originally to let out evil or something, then was used in formal medicine successfully but the cause it addressed was incorrect. Now we have much better ideas of how and when it helps to make it even more effective, but the underlying reasons and the methods changed completely.
Bloodletting is still a thing, but it’s called therapeutic phlebotomy.
Source: I have too much iron in my blood so I have to be bloodlet
Not quite. Science is empirical, which means it’s based on experiments and we can observe patterns and try to make sense of them. We can learn that a pattern or our understanding of it is wrong.
Math is inductive, which means that we have a starting point and we expand out from there using rules. It’s not experimental, and conclusions don’t change.
1+1 is always 2. What happens to math is that we uncover new ways of thinking about things that change the rules or underlying assumptions. 1+1 is 10 in base 2. Now we have a new, deeper truth about the relationship between bases and what “two” means.Science is much more approximate. The geocentric model fit, and then new data made it not fit and the model changed. Same for heliocentrism, Galileos models, Keplers, and Newtons. They weren’t wrong, they were just discovered to not fit observed reality as well as something else.
A scientific discovery can shift our understanding of the world radically and call other models into question.
A mathematical discovery doesn’t do that. It might make something more clear, easier to work with, or provide a technique that can be surprisingly applicable elsewhere.You’re contradicting yourself.
What happens to math is that we uncover new ways of thinking about things that change the rules or underlying assumptions
Is no different than:
A scientific discovery can shift our understanding of the world radically and call other models into question.
Science isn’t changing, our understanding of it is. Same with math.
Those are entirely different. Peano developed a system for talking about arithmetic in a formalized way. This allowed people to talk about arithmetic in new ways, but it didn’t show that previous formulations of arithmetic were wrong. Godel then built on that to show the limits of arithmetic, which still didn’t invalidate that which came before.
The development of complex numbers as an extension of the real numbers didn’t make work with the real numbers invalid.When a new scientific model is developed, it supercedes the old model. The old model might still have use, but it’s now known to not actually fit reality. Relativity showed that Newtowns model of the cosmos was wrong: it didn’t extend it or generalize it, it showed that it was inadequately describing reality. Close for human scale problems but ultimately wrong.
And we already know relativity is wrong because it doesn’t match experimental results in quantum mechanics.Science is our understanding of reality. Reality doesn’t change, but our understanding does.
Because math is a fundamentally different from science, if you know something is true then it’s always true given the assumptions.There’s a difference between an advance that repudiates prior understanding and one that doesn’t. You can, in maths - and I assume this is the point - know that you are right, in a way that you can’t with a more… epistemological science. Of course it’s more complex than that, and a lot of maths is pretty sciency, like deriving approximate solutions for PDEs is more experimental than you might imagine, but even though we might make improvements there, we’ll never go ‘oh actually those error bounds are wrong’. They might be non optimal but they’ll never be wrong
This is missing a lot of historical intrigues and “mistakes” in mathematics. Firstly, the way modern mathematical theorems and proofs are built up from axioms is relatively new (a couple hundred years or so). If you go back to Euclid, there are in fact contradictions that can be drawn from his work because he was defining his axioms inappropriately.
In more modern times we have discussions around the “axiom of choice”, and whole fields such as set theory and Fourier analysis faced some major hurdles in just being established.
My point is that math is constantly changing, also on a fundamental level, because new systems and axioms are being introduced. These rarely invalidate old systems, but sometimes they reveal a contradiction in terms that puts limitations on when some system is valid.
This is very similar to when Einstein developed a new framework for describing gravity: It didn’t “disprove” Newton in the sense that Newton’s laws still apply for all practical purposes in a huge range of situations, it just put clearer limits to when they apply and gave a more general explanation to why they apply.
yeah, and physics changes as a science because the actual physics of the universe changes. what are you on about. “we just learn more about it” is pretty much the definition of all sciences.
Religious Texts: … that text was written by some half literate guy living in a desert who heard tenth hand folk stories from his community from people who had died about a hundred years before his time, mixed in with legends, myths and fairy tales that are thousands of years old … but it’s all true because it came from God, believe it or you will burn in hell forever.
Q: How can you tell if a Lemming is an atheist?
A: Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
You saw a meme about science and math and your first thought was “how can I make this about religion”?
excuse me, but this is a meme about history and religious mythology is definitely a big part of history
I would just expect someone who doesn’t like religion to not want to have conversations about it, instead of bringing it up at every vaguely related opportunity.
sounds like you haven’t had much experience of having to sit through religious people spout bullshit at you every single day. it’s not the least bit surprising to me that it’s on someone’s mind. or maybe you just don’t understand why religion would matter to someone? even to challenge/deny it is to engage with its importance no?
sounds like you haven’t had much experience of having to sit through religious people spout bullshit at you every single day.
You mean like what’s happening in this thread? Someone had a joke that had nothing to do with religion, and here we are talking about religious bullshit because someone can’t let any opportunity pass without mentioning religion.
Again: if you’re tired of people spouting religious bullshit at you all day I would expect you to not try to steer even more conversations towards religion.
I didn’t steer shit, first of all. I’m not the one who posted the original comment. I’m just telling you to shut the fuck up. Let us enjoy our thing.
Second, do you really believe that if you just ignore things they go away? As if people are not out there bible thumping every single day? and we come in here and try to enjoy a moment of reflecting on the ridiculousness of those beliefs and you have to come in here and bitch about it. hence, I’m here to tell you to shut the fuck up.
I’m sorry if this comes across as rude, maybe cussing will send me to hell or whatever, but i really feel like your input has been the truly rude part of this conversation.
I didn’t like covid either but I sure ranted at people online about it!
Do you reply to memes about video games with your thoughts on covid?
Also rewritten, heavily translated with a large variety of biases, and with whole sections taken out or added in depending on the version AND there has been lord knows how many instances of stacking errors because new interpretations often come from already dubious later versions and not the original texts.
But it’s also all the undeniably word of god and you better not question whatever version you grew up with.
That wouldn’t be true for Christianity as 3 of the 4 Gospels were cribbing off the 4th one. Heck the Gospel of John and the Revelation unto John were written by at least two different people and the Revelation likely was included at the Council of Nicea because they both had John in the name. Christianity would be very different without revelations.
The prevailing consensus is that the gospels of Matthew and Luke were cribbing from the gospel of Mark and a text that is lost to us that is referred to as Q. The gospel of John is original as far as we know.
Also, a lot of the Pauline epistles weren’t even written by Paul.
You, a loser Christian, reading from a 2000 year old book of morality fables.
Me, a sophisticated Scientologist, reading from a 70 year old Sci-Fi/fad health trilogy.
Maybe L. Ron Hubbard was a time traveller that had already started everything 3,000 years ago and decided to restart it all again 70 years ago.
Or maybe he just copied the successful indoctrination practices of existing religions…
Maybe the real religion was the profit we made along the way.
Always was
The hypocrisy of this book being the words of their all powerful master while they give themselves the option to cherry pick which rules they wish to follow is astounding.
It’s one of the first things that convinced kid me that it’s all made up bullshit to control gullible people.
The funny part that is … which book are you talking about? … Christian bible? Jewish Tanakh? Islamic Koran? … and if its Christian - is it just the Old Testament? New Testament? … which version of the Christian bible? - King James? New Standard? English Standard? Anglican? Baptist? Lutheran? Methodist? Presbyterian? Roman Catholic? Mormon? Protestant?
Yes
I don’t see any difference between cults. It’s all a way to control uneducated people with fake magical thinking and the threat of eternal damnation.
well the joke is that each book claims to be written by God
Same here … and they’re all cults as far as I’m concerned
The only difference between a cult and a religion is time
Time and mass acceptance
Whichever one best justifies the lifestyle and decisions.
Don’t forget about all the apocrypha.
I reminded your mom of the apocrypha last night, if you know what I mean…
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And don’t worry, it definitely wasn’t completely written a thousand years later to push the preferred political agendas of the time.
Lol bro doesn’t know about calculus
Yes, maybe, but bcz of that he invented a completely new branch of mathematics that was shunned at first, but we found really important once we got our interstellar dew hickeys working with interstellar time travel. Now he’s considered a legend, even tho he died broke and destitute.
I love that Eratosthenes was able to estimate the circumference of the earth with the amount of math we had in his era. Meanwhile, modern flat-earthers are still making me want to vomit.
I used to see fractals in the shadows on LSD. I couldn’t think of the word “fractal,” and told my friend, “You know, that thing in math?” And he said to me, “When you trip you see math?!” Fun times. To be a teen again.
Someday I’d like to replicate Eratosthenes’ experiment with a long north-south road trip, but I never remember to make the measurements.
I love that Eratosthenes was able to estimate the circumference of the earth with the amount of math we had in his era.
Not only that, but he was much closer to the right answer than Columbus was, yet Columbus is the one to get a day named after him, even though Columbus would have died due to starvation as most people had predicted he would if he had not gotten lucky and run into a continent that no one knew about except for the people that lived there and the Vikings and the Chinese and other people that didn’t count! It just proves the principle that the key to success is not to be smart but to be lucky.
"… Science is constantly proved all the time. You see, if we take something like any fiction, any holy book… and destroyed it, in a thousand years’ time, that wouldn’t come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book, and every fact, and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they’d all be back, because all the same tests would [produce] the same result.”
― Ricky Gervais
Have you met a bayesian guy? All prof on statistics in my uni keep talking how “traditional” approach is stupid, inferior, blah blah
As nearly always, there is a relevant xkcd.
On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.
Software Development: You bought a textbook?
“Oh, that blog post is obsolete. It was written before version 1.87.0d.20250304.nightly”
“It’s okay, I’ll just ask ChatGPT.”
Asks ChatGPT about new feature.
ChatGPT makes up a completely fictional answer that sounds plausible given the state of the repository two years ago.
"That’s great! I’d love to help you discover the exciting world of programming! The best language for a starter is probably HTML, which stands for Hypertext Text Machine Learning Code 5. You can write HTML in an environment which is a kind of software. The best environments for creating HTML are:
- VSCode
- Visual Studio Code
- Code
- HTML
- Eclipse
- Visual FoxPro
- Visual Basic
- Visual C+++
- Borland Turbo
- Pascal
- Vienna
- Innsbruck
- Salzburg
Remember to install your favourite using one or more supported environments. Begin with something basic and work up from there. You’ll be in no time. Have fun! Or should I say, Have Fun!"
Oh dear, that is excellent.
Math is a thought game with axioms as rules. It’s much more stable since the rules are “self-evident”.
Fuck you professor, its a 35 line proof, and it isn’t as trivial as you think it is!
It’s actually a 36 line proof, so this question is wrong and you score a 50 on the test.
I’m getting undergrad flashbacks. “It’s trivial so I won’t be going over it…”
Electron was discovered in 1897. If you own a textbook on chemistry which is older than that, put it up on Ebay in the antiques category.
Newton lived in the 17th century, so if you got a textbook older than that give it back to the museum
I’ll drop it off for anyone if needed.
I’m very trustworthy.
Very.
I promise.
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“Why yes I do happen to also be the author of the textbook for this course, why do you ask?”
Computer Science:
Oh, that textbook is outdated. That was before NodeJS 22.
One of the best programmers I’ve ever met told me, “All you need is Knuth everything else is just syntax.” And I don’t know if that’s 100% true, but can say I learned more from reading The Art of Computer Programming than I have in basically any other textbook/textbook series I’ve read on the subject.
For me its like “oh great a old textbook, now i can finally understand our legacy codebase”.
Or: The new version is reimplemented and incompatible, so everything you learnt about it from the previous versions is wrong.
Oh, you use the MediaWiki engine, too? The documentation is always a few versions behind, and between there and now they broke the interface three times…
This is one reason I really liked my Dynamics professor. On the first day of class, he wrote “F=ma” on the white board and said, “See that equation? It hasn’t changed much in the last 200 years. You don’t need to buy the newest edition of the textbook; it’s mostly just fixing errata. The lessons are virtually the same as the first edition.”
