These people vote:
Every Tuesday at 6 p.m., three dozen Coloradans from every corner of the state assemble in the windowless back room of a small Fort Collins coffee shop. They have met 16 times since March, most nights talking through the ins and outs of their shared faith until the owners kick them out at closing.
They have no leaders, no formal hierarchy and no enforced ideology, save a common quest for answers to questions about the stars. Their membership has slowly swelled in the past three years, though persecution and widespread public derision keep them mostly underground. Many use pseudonyms, or only give first names.
“They just do not want to talk about it for fear of reprisals or ridicule from co-workers,” says John Vnuk, the group’s founder who lives in Fort Collins.
He is at the epicenter of a budding movement, one that’s coming for your books, movies, God and mind. They’re thousands strong — perhaps one in every 500 — and have proponents at the highest levels of science, sports, journalism and arts.
They call themselves Flat Earthers. Because they believe Earth — the blue, majestic, spinning orb of life — is as flat as a table.
There is so much to unpack here, but I think the fear of being persecuted for saying and believing stupid things is not something society should be concerned about. Stupidity should be persecuted. People should strive to not be stupid. This is priceless:
Knodel worked for 35 years as an engineer and now runs the popular YouTube channel Globebusters, which has nearly 2 million views across more than 135 videos. “I’ve researched conspiracies for a long time,” he says. “I’ve looked very critically at NASA. Why is it that the astronauts have conflicting stories about the sky? Is it bright with stars, or a deep velvet black?”
His wife, Cami, shares his views. “Our YouTube channel gets people to critically think,” she said to the Fort Collins group. “The heliocentric model says that we’re spinning at 1,038 mph. They say you won’t notice it because it’s a continual motion. But you should be able to feel it. You shouldn’t be able to function allegedly spinning that fast.”
A.) That’s not thinking critically.
B.) Clearly you have never been on a plane.
BGinCHI
A movement led by Vnuk and Knodel.
Coincidence?
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
And to think we’d successfully killed this shit until Washington Irving pulled that Columbus story out of his ass.
Tilda Swintons Bald Cap
This country has too many stupid people to continue on into the future. 50 years from now things will look a LOT different, and not in a good way.
Baud
QFT.
BGinCHI
Every time I think we should move to CO (the beer! the mountains! the cycling culture! the weather!) I read something like this and I’m convinced white people ruin everything.
MaxUtil
…and yet smart enough to know they’ll be ridiculed for spouting this stuff. People are weird. I have to think this has more to do with just being contrarian than any firm model of how the physical world works. They just like being the special ones that haven’t been fooled. Wake up sheeple!
Baud
I blame Democratic hubris.
schrodingers_cat
Stunning exemplars of the civilization, the orange man was blabbering about yesterday.
MomSense
My mom was telling me that one of her friends has a kid who is a “flat earther”. It’s just too much stupid to process.
Baud
@MaxUtil:
I thought that was us!
Lizzy L
I prefer to believe this is an epic troll.
scav
Hey, Knodel? I’ve heard conflicting stories about you and your wife’s intelligence and physical attributes as actual members of the human species — Best I can tell, that actually is a dumpling on top of what’s normally a neck.
lollipopguild
@Baud: I blame Satan in a Blue Pants Suit e-mails.
Baud
@MomSense: We need to bring back whuppings.
@Lizzy L: That’s pre-11/8 thinking.
Baud
@lollipopguild: Yep. As soon as she said she’s traveled all around the globe as Secretary of State, it was all over.
geg6
Oh for pasta’s sake. These people need to be mocked and ridiculed in public forever. I just can’t with this shit.
Uncle Cosmo
@BGinCHI: Um, inasmuch as “knödel” is German for “dumpling”, & “vnuk” is “grandson” in 8 Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish [wnuk, but same pronunciation], Russian, Slovak, Slovenian & Ukrainian)…what point am I missing here?
Brachiator
The Internets and rise of technology has sparked a revolutionary increase in knowledge and access to information.
This has also sparked a revolutionary increase in fear and ignorance, an almost inevitable pushback.
Oddly enough, the Internets has also made it easier for the perpetually ignorant to find one another. Used to be village idiots were isolated. Now, they can jump online and reinforce one another.
patrick II
My grandmother once took a trip around the world, starting in Chicago and heading East to Europe, Egypt, India, Japan, Hawaii, California, and then back to Chicago. She had a wonderful time but she held back stories on how it felt flying over the Eastern edge of the earth and then flying back upside down on the bottom side and then coming back up over the Western edge to fool people that she actually went “around” the world. I never trusted her after that.
MaxUtil
Been perusing their youtube channel and have learned that science is a jewish plot to destroy all religions…and that these guys smoke a lot of weed.
Baud
@Brachiator:
I thought that was us!
(Seriously, I agree with everything you said.)
Shell
I don’t think they understand what that phrase means.
Are we sure they’re just drinking coffee?
Mr Stagger Lee
Idiocracy in full swing, did you love Ivanka representin’ in the G20?
Baud
@MaxUtil: Well, that gets me to think twice about legalization.
Baud
@Mr Stagger Lee: It’s seriously pathetic, but also probably safer for us and the world than a “real” official.
schrodingers_cat
@MaxUtil: Really? Yesterday, someone on Balloon Juice was arguing that science is the epitome of the western civilization. Clearly, I must have imagined Galileo’s ordeal.
Mike R
They may be right, the last time on a plane when I stood up to use the restroom the speed of the plane threw me into the rear bulk head. I was never able to return to my seat as the speed of the plane prevented me from working my way back. ////////////
scav
@Brachiator: Internet? GPS? Unpossible, those frauds require impossible satellite technology. Everyone knows it’s really all done with really fast vacuum tubes like at the proper banks. Maybe really tall stationary radio towers at the four corners of the planet, but there’s a bit of a controversy between those that insist on four corners and those insisting that round is a more platonic ideal. Let’s not even get into the sixers and twelver sects. Hexagons and dodecagons?! At least there are no octagon heretics — everyone and Cami know motion on that planet would be utterly impossible.
TriassicSands
I don’t know what it is, but it’s not really even thinking. Next she’s going to come up with five reasons why gravity is a myth. If she’s ever seen the movie Atlantic City, she’s already got grave doubts about gravity.
gene108
If the Earth is flat, how do explain the child slave colony on Mars?
If the Earth is flat, the solar system is flat, and flying beyond the atmosphere would be impossible.
Bill Arnold
@Lizzy L:
Likewise. I refuse to believe[1] that this is not a organized performance art until I meet one (or more) of these people and talk with them for a half hour.
[1] Just kidding; I know some of them believe this. It is just depressing how easy it is for people to get deeply stuck in a weird belief-system rut that is clearly inconsistent with observed reality. (As in falsifiable.)
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
That can’t be real. Has this woman heard of gravity? I don’t know the scientific particulars of why we don’t feel the rotation of the Earth. My immediate response isn’t to declare therefore the Earth is flat
Citizen_X
These idiots infest NASA’s F-book posts. Their favorite cry (besides “sheeple!”) is “CGI!” whenever any planetary image is posted.
Yes, even if it’s from an Earthbound telescope.
And yes, they should be ridiculed without mercy.
scav
@gene108: There are many soundstages in my father’s mansion.
gene108
@MaxUtil:
What isn’t a Jewish plot to destroy something?
Aleta
Why are there conflicting photos of the moon? Is it all lit up or nice and shady?
TriassicSands
Ridiculed for sure. Persecution sounds unjust. Such people deserve derision and I’m not sure if politeness is necessary. There no need to be rude in ridiculing them, but neither is there any reason to stress politeness. They’re willful idiots and, as such, deserve no respect. Minimal civility, perhaps.
Baud
@gene108: Donald Trump.
schrodingers_cat
@Citizen_X: Have they never used a fucking telescope? Don’t they use smartphones?
FlipYrWhig
What produces these views is economic anxiety. :P
sdhays
@gene108: The Trump Presidency?
ETA: Damn, Baud beat me to it!
Baud
@TriassicSands: Yes, that’s a better way of saying it.
gene108
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
That because you never learned to think critically for yourself…
Citizen_X
Newton wept.
FlipYrWhig
@Mike R: I read this to my wife, who is still laughing. :D
gene108
@Baud: @sdhays:
Good point
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Aleta:
Exactly! Moon gets bigger, moon gets smaller… you can’t explain that.
sdhays
@TriassicSands: But such stupidity should be disqualifying for certain jobs, right? It’s not “persecution” if I don’t want my engineer to be a stupid moron who believes physics is a conspiracy…
SFAW
Can I suggest a minor modification? Willful stupidity should be persecuted. Because sometimes even smart people do stupid things: if they learn from their mistakes — or at least try to learn, that’s one thing; if they refuse to learn, or refuse to consider they might be worng, then (A) they’re Rethugs and (B) they’re too stupid to be allowed to run free.
Mike J
Stupid people don’t understand the first amendment.
SFAW
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Pursuant to what gene108 has pointed out @ 43: perhaps you should change your nym/nom to “The Sheeple of the (Flat) Universe”
azlib
Ask them about the turtles holding the flat earth up.
Baud
@Mike J: No, that statement is technically correct. What’s wrong about it is the insinuation that mocking people for their beliefs is necessarily improper.
SFAW
And, somewhere in Heaven, Terry Pratchett is either laughing or crying.
Someone should ask these morons if the Earth is held up by four REALLY BIG elephants.
ETA: Damn! azlib beat me to it.
Mike J
@Baud: They seem to think the first amendment protects them from ridicule. They don’t understand what the first amendment is.
Baud
@Mike J: I was teeing off the sentence as actually written, which technically doesn’t say that. I bet you are correct as to what they actually believe.
TriassicSands
@sdhays:
Exactly. Disqualifying a scientist for not believing science is NOT persecution. It’s common sense.
I’ve always been appalled by the guy with a doctorate in biology or geology who doesn’t accept evolution or believes the planet is 6,000 years old. They work at places like the Creation Museum in Kentucky, home of our esteemed, climate change-denying Senate Majority Leader Mitch McTurtle.
Mike in NC
“The tide comes in, the tide goes out. Nobody knows why.”
Lapassionara
Wait until the dragon swallows the sun on August 21st! How will the know-nothings feel then?
BretH
For fun my dad got a subscription to The Flat Earth News, a cheap print publication. I recall reading it when I was young and thinking it was either brilliant satire or the stupidest thing imaginable.
MattF
@SFAW: Four really big elephants riding on the back of A’Tuin, the Great Space Turtle. More details here.
TriassicSands
@Mike in NC:
I know. It’s because what goes up must come down, but wait, that theory depends on gravity, which is definitely suspect.
The tide comes in, the tide goes out and nobody knew that health care could be so complicated. I think I nailed it.
Does that help?
Lapassionara
Seriously, I remember learning in grammar school all the ways people figured out the earth was a sphere, well before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Have they never heard of Magellan?
Ken
Two million YouTube views is about, what, 0.3 millicats? (One cat = number of YouTube views of a cat jumping into a box.)
randy khan
@gene108:
No, the Earth is flat and the sky is a big dome above it. So the problem isn’t you can’t get to Mars, it’s that it’s actually pretty small, so there isn’t room for a colony.
Uncle Cosmo
@Lizzy L: Let’s hope so.
One classic refutation of flat-earthism is to stand the flatearthers on the seashore & have them watch a ship sailing off as it gradually disappears, from bottom to top, instead of getting smaller & smaller & smaller. Of course that generally requires the use of binoculars. So I guess they’d have to be optics deniers as well – or maybe deniers of transparency – & any of them who wears eyeglasses is a hypocrite.
randy khan
@MattF:
And then it’s turtles all the way down.
TriassicSands
@Uncle Cosmo:
They might be deniers of vision.
Ken
@Uncle Cosmo:
Oops, I’ve been doing it wrong all these years. I was burying them at the seashore and having them watch the tide come in.
SFAW
@MattF:
Yes, I know. I just didn’t think the remaining two-thirds of a brain cell in their (combined) heads could handle that concept.
Uncle Cosmo
@TriassicSands: None so blind… =;^D
GregB
Copernicus should have campaigned in Wisconsin.
TriassicSands
@Mike J:
They know that the First Amendment is enforced with the Second Amendment.
Chet Murthy
@Citizen_X: Also, they can feel it — it’s called the feeling of gravity pulling them down into the Earth. Oh, and Coriolis forces. Like with the weather. Sigh.
Chris
@Brachiator:
In other words, the Internet is simply doing what mass politics did a century or two ago. (It was good for liberals and socialists, but in time fascists as well).
SFAW
@randy khan:
Different meme?
TriassicSands
@Ken:
That works!
NoraLenderbee
@Mike J:
I’m being persecuted for my First Amendment-protected right of mockery!
PhoenixRising
Can we…just for safety’s sake…get a list of his employers and the products he worked on during that career?
I mean, I’m not driving across a bridge built with trusses he designed.
TriassicSands
@Ken:
I think the official scientific units are the milliMaru, the megaMaru, and the gigaMaru.
schrodingers_cat
@Citizen_X: Engineer person seems to have forgotten Phys 101.
p.a.
You ‘globe-ists’ will be laughing out your arses (located towards the left shoulder blade) some day.
LongHairedWeirdo
What’s really kind of sad is that it can be *interesting* to take up a crazy, contrarian position, and dig in to prove the other way wrong.
I mean, if someone started with the assumption that the earth is flat, and tried to prove it wrong, they could learn some fascinating things about science, critical thinking, and how to counter a lot of rhetorical garbage. They might learn rhetoric (and its weaknesses – in Gorgias, Socrates suggested rhetoric was a “knack of the worst sort” – like cooking, which can make delicious foods that are nutrient-poor), and methods of teaching and explaining. They might learn some fascinating questions, and then learn that, by golly, those questions *do* have answers. They might learn why “appeal to authority” is a fallacy *AND* when it’s sound (“oh, so, Stephen Hawking, who doesn’t study climate science, *can* judge that the physics is sound, assuming the heat trapping properties are correct, but whatsisface who’s a mechanical engineer, and pretty smart, hasn’t actually put pencil to paper to learn the sad truth.”
Really, this is one of the things that make me mourn. I saw some people who defended George W Bush’s statement about uranium as “true, because British intelligence *did* believe the story we’d already debunked” but excoriated Joseph Wilson for a quote in the Washington Post that was attributed to Wilson via hearsay.
That is: Wilson was never quoted as saying “the names were wrong, the dates were wrong,” regarding the Niger memo, but another person *claimed* he’d said that. Anyone able to parse out an excuse for George W has the parsing ability to defend Wilson. And I mourn that my nation is in such a state where people who can pull that kind of crap aren’t shamed as moronic know-nothings but here are the secondary effects: when people act in a post-truth manner, other people will pick up really dumb-ass concepts because they’ve never learned to dig for, and *accept*, truth… that George W lied (that is: spoke in a manner deliberately intending to communicate an untruth), and Joseph Wilson didn’t.
Keith P.
All this time, I thought “Flat-Earther” was a figure of speech, as in “someone who believes in things easily (and long) proven false”, but not literally that the Earth is flat. Maybe they’re grifting for someone to send them up on Virgin Galactic’s ship for free.
NotMax
Finally, a solution for what to do with tons and tons of nuclear waste. Dump it over the edge.
Tinare
I could so get behind a kickstarter to send these guys off on rocket so they can see for themselves. Preferably one that just orbits the earth for eternity.
MattF
@NotMax: So many people have suggested that! But no one’s done it! Must be a conspiracy!
Doug R
@BGinCHI: Wish their ancestors had fallen off the edge of the earth when they were trying to get here.
lollipopguild
@Mr Stagger Lee: It was take your daughter to work day.
Another Scott
@Citizen_X: Yup.
Wait until they find out that The Solar System is traveling at an average speed of 828,000 km/h (230 km/s) or 514,000 mph (143 mi/s) within its trajectory around the galactic center,[3] a speed at which an object could circumnavigate the Earth’s equator in 2 minutes and 54 seconds; that speed corresponds to approximately one 1300th of the speed of light.
Trolling of the gullible often gets out of hand.
Maybe rather than explaining Newton, we could ask them to explain Noah and the Flood:
Really? What would someone with even passing acquaintance with fishing say to that? “Yeah, I totally could catch a humahumanukanukaapuaa here in the Yellowstone river!!1” Didn’t anyone who had a goldfish or an aquarium as a kid figure this out – often the hard way?!?
Maybe the Bible stories are stories from a pre-scientific people who didn’t know as much as we know now? Maybe??!
(sigh)
Cheers,
Scott.
p.a.
Don’t be taken in by Big Globe! It’s a trick of the Valar. When Melkor returns you all will see…
Felonius Monk
@Lizzy L:
I think I smell an Onion.
lollipopguild
@Doug R: The Dragons ate them before they could fall off.
Keith P.
@NotMax: Then you poison the elephants with radiation.
Kofu
As for feeling the spin, I wonder what they’d say about the Foucault pendulum, if they bothered to wonder about it? Not a biggie, but one of many ways that the ’round earth’ presents itself to us.
p.a.
@Tinare: Couple of revolutions, then a real ‘hands on’ display of gravity.
Citizen_X
@Keith P.: That’s my space tourism business model: Take flat-Earthers up to orbit, absolutely FREE! Getting down? That will cost $10,000,000. (Money must be in escrow before launch.)
patrick II
@Ken:
I live in Virginia Beach and sometimes sit on a bench on the shoreward side of the boardwalk. There is a level handrail about waist high on the seaward side of the boardwalk. From the bench looking at the ocean you can see the curve of the earth as it rises above the rail directly across from you, and then falls off below as you look to your left and right. And of course, you can watch the ships sail away and disappear from bottom to top as they leave.
hueyplong
Cami Knodel will make more sense once she gets her humors in balance.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Tinare: Yes – an old Bloom County strip had a mention that the Russians would take John Denver into space. “Well, that’s a piece of news we can all feel good about!” and the cruel punchline was “oh, no… you don’t think they’re going to bring him BACK, do you?”
FlipYrWhig
@patrick II: Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams and level handrails are a hoax!
woodrowfan
“engineer” covers a LOT of territory. My Dad was an engineer. He designed assembly lines for GM. My uncles were also engineers. One designed electrical systems, another was an expert on Soviet aeronautics. I found that engineers love to toss that title around as if it made them an expert on all things scientific and technical (My Dad and my uncles did not do this, thank God).
The Pale Scot
@Brachiator:
The Fermi Equation needs an additional variable to account for how willful stupidity might affect ET societies, apart from political failure, it would seem to be an obvious part of the “technical civilizations inevitably blow themselves up soon after they get the ability to do it”
Consider that almost 25% of Americans believe/know that they are gonna meet JC before they die, AKA rapture. Another 20% just considers it likely.
Before cable TV and the internet, politicians from Bible Belt could say one thing to their constituents and be a member of the reality based world in DC. Now any digression from dogma is immediately jumped on. And that has played a big part of the nutification of the GOP. The Scopes Trial happened in part because the elites of the community were concerned that the reputation of the county schools would affect the ability of their children to get into preferred colleges. Sort of neo-con like, “one truth for the masses and a another for the elites, as Strauss put it. Now ignorant, prone to violence sector has the ability ID and attack anyone of them that strays, and the ones who do the IDing do simply because it’s profitable.
Another Scott
@schrodingers_cat: Somebody stole his impetus and he’s looking all over for it…
Cheers,
Scott.
The Pale Scot
@SFAW:
Christ everyone knows it’s Turtles All The Way Down
Keith P.
@woodrowfan: The guy probably works car engines and decided that makes him – literally – an engineer.
The Lodger
@p.a.: I can remember wanting to find material from the Church of the Sub-Genius. I think I’ve just been cured of that.
TaMara (HFG)
@BGinCHI: Oh, good, our plan is working! Now I need to go have a word with Cole about posting smack about my state.
I mean do I go an post about the whack-jobs in his state. ;-)
Gravenstone
An engineer who doesn’t get the concept of relative frames of reference. Where did he get his degree, a box of Cracker Jack?
Ruckus
@TriassicSands:
If common sense actually was, more people would have some of it.
JPL
Enquiring minds want to know what is holding up heaven.
If Trump ever has another press conference, maybe someone can ask him.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Another Scott:
I recall being in fifth grade and hearing the story of the flood, sitting there doing the math, and concluding at the age of 10 that Noah’s story was crap.
Ruckus
@Uncle Cosmo:
They live in CO, it’s possible that they’ve never seen the ocean.
Had some distant relatives who came to LA from their farm in the mid west when I was about 12 or so. They had never seen the ocean. Understood it, didn’t think the earth was flat but had very limited exposure to anything other than farming/rural life. I wonder how many people in this world can’t understand anything past their own experiences? On that note I remember a few years later after that having someone telling me that it was possible that the entire world is in our minds, that we make up everything we see as physical so that we don’t freak out at our minds. I think acid was one possible/likely explanation for this persons observation.
pacem appellant
My backup handle was “orbis terrarum” which is Latin for “circle of lands”, their euphemism for The Whole World.
The social media-sphere is abuzz with Flat Earthers of late. Must be fad, or something in the weed.
Schlemazel
@schrodingers_cat:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is the same as magic. GPS=magic, cell phones= magic. These folks really should see if the Amish would take them in so they can avoid magic & live in the real world
Ruckus
@Ken:
Not sure that was wrong. Just a different solution to the problem.
trollhattan
@schrodingers_cat:
I work with an engineer who (seriously) does not believe in human evolution. Other critters yes, but not humans.
Engineers can be a very odd bunch.
TriassicSands
@Ruckus:
Common sense: A historical artifact of the human race. It began to disappear in the late twentieth century and for nearly half the population of the United States it was completely gone by the year 1980. By the year 2017, researchers had begun to believe that negative common sense existed.
Schlemazel
@sdhays:
Perhaps he was a sanitation engineer. “Engineer” like “Reverend” and “PhD” are terms a lot of morons throw around to inflate their opinion’s sense of worth. I am an engineer but that does not mean I know anything about orbital mechanics or climate. I know my field, I understand some of the math from others but being an engineer does not confer universal knowledge or an inability to be fooled into believing bullshit
Schlemazel
@SFAW:
There is a difference between ignorance and stupidity. Ignorance can be corrected with a little education, stupidity is a wilful condition caused by refusing to cure your ignorance. Stupid people should be persecuted
germy
newsweek:
Ruckus
@woodrowfan:
My dad used to say, “Yesterday I couldn’t spell engineer, today I are one.” This would invariably come up while looking at a blueprint that could be drawn in 2D but not built in 3D. That might even explain how an engineer might only be able to think in 2D, those being dumb and dumber.
Major Major Major Major
@Schlemazel:
An engineer who doesn’t think they know everything about every other field? I question your credentials.
Honus
Sometimes I want to go back to church and then I think for a minute about the things you have to literally believe to be a catholic.
Ruckus
@TriassicSands:
Well the post is about people who have more than their share of no common sense so that would easily explain that a negative value for common sense is required to show how much they don’t have.
MaryRC
I was amused to note in the article that the group was stumped by a simple question about how they can explain the solar eclipse coming this August to skeptics. Surely their many coffee-shop seminars would have covered that one already.
The real question to ask these people is who is behind the “propaganda” and “conspiracy” they talk about, and why. They’re not just convinced that they’ve uncovered facts that others don’t know, but that these facts have been actively suppressed for centuries. When asked by the reporter, Kobel mumbles something about “elites” wanting to enslave us and become richer. While I sometimes suspect that this is indeed the motivation of the 1%, I can’t see why they would choose denying a flat Earth as their instrument.
Major Major Major Major
@MaryRC:
Why bother, they’ll probably just say Shariah lizard Illuminati.
Seanly
Read that article yesterday. It was infuriating and depressing.
Ruckus
@MaryRC:
Make it easier to find and separate the easily mislead from their money?
The Simp in the Suit
Fear of ridicule for being ridiculous — sure. But fear of reprisals? Who would want to harm these idiots? I can barely muster sympathy; reprisals would just take too much energy.
sukabi
Flat earthers…big surprise 2 dimensional people see the world in 2 dimensions…?
piratedan
folks like this, I just want to give them 5 bucks and tell them to take a field trip to the edge and then take a picture when they get there….
Miss Bianca
These clowns are in Fort Collins? I weep for the state of my state.
Chet Murthy
@MaryRC:
I challenge you to imagine a more successful diabolical plot! They’ve succeeded beyond their wildest expectations: only a brave and hardy few even remember the truth, and they’re holed up in a bunker behind a coffee shop in Colorado! /s
ETA: OK, OK, fluoride in the water comes close.
Miss Bianca
@Chet Murthy: The truth is out there…just over the horizon…oh, wait…
Ruckus
@The Simp in the Suit:
Well if you have children and don’t want the risk of them learning to be fucking morons………
jimmiraybob
@Mr Stagger Lee:
So like what I believe is being insinuated is that we put water on the crops? Like out the toilet? Unpossible. What about the electrolytes?
CZanne
@Ruckus: If so, they’ve also never been to the top of a Fourteener, or even stopped on one of the high ridges on the Peak to Peak and looked east. (Pike’s Peak and Mt Evans both have driving routes. Others may.) The curvature of the earth is absolutely visible. Hell, they can drive halfway up Flagstaff road, overlook Boulder Valley, and see the earth curving. My 8 year old niece saw it the first time I got her here. (She and my 8 year old nephew then spent about 15 minutes playing with a straight-edge and perspective, which is eternity for a pair of over-excited 8 year olds with varying degrees of the family ADD. The teenagers were a bit more… blasé.) Second graders can figure this out if you get them up high enough. These adults have no excuse.
Ruckus
@Miss Bianca:
Not to worry. Learned idiots are everywhere. Just like police brutality or racism or…… It’s always existed everywhere and will continue to be for a long time to come.
It’s just that it’s far easier to record and we are now far more exposed to it. And it might just be the start of being able to reduce it to more manageable proportions.
SFAW
@Schlemazel:
I used to have a sign in my office: “Stupid is forever. Ignorance can be fixed.”
I was trying to give some persons the benefit of the doubt (not sure why), in that not every act of stupidity is one committed by a stupid person.
TriassicSands
@trollhattan:
Without going into great detail, !et me say that I think one can make a distinction between education and training. If you look at the coursework for engineers, you’ll see that there isn’t much room for education — it’s all training. If they are lucky they’ll get one elective a semester. They may be well-trained, but they aren’t very well-educated. If they go on to graduate school, it’s more training.
Few people remain in school for their entire lives, so education can and should be continued outside of formal academia. But how many adult Americans spend their free time trying to become better educated?
Training determines how good an engineer you are. Education influences what kind of person and citizen you are. I want my engineers and doctors well-trained. I want my friends, neighbors, and voters to be well-educated.
You can’t always get what you want.
Sadly, college in the US has become trade school to what may be the majority of Americans. You go to college to get a better job to earn more money. College has become too expensive for most people to separate education from training.
SFAW
@The Pale Scot:
Not on (well, under, I guess) Discworld, it ain’t.
Another Scott
@Ruckus:
There is actually some real science behind that. We make a map of the world in our heads based on sensory input from various things. Sensors that convert some property into a change in our nerves and our brains interpret that signal. But it’s a picture, a map, a model. It’s not reality. Our eyes aren’t perfect cameras. Our ears aren’t perfect microphones. Our bodies can’t detect X-rays or radio waves (unless we’ve got wonky fillings) or lots of other things that we now “know” are out there. And we get creepy feelings about things that aren’t “there”.
Of course, most of us believe there is a reality outside of us, but “proving it” is one of those challenging exercises.
Akitakoka’s optical illusion pages are wild (scroll down to Algae and White Heart Yellow Heart). One can get lost there for hours, so be wary. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Just One More Canuck
@Major Major Major Major: no kidding – I was once involved in a lawsuit where the plaintiff, who was an engineer, not only knew everything about his own field, but tried telling every lawyer he hired and subsequently fired (there were at least three) that they knew nothing about the law and told every economic expert that they knew nothing about economics or how to calculate damages. When he then told a judge that he was wrong about his reasons for dismissing the case, it was as close as I’ve ever seen a judge tell someone to fuck off
TriassicSands
@Ruckus:
I smiled. Even chuckled.
debbie
@Mike J:
No, it’s all about them. They have First Amendment rights to say whatever they want, and your saying anything different also violates their First Amendment rights. It’s a win-win, for them only.
Ruckus
@CZanne:
Of course they do. They are fucking learned morons. Or possibly unlearned morons if you will.
Take religion.
Please.
Even late religions such as scientology. Myths and bullshit, with just enough reality or misdirection thrown in to keep lots of people from asking too many questions. Why? Why not, some people are easily bored, some easily misdirected. That leaves room for profit, be it a room and food or money directly.
raven
@Just One More Canuck: In 1966 I had a judge tell me it was jail or the Army, that was pretty close to “fuck off’!
Matt McIrvin
@Lizzy L: It is not.
The “Satanic churches” that keep trying to get Satan monuments put in Jesusy public places? They’re trolls (smart and funny ones, generally speaking).
The flat-earthers are, by and large, not trolls. If you go to a flat-earther’s Facebook wall you will find out that most of them are the kind of people who believe every conspiracy theory at the same time, and are really terrified of The Jews.
Major Major Major Major
@Another Scott: I mean, if we allow that evolution exists, and we allow that we don’t perceive reality as it really is (both givens, I should think), then it’s not much of a step to say that the highly-optimized utilities we use to experience the world are biased in favor of ‘things humans need to experience in order to reproduce’, rather than ‘the world as it objectively is’. Being able to see quantum foam isn’t particularly helpful, and is very expensive.
Ruckus
@TriassicSands:
Thank you. Glad I could brighten your day.
MoxieM
@Shell: Wait, so they’re OK with splitting infinitives, but not OK with splitting the atom? Or understanding the shape of the earth? I bet they don’t support the Oxford comma, either. Ignorant savages.
TriassicSands
Talk about a lack of common sense. WTF? Maybe Donald will give Vlad aka “Razz” Putin our nuclear codes. You know, as a show of good will and mutual trust.
Iowa Old Lady
Honestly? Stupid people gotta be stupid. I refuse to believe there are very many actual flat earthers.
Ruckus
@raven:
Have a buddy who was told about the same time by a judge ‘It’s the marines or my hotel.” Known him for over 40 yrs. The marines seemed to have been the right place for him at the time. He spent a year at Da Nang arriving on the day of the Tet offensive.
TriassicSands
@Ruckus:
Oops. I just looked at a newspaper. Damn.
Where’s the Prozac?
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major: Yup. But imagine all the advertisers in comic books that would be put out of business if we had X-ray vision and didn’t need X-ray Spex!
It would crash the economy!!1
Cheers,
Scott.
SFAW
@TriassicSands:
The education vs training argument could be made regarding just about every major or area of study. Engineers are trained to be engineers, philosophy majors are trained to be “philosophers” (so to speak), poli-sci majors trained in poli-sci, etc. Whether a student has any understanding of concepts outside of their chosen field is a not a function of which discipline they’re studying.
As far as college being a “trade school”: the days of sitting around, discussing Hegelian dialectics, or whether Joyce’s understanding of Catholicism was spot-on, or whether Stalin was worse than Hitler, have probably passed for good. I would surmise that colleges have become “trade schools” because that’s what’s (to some extent) necessary in a country where the standard of living is declining, and has been for a number of years. (By the way: Thanks, Ronnie! Thanks, Howard Jarvis! May you both rot in Hell.) It’s also a function of what a society values. I happen to think that Social Workers have pretty thankless, difficult jobs — for which they typically get paid shit wages.
Anyway, I’m getting a little far afield. Engineers ARE weird, at some level. Or maybe many levels. And the good ones are extremely well-trained. But that doesn’t mean they’re NOT well educated. Both my parents were engineers, and they were both pretty-well-rounded with respect to non-engineering areas. And they were not unusual, then or now.
chris
I’d sure like to know how these folks explain our lizard overlords who live in the hollow centre of the Earth under the north Pole.
feebog
While all this is stupid beyond belief, it would be fun to troll these folks. Some questions:
Are all the continents on the same side of the earth? If not, which continents are on the bottom?
If all the continents are on the top, what’s on the bottom?
Is there gravity on each edge of the earth? if not, what keeps things on the edge from falling off into space?
Where exactly is each edge? How did you determine this? Why can’t you see the edges from outer space?
Major Major Major Major
@Another Scott: it’s comic books, they would just sell f-ray spex instead.
@SFAW: I think it’s largely a function of personality.
trollhattan
@Ruckus:
That’s practically the plot of Full Metal Jacket.
Good times.
Immanentize
@raven: That used to be a pretty common recruitment technique in the sixties. Seemingly especially popular in the south.
My Dad had a funny/not funny story about his enlistment. Just after he turned 17, he and his father got into fight (my grandfather could be a great guy but was an angry drunk). After a bit of fisticuffs, my father said, “If that’s the way you want to go, then I’m going to join the navy and get the hell out of here.” Next day, his father took him to the enlistment office and signed him over to Uncle Sam.
Ruckus
@TriassicSands:
I find that reading most newspapers can cause stupidity. It takes a person suitably inclined to be so inflicted with that stupidity but then if one has one’s head up one’s own ass, they are inclined, so to speak.
I also find that listening/watching faux news constantly DOES cause stupidity. Possibly criminal stupidity.
Iowa Old Lady
From TPM
Speaking of stupid.
Mike in NC
@chris: On the agenda for an upcoming Trump cabinet meeting? Maybe that was the real reason Mike Pence was visiting NASA.
trollhattan
BTW, the Colo Flat Earthers should give this Kiwi’s video a gander, courtesy of the ISS. (Watch, it’s seriously cool)
Immanentize
I don’t know if this has already been covered, but did others catch this little bit about the Vote Fraud Jerkwads — This is from Josh Marshal about EPIC’s law suit against Kobach:
Why is it a .mil address? Is this a total government take over of voting? I’m not the most paranoid person I know, but —
CLAXON BELLS GOING OFF!!!
J R in WV
Say Whut?
We need to know what the F he designed, so as to stay WAY the F away from it, because it WILL fail in some unforeseen and spectacular manner, which we must hope is captured by HD video security cameras, like that bridge in WA state.
What KIND of engineer is he supposed to be? Honeybee hives? Flashlights? Geeeze, the stupid it burns. There are so many common-sense ways to verify the roundness of the world. Sextants, watching ships sail away, just flying high enough, crossing the Atlantic westbound watching the sun not quite set no matter how long you wait past sundown Paris time.
My parents sailed around the world in the QE II back in the early 1980s…. Time zones!!! They won’t work if the world isn’t round.
Immanentize
@J R in WV: He was a train engineer. It was clear from the cab that the world, although hilly, was flat.
T S
@MaxUtil: That’s exactly it. They start from wanting to be contrarian and coerce their perception of the world into that, rather than seeing the world and allowing observation to drive what they believe. It’s definitely a childish mentality. NO ONE CAN TELL ME THE WORLD ISN’T HOW I DEMAND IT!
Steeplejack (phone)
@Mike R:
LOL of the day.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
My buddy said that movie was very realistic about marine boot camp. I don’t doubt him. I used to get up in the morning at navy boot camp and walk out the back door of the barracks. Across the alley there was a chain link fence separating us from marine corp boot camp. Remember we’d just gotten up, and the marines were double timing by, in formation with full packs/10+lb M1 Garand rifles at the ready, over broken ground. Their barracks was over 2 miles away. I’d show anyone who complained about navy boot camp this scene. They never said another word.
Another Scott
@SFAW: You’re both right, IMO. I got a liberal arts degree (majored in physics, with lots of reading and writing and history and German and …) then went to grad school for engineering. That was many, many years ago, though. When I was in grad school, the undergrad EEs were fighting like hell to stay in their major because the school admitted about 50% more freshman students than they would let continue to get EE degrees. It was cut-throat with little time for the liberal arts. I can only imagine that it’s even worse for them now. :-( The ones that made it through were very talented engineers, but I often wonder how well they grew into their fields – what happened when their genius PMOS microcontroller design was replaced by a submicron gate-array, or standard cell, etc., etc. Did they keep up with the rapid technological change, or did they decide the management track was the way to go…
IMhO, everyone needs more than a high school education. Life and society is much more complex now than it was when our current system of 12 years of schooling was proposed in 1892. Everyone needs to be able to think clearly, to learn how to learn, how to find out things they don’t know, how to understand compound interest and predatory contracts, to distinguish fact and rational argument from propaganda, etc., etc. And we need to also train people in trades that take years of practice – and not just try to shuffle all the superstars into the latest bubble get-rich quick scheme (Wall Street! Patent Law! Pharmaceuticals! Silicon Valley! Real Estate!). And we need to train people in specialized technical fields that require additional years of study. And so forth. So, for me, “everyone should go to college” is a truism. But what they study there – and afterwards – doesn’t necessarily align with what is taught these days. We still need trade schools and apprenticeships. People need much more than to get an AA in “computer technology” – they need a general education as well as the ability to have a path toward a good technical job if that’s their aim.
Cheers,
Scott.
mai naem mobile
Forget voter suppression by ID just give a poll test with basic questions like ‘Is the world flat?’ and ‘what is 2+2?’
TriassicSands
@SFAW:
Except that specialization in liberal arts doesn’t really begin in earnest until one gets to graduate school. Liberal arts majors have to take a wide variety of coursework in different majors. There is a “‘major,” but as someone who has done both there is a huge difference between engineering undergraduate work and that of history, political science, and philosophy majors.
One relatively simple way to see the difference is to compare job opportunities for graduates. There are no jobs, as such, for BA degrees in philosophy, science, or history. To be a ‘historian,” you have to have at least an MA (which will get you a teaching job in a community college, but where you are unlikely to be able to do the kind of research necessary to be considered a real historian. And to teach at any reputable four-year university, you have to have a PhD. That is not the case with engineering. As time passes and more people get college degrees, the pressure to get more than a BS in engineering certainly exists, but the fact (and I think it is a fact) there is a big difference between a major in liberal arts and engineering. People with BSs in engineering call themselves engineers. No sensible person with a BA in philosophy or history calls herself a philosopher or historian.
Note: And how do you get an MA in history or philosophy? You stop taking coursework in other fields and take courses in your major area — in graduate school.
Possibly the main reason to get an MA today in a field like history (and stop there) is to be able to teach at the secondary level.
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
I’ve crossed the Atlantic a number of times and always saw the sun set. I was sailing on a destroyer though.
SFAW
@Major Major Major Major:
I don’t disagree.
Sloane Ranger
There actually is a Flat Earth Society. I used to pass their international headquarters when I worked in Pimlico, London some years ago.
I don’t know if it’s still there but I remember thinking that despite being a bunch of nutters they must be reasonably well loaded to be able to afford to keep the place up.
Just googled them and they are still a thing. The sheer stupidity never fails to amaze.
Immanentize
@mai naem mobile: Yes, but what would be the right answers for Republican vote maximization?
Ruckus
@T S:
Have you been channeling drumpf for some time now?
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major: Futurama is/was such a great show.
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
@Ruckus:
“Rise and shine, ladies!”
Great story and very consistent with what I’ve heard over the years. Know a city cop who pulled tours in Afghanistan as a Marine. Finds being a cop relatively easy.
Doug!
If you grew up with frontier values, you’d have every reason to believe the earth was flat. Democrats need to respect flat earthers, instead of treating them with contempt and condescension.
Major Major Major Major
@SFAW: would still be nice if everybody had the opportunity to study the liberal arts.
J R in WV
@patrick II:
Dude, that rail isn’t level, it’s curved!!!! Ask anyone!!!!!! GOTTA BE!!!
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: I prefer the liberal dark arts.
Immanentize
@Another Scott:
This is so true — There are a ton of statistics to back this up. Including the increased rate of secondary education post-WWII, the need for more technical knowledge even for non-technical positions (think the PC on every desk), etc. Also there is the negative data — after the 2008 crash, workers with highschool educations only recovered very slowly (or not at all) and as you go up in college attainment, the recovery of the cohort was quicker. One data point that I worry about is that the number of high school graduates who went to college pre-WWII is now about the same number as the people who get to go to elite colleges. The stratification remains, even though so many more are educated….
Immanentize
@TriassicSands: To take this a step further, the master’s degree is almost dead as a destination degree and is mostly sought by BA and BS workers who have an opportunity to increase their income with an advanced degree. Nursing is classic for this relationship, but now almost every other straight up MA degree is an add on after work. This includes the disappearing MBA cohort.
TriassicSands
@Another Scott:
I agree.
Ideally, I think people should all be educated broadly first and then trained specifically afterward. However, I believe the general education should continue throughout a person’s life. That doesn’t require formal schooling, but, if not, it may require more discipline.
When I said:
it meant that I want everyone both educated and trained.
Most liberal arts undergraduates don’t have enough math and science to get into most engineering graduates schools. At least not without first taking more courses. I don’t have the statistics on that, but that is certainly how it seemed when I was an undergraduate engineering student. A physics major would.
Brachiator
@The Pale Scot:
And I’m sure that someone has written a SF novel in which a global Civil War erupts after easy interplanetary travel is invented. One group wants to explore. The other group insists that the deity intended for man to stay on the Earth. There is also a faction that insists that humans have no right to go to other planets, bringing pollution, etc.
Another Scott
@trollhattan: Nice. The sound effects were kinda distracting, though.
I saw satellites out camping in the hills of WV in the early ’90s, but not the ISS. It’s quite the experience the first time you realize what that fast-moving light is… :-)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
TriassicSands
One of the great aids in continuing education (a term very familiar to every public school teacher in the US) is the existence now of all the high quality online college coursework. It’s a different world, thanks to the Internet, than when I was young.
TriassicSands
@Baud:
Hmm. My understanding is that the only accredited “liberal dark arts” university in the US is run out of the basement of the NY Times. And we all know how you feel about the Times. Fess up!
Or was it Fox News?
zhena gogolia
@Doug!:
Give that man a byline in the NYT.
Ruckus
@Doug!:
I find it difficult anymore to admire people who try to remain willfully stupid. I could see this when the vast majority of people didn’t venture more than 20 to 100 miles from where they were born, because they had to walk. Have a friend who knew a man not that many years ago who lived in northern calif who had never traveled farther than 16 miles, in any direction. And I can understand that someone would not travel a lot by plane, but to just believe only what they can see with their own eyes and not believe that others can and have seen more than them?
I wonder how many of these people, who don’t believe anything they can’t see with their own eyes, believe in religion. Something no one can see with their own eyes.
efgoldman
@Immanentize:
When my mom graduated from one of the Boston hospital nursing schools in ’38 or ’39 (now gone – the hospital very much still there on Brookline Avenue but their nursing school closed down long ago) it was a three-year program (for an RN) equivalent to a bachelors’ degree. After WW2 she could always find work if she wanted to, but she knew she’d never be any kind of supervisor without a masters; it was never important enough for her.
grandpa john
evidently none of them were ever in the Navy either. I was a signalman during my tour and from on the signal bridge it was a very common experience to watch other ships vanish slowly over the horizon
Florida Frog
@TriassicSands: I’d like to smack that down right now. We need to be both well-trained and well-educated or we can’t execute a proper design in context. I do have a depressing number of colleagues who understand very little of the world outside of their discipline and they aren’t truly good engineers. The best of us understand that we are designing in a human context and we need a much broader perspective if we are to be creative problem solvers. The highest (shared) compliment I ever got was from a senior executive in a huge engineering firm who politely noted that I must be among the first cohort of women to enter the field in significant numbers. It was a nice way of saying I am approaching old ladyhood. He said that women had permanently changed “his” profession. I gritted my teeth for a bout of mansplaining. He said that we think differently, more broadly about the effect our work will have on the people we are serving. He said that because of women and a bit later, minorities, engineering has become more conscious, more creative and much more exciting than in his day. I had the great joy of mentoring some US undergrads in Morocco this year. Those kids are not technicians and never will be.
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
I have a master precision level that’s accurate to 0.0005 of an inch per foot. I’d bet that parts of that railing would be shown by this level to be parallel with the earth at some specific moment.
And the railing would still be curved.
Brachiator
@TriassicSands:
This is true, but I don’t think this is a meaningful comparison. I don’t think that doctors or lawyers would have enough math and science to get into most engineering graduate schools.
BTW, I was a physics major in college who abandoned science and became an English major. To some friends, this was as if I had dropped out of society and become a bum. My mother taught both English and math in public schools, and I always loved both, but ultimately loved literature more.
But I sometimes felt like a spy in dealing with the science folks or the literature folks who, in some ways lived in separate worlds and spoke different languages.
TriassicSands
@Immanentize:
Your generalization is, I believe, quite true. I alluded to that with the comment about getting an MA in history to teach at the secondary school level. It isn’t generally considered a worthwhile credential for getting a teaching job at most accredited 4-year colleges and universities.
Once, teachers got MA and MS degrees in education. Now, the preference and more likely requirement is to get the advanced degree in the subject area. It gets the teacher a bit more money, but increasingly, it will be the difference between getting and keeping a teaching job and finding something else to do.
patrick II
@J R in WV:
I was hoping no one would catch that, but you are too sharp. Of course the railing follows the curve of the earth too, but because of distance and perspective not as much of the curve is visible as one looks towards the ocean, and thus gives more of the appearance of a straight line than the more distant horizon eight miles away.
Brachiator
@Doug!:
Very droll.
If God didn’t intend for the world to be flat, he would not have invented pancakes.
dmsilev
I eagerly await the news coverage: ‘shape of the Earth: opinions differ’.
p.a.
@Brachiator:
And roadkill.
efgoldman
@Brachiator:
Oh yeah? Well what about waffles, libtards! Not to mention crepes and blintzes.
grandpa john
@Citizen_X: I’m sure that any mention of relativity or accelerated frames of reference, would leave them as quivering masses of protoplasm
JPL
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html
They were concerned about adoptions. To be clear the meeting was two weeks after the republican convention.
Baud
Curvature is relative.
Another Scott
@TriassicSands: I haven’t thought about this too deeply, but I really wonder if all that much math is really needed these days.
I’m reminded of one of the famous qualifying exam questions for the PhD program in physics at Chicago. It was basically to write down and solve the equation of motion for a spinning top on a spinning globe, given various parameters (coefficient of friction, starting angular velocities, mass, radii, etc., etc.). Sure, it’s great to be able to do that if you’re aspiration is to teach classical mechanics, but how does being able to write down and solve that problem, under the time constraints of a life-changing exam, have any relevance if you want to be a solid-state physicist? Or do particle physics? Or create new engineered materials that have never existed before?
Almost nobody derives equations and solves Hamiltonians and uses Green’s Functions and all the rest of that on the job. The people who do do that stuff are theorists – a tiny fraction of the STEM workforce.
What’s much more important, IMHO, is being able to have developed a feeling for the work and the issues. “Is the wavelength of light bigger than a breadbox?” “Is what your calculation spit out reasonable? What are the error bars?” “What’s the quickest and most reliable way to get the answer to this question? Is it to build a prototype or construct a finite element mathematical model?” “Is this a solvable problem in a 2-3 year research program? What are the risks and how will we address them?” “Do we need to buy that $500k/seat software package to get the answers we need, or should we spend the time and money to write something ourselves?”
I did well enough in math in high school, including calculus, but the pace accelerated rapidly and was always based on stuff that “we learned in kindergarten” that I had forgotten by the time grad school rolled around. I made it through. Not falling in love with Arfken didn’t hurt me too much, since I never had any interest in theory or teaching. J hated Jackson, also too.
I don’t know the right balance. Some people need to be able to understand this stuff backwards and forwards and be able to teach it. But not everyone in the field needs to, IMHO.
Computers and software packages can solve problems that were impossibly complex 20 years ago. Being able to derive simplified equations to describe these systems can be important, but they’re not as important as they were 100 years ago when many of our curricula were designed.
Cheers,
Scott.
TriassicSands
@Florida Frog:
I’m curious, if you went to undergraduate school in engineering, how many electives did you have outside of math, physics, chemistry, and other courses related explicitly to science and engineering?
Brachiator
@efgoldman:
Crepes are French, and hence godless.
Ruckus
@Florida Frog:
That you are correct about being well rounded is important is not in question in my mind. One can be well rounded and not have a degree in anything or one can be well degreed and not be in any way, well rounded.
J R in WV
@Schlemazel:
My Grandfather was an Engineer, worked at it all his life, til the Black Lung brought him down. He was a Hoist Engineer, and in the beginning there was boilers and steam engines to lift the hoist up the shaft. He worked to keep the machinery in good operating order, too.
Later on there was generators and motors to lift the hoist up the shaft, hundreds of times a day, probably. I don’t think he ever worked on the more technical parts of the electrical plant, but I could be wrong about that.
My Great Uncle, Grandfather’s brother-in-law, was a Conductor, too, on the B&O RR. Never as technical as being an Engineer, but he did know Morse code cold, as that’s how the dispatchers and the Conductors communicated.
I’ll bet my Grandfather believed the world is round!! He saw the ocean! Those folks in Colorado should go to the top of Pike’s Peak and look east, with good binoculars. That’s almost as good as the ocean….
Immanentize
@patrick II: The reflecting pool at the “First Church of Christ, Scientist” in Boston is large enough that it was built with a slight curve to match that of the earth.
And, favorite Christian Scientist fun fact, Mary Baker Eddy had a phone installed in her coffin — just in case.
Major Major Major Major
@Another Scott:
And yet they still ask you to sort an array during tests for programming jobs.
I saw a great one the other day; Quantum Bogosort.
1. Randomly shuffle the array.
2. If the array is not sorted, destroy the universe.
3. Any remaining universes contain the sorted version of the array.
Smiling Mortician
I keep waiting for someone to link to this. Guess it’s gotta be me.
RSA
@Florida Frog:
I think this is true, because (if I remember correctly) this is what women say in surveys about why they enter demanding fields such as medicine and some of the sciences.
In my academic field, computer science, the few breakdowns I’ve seen of research subfields by gender show the highest percentage of women working in areas where you can see direct connections to people’s lives and society in general. (It took me until mid-career to appreciate this perspective and to adopt it as well.)
JPL
@JPL: From the same article
A friend mentioned maybe this is why Preet was fired.
dmsilev
@TriassicSands: I went to a school which was ~98% science and engineering majors, and we had to take eight humanities classes of various sorts (one per semester) as one of the graduation requirements. Some people took more, though the time requirements for courses within your major generally made that difficult. not exactly a classical liberal arts education, but not nothing either.
schrodingers_cat
@Another Scott: A bead sliding on a rotating hoop is another classic. I share your feelings about Jackson, Arfken, I did like. Also too, I think a Lagrangian would be better to solve the problem as well as the one you mentioned. Classical mechanics rocks, solid state, is more like squalid state.
BTW I do agree that physics curriculum is in desperate need of some revision.
CarolPW
@Brachiator: I did the opposite of that – started in liberal arts and stayed in it for three years, then left the university and went to Community College starting over again with algebra. Took all their science and math classes, then reentered the university and graduated with a joint major in Chemistry/Biology. I don’t regret anything, and not one bit was a waste of time. Fortunately it was a lot cheaper then and I could support myself the whole way through.
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major: The multiverse always saves the day!
:-)
It would be neat to get inside and figure out how Alpha Go managed to come up with those unexpected moves that flummoxed the champions. Stuff like that you’ll probably never figure out by just being able to regurgitate the Top 20 Sorting Algorithms That Everyone Should Know! ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Mike J
@Major Major Major Major:
That’s about as basic as you can get though. It’s good to see if people understand what o(log N) really means and their general approach to problem solving.
Even better, ask them how to encrypt something and say goodbye if they answer with anything other than call a library routine. Unless the job is to write encryption routines, most people shouldn’t try. True of sorts too, but they should at least understand the concepts.
Kay
I thought so. It’s Earth Exceptionalism. So none of the other plants are flat? I wondered. Just earth.
Major Major Major Major
@Another Scott: It doesn’t count for the universes outside the anthropic zone, but you get the idea.
One of my good friends works there, actually, but he won’t tell me.
@Mike J:
You can do that without handing them a dry-erase pen, though. It’s asinine.
Agreed on encryption, that’s a good one. Knowing what you don’t know (and can’t feasibly learn to an acceptable degree) is surprisingly rare.
raven
@J R in WV: My grandfather was also a coal mining engineer in Southern Illinois and his father was a “hoisting engineer” and was killed when a cable snapped. As you can see from the headline it was big news on July 1, 1914. In a small article at the bottom it makes note of the funeral of Archduke Ferdinand,
dmsilev
@Another Scott:
For whatever it’s worth, the UofC physics department has seriously dialed back the nastiness of the qualifier exam over the last fifteen or twenty years. Both because of the basic uselessness of the questions that you discussed and because there was starting to be …issues involved with admitting twice as many grad students as the program could really support and then flunking out half after the first year.
(I was a postdoc and then a staff member there for a while before moving on a few years ago.)
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: What it is, is exceptionally stupid.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
I had this conversation with a cousin who is insulating her children from math because they say it is too hard. She will accept that they get C’s or barely scrape by. She says nobody needs algebra or higher math once they get out of school.
Of course, she is an accountant and her husband has an engineering background who works in the real estate industry.
At the other end of the scale, we have cash registers that calculate the amount of change you get back, and kids and adults who can’t compute and add sales tax or determine how much change you get back without assistance.
Once, at a store without a fancy cash register, I included some nickels and pennies with my payment because I wanted to get some quarters back. The clerk looked at me blankly and said that I had given him or her too much. After a stalemate I paid the exact amount.
At yet kids often use math all the time with games and other stuff they love and don’t think twice about it.
RSA
@Major Major Major Major:
Funny. I sometimes chat with my CS theory colleagues about teaching algorithms, complexity, and computability (though my own knowledge and skills in the area are rusty almost to the point of non-existence by now). My impression is that sorting is a persistent topic in the classroom because (a) it’s easy, (b) there exist lots of plausible techniques that are best under different assumptions, and (c) it’s a good way to introduce basic analysis concepts that generalize to other algorithms. Something like the reason students learn to solve physics problems for which solutions have been known for centuries.
Immanentize
@Kay: Disc World with added privilege!
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator: My mother, who was a math teacher before she retired can multiply fractions in her head. Also too read Sanskrit with perfect diction and is well versed in Modi (the d is hard not like the Indian PM’s last name) script (script version of Devnagari, which fell by the ways side after the advent of mass printing). Her is the boss!
sm*t cl*de
@trollhattan:
Note guest appearance from possum at 0.29, bounding across the cyclist’s path, on the way along the Pencarrow Coast to the observation spot.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
What about the people who write the algorithms in the program that solves those questions?
I was involved as a user of cad/cam starting back in the early 70s. Most all of the commercial programs available at the time were based upon the work of one man, Dr. Patrick J. Hanratty, which was a problem because the problem that he was trying to solve was not the one which most of them were. It took a number of years for a lot of smart people to figure out but many did. And today we live in a world where machines are better because of it, where many things we take for granted would not be possible without it. Those people needed to be able to see, as is said, outside the box, because the box was too small, too limiting. They needed a broader view and understanding of not only mathematics but developing computer languages, as well as design and engineering, of working with and bouncing off each other.
This is just one issue, and we have many of these types of situations in modern life. People can’t be truly effective with limited understanding.
trollhattan
@Immanentize:
Heh. A buddy who married a Christian Scientist has always wanted three goats named Mary, Baker and Eddy. Decades-long running gag.
Speaking of shit the flat-earthers can try and ‘splain away, take them to see a Foucault pendulum. Nice one in the U.N. building for double wingnut points.
trollhattan
@sm*t cl*de:
Saw that and thought “Man, what an ugly cat!”
Steve in the ATL
@Brachiator: I will cut a bitch who gives me back four dimes instead of a quarter, dime, and nickel.
schrodingers_cat
@trollhattan: One in DC too, in one of the Smithsonians.
Florida Frog
@TriassicSands: Tulane (Newt Gingrich, I know, I know) took a pretty firm stand that we should be reasonably literate so ISTR an elective or so each semester. That gave me at least intro level courses in economics, classics, psychology, history and a lit class or two. We also had a wonderful course on the history of science. That may not count but it was a terrific introduction to how science happens and what kind of society is necessary for scientific exploration to flourish. We could also cross-register at Loyola U. next door. In grad school I got fascinated with textual criticism and history of religions and was able to squeeze in a bunch of theology courses. Regardless of Catholic doctrine, Jesuits are outstanding teachers. So, not a extensive liberal arts education but enough to teach me just how much interesting stuff there is to learn and to understand how to keep learning.
Immanentize
@Brachiator:
How I hate this parental attitude. How I hate it!
What if it ends up the kid just fucking loves math? Because it is awesome? Nope, too hard. Might not get an A.
My son is very good at math but just had a rough teacher who was not necessarily as into math as my son (or as into my son’s exuberance). So, for his enthusiasm and creativity he gets an A in chemistry but a B+ in math. “Too bad, so sad”, I told my son — you have to calibrate behavior to those around you but know your true strengths. It was great learning for him and the grade didn’t matter a bit.
Ruckus
@Smiling Mortician:
This poses a question.
What is 5 steps beyond shade?
Immanentize
@trollhattan:
Now that would be an excellent cabrito cookout!
Major Major Major Major
@RSA: It’s great for teaching but it’s a stupid interview question.
ETA: I heard a story one time about somebody who didn’t get the job, but when asked some mildly advanced sorting question, he totally spaced on the algorithm and said “why would I write it from hand when I can just import Guido van Rossum’s solution?”
Which is actually kind of a brilliant answer, in its own lazy way.
Matt McIrvin
@Chet Murthy: Gravity doesn’t arise from the Earth’s motion–but the effective pull is lessened slightly near the equator by its rotation, which is why the shape of the planet bulges out a little in the middle.
Ruckus
@Kay:
Maybe it isn’t the planet that’s flat.
It’s their “understanding” that is.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: I suspect that there’s a large fraction of the population who believe that nobody ever uses algebra, not even engineers or scientists–that it’s just some sort of scholastic hazing ritual with no real-world relevance. It’s a common notion in “observational” stand-up comedy and such.
Mike J
@Major Major Major Major: I interviewed a guy in a server programming job who couldn’t even start to tell me the difference between ports under 1024 and those over 1024. My next question was to explain in broad strokes a http transaction, but we never got that far.
Immanentize
@Florida Frog:
This is because, in many ways, Jesuits concept of “discernment” is not far off from the Rational Dissenter’s basic precepts (OK, include some Puritans) that the only way to truly understand (discern) God’s hand in creation is to know as much as possible about everything. If one must believe in God, this makes much more sense than the idiocy of current Calvinist-inspired grace based theism.
Carol Van Natta
As a 20-year resident of Fort Collins, CO, I hereby apologize to the rest of America for opening our proverbial commercial doors to delusional morons who make the worst of our kid-in-saucer hoaxing, fluoride-hating, conspiracy-loving citizens look merely bewildered by comparison. I intend to ask the resident mad scientist if he’s interested in joining me in eating a toxic amount of beans, then spending Tuesday evening at the Purple Cup outgassing the result.
Major Major Major Major
@Mike J: And that came up because you asked a domain-relevant question, not because you asked him to sort a list.
Matt McIrvin
@J R in WV: Probably an electrical engineer. In my experience, they’re the most prone to subscribe to bizarre crackpot ideas of anybody in a technical field, with the probable exception of computer programmers.
I recall a discussion about this on James Nicoll’s LJ a while back in which somebody proposed that it’s because EEs spend a lot of time studying simplified approximations to real physics for EE use, and get proficient enough with this that some decide they’re masters of the universe, then notice the flaws in the simplifications and assume that they’re flaws in orthodox science.
TriassicSands
@Florida Frog:
Not count? How could it not count? It’s as valuable as any other course you mentioned.
We all agree, I think, that Trump is a know-nothing idiot. But what is it that he lacks specifically? Surely, he needs to know a lot more history, but then so does almost every American. It would be nice if Trump knew some philosophy — logic would be nice. Despite his life in real estate (laughter — it was really grifting and scamming), he knows next to nothing about economics. What he lacks most (apart from character and integrity) are curiosity and the will to learn. I believe that a broad liberal arts education (with a motivated student) can help develop those traits in the areas we need to be good citizens.
We can argue all day whether the US has enough scientists, engineers, and computer scientists, but what we surely lack is enough good citizens. Obviously, I’m biased, but I don’t believe a good citizen would ever vote for a person who is manifestly unfit to be president. We had more than 60 million of those last November.
And that’s the most important lesson of all. At least, I think so. What percentage of Americans, would you guess, ever get there? (Rhetorical question.)
In some ways, I guess my whole point is that you can be educated to be a good citizen — that’s the only way to get there — but you can’t really be trained to be a good citizen, which requires much more than knowing how to fill out a ballot (though that would have been handy in Florida in 2000) or send a check to a candidate.
I’ve got to go. It’s been fun.
RSA
@Major Major Major Major:
I see what you did there.
Also, I’ve always been a little skeptical of technical interviews, at least the grueling kind I’ve heard about in some areas of the industry.
Ruckus
@schrodingers_cat:
The young guys at work wonder how I understand fractions and can us them in my head. Some of it is that we did that in school and some of it is that I had to do that in my field, machining, decades ago. We don’t do much of that any more except in sizes of tools. Drills are mostly fractional, but there are other systems because fractions don’t come close to covering everything one needs, and unless you use the metric system. Which of course the young guys have little to no training in. Because it’s not Murcan! They freak out when I ask them how a foot came to be a system of measurement or what percentage is 1/4. Of course they don’t understand trigonometry either, and are confusled by my scientific calculator.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: Its like becoming yellow with half a pod of turmeric.
TenguPhule
Bring on the fucking asteroids.
Really, as a species we kinda do deserve it.
Sherparick
@NoraLenderbee: Yes, and for being so stupid that they don’t understand that although they may have the right to open their mouths and prove they are idiots, I have the same right to point out that they are bleeding idiots. These people had to work hard to make themselves insane, they were not born this way. (A lot of is dogged belief in Biblical inerrancy, except for the part about loving one neighbors and giving to the poor and shunning worldly goods, which they apparently consider a misprint).
RSA
@Matt McIrvin:
Me too. I’ve been in online conversations with people who explain how they do ordinary things like figuring a tip without using algebra, and when I say, “But what you’ve just described is algebra!” they deny it. Something’s screwed up, somewhere.
Major Major Major Major
@RSA: They’re really obnoxious, and all they actually screen for is whether a person is good at technical interviews. This is one of the reasons to be skeptical when people say there’s a shortage of good developers. There’s a shortage of the exact developers they’re selecting for, but like in so many other sectors of the economy a part of this is just that they don’t feel like investing in training.
SiubhanDuinne
@Ruckus:
That almost makes we weep, scream, and rend my garments in frustration.
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
Large fraction. I see what you did there. Joking. I see your point and agree completely.
I think part of the problem in schools are teachers who hate math themselves and are terrible at math.
Once I was at a fast food joint an overheard a teen girl helping a friend with her math homework. After a very elegant breakdown of a problem, the one girl said, “I understand exactly what you are talking about! I wish that Mrs X could explain things as well as you do!”
An excellent student and an excellent teacher. Both girls were Latinas. This was a couple of years ago, and I hope that they were able to get ahead in school.
Ruckus
@Mike J:
Have a related employee story. Did a very quick interview with a prospective employee to be a mold maker. Which is a specific type of machining. He passed OK, so I gave him a shot. He showed up with more tools than a supply store and the shop spent about and hour helping him haul and set up his toolboxes. I normally would look through a new or departing employee’s tools, to see what he knows and knows how to use best and when he’s leaving, how much he’s taking. Decades ago no on seemed to think this might be wrong. As I started looking it became apparent that he had multiple copies of a lot of tools. As I questioned him on why and what he used them for it became apparent that he had no fucking clue on what he was talking about or what the tools were used for. He lasted that hour. And I made him reload all the tools himself so he wouldn’t waste any more of my time. I did pay him my usual last check, 8 hrs for the day. He did take the job and show up after all. Not his fault I believed his interviewing skills.
Sherparick
@MaxUtil: He reveals the reason he latched onto this and decided to become a nut: “They want you to think you’re insignificant, a speck on the earth, a cosmic mistake,” Sargent says. “The flat earth says you are special, we are special, there is a creator, this isn’t some accident.”
By the way, he is wrong about the 500 years age of his alleged conspiracy. Eratosthenes of Alexandria measured the circumference of the Earth in 240 B.C., so even in the time of Christ, this crew would have been considered looney. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes
Ruckus
@SiubhanDuinne:
They get it, when they stop to think about it. It’s just not normal any more. We have calculators on our phones! They don’t need to think that way any more. It’s helpful but it’s not really all that much of an issue. And they don’t laugh at me for typing on my phone with one finger because one or both of my thumbs is is always in tremor any more so I guess we are even.
ETA We don’t really rend garments any longer do we?
Ruckus
@Sherparick:
While it is true that academia knew about the general shape of the earth for a long time, a lot of people were uneducated their entire lives. Some still are. People born in the 1940s (like me) knew many older people, and some not so much older, who hadn’t attended high school. I worked with a very nice guy, built like a weight lifter, had a wife and 3 kids, had a 4th grade black education in Louisiana in the very early 50s, we taught him trig in about 2 off and on months. He is one of my heroes, a man that helped teach me dignity, humanity, and kindness, who the world shit upon regularly and he just kept moving anyway.
Bill Arnold
@Major Major Major Major:
If you like that one, you might like “Anthropic Computing”, NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality, Section 9 (geekiness warning):
Kind of crude and wasteful. :-) (Perhaps there is a variant on that method that is much less wasteful. :-)
Matt McIrvin
@Sherparick: The thing that gets me about flat-Earthers is that they think of the roundness of the Earth as some esoteric advanced-science thing that you have to take on faith from NASA and doubledome scientists, not something you could figure out yourself with minimal equipment. But the Greeks figured it out thousands of years ago with no spaceships or radar or anything. A lot of it, I think, was just spending a lot of time messing about in boats. Living by the sea with boats coming in and out definitely makes it easier to figure out.
MoxieM
@SiubhanDuinne: …trying to shorten a story: one time I was at a Rosies (fairly decent bakery) and wanted 3/4 lb. of cookies (no idea why…maybe I was broke? was a grad student. ). The kid behind the counter said, “they didn’t sell things by the 3/4 lb.” “Ok,” I said, “how about 3, one-quarter of a pound(s)?” She looked dubious, like I was trying to trick her. So I suggested, “how about one half pound, plus a quarter pound.” That, she could manage. She rang up my cookies and I attended the (seminar, brown bag, whatever) with an offering. And a story for life about the value of numeracy.
Bill Arnold
@Another Scott:
The original AlphaGo paper is pretty clear if you’re familiar with programming for games that involve search and with reinforcement learning:
Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search
It was quite impressive but did not (at the time at least :-) involve anything exotic like quantum computing.
Matt McIrvin
@RSA: Once when I was doing my taxes I discovered I’d misplaced my form 1098 at the last minute and had to file for an extension. I had some mortgage statements so I used calculus to estimate how much interest I had paid over the course of the year, assuming continuous compounding. When I found the form (not long after) I think I’d got it to within a few dollars.
The most advanced math I ever used in a professional capacity was probably when I was writing laser-printer software and actually used some calculus of differential forms that I’d learned in graduate school to derive how to transform a continuous color gradient. Later I found out that I’d rediscovered a standard derivation that was written up in “Graphics Gems”, but for a short time I was very proud of myself.
NorthLeft12
As a Chemical Engineer who has worked in the industry for thirty-seven years, I would like to believe that there are not any qualified engineers who are that stupid, but then I remember a number of the Mechies and Civies that I have met, and this comes as no surprise. ; )
Bill Arnold
@Bill Arnold:
Wow, the author of that paper (Scott Aaronson) has a lot of mind-bending papers related to quantum computing, and computability. E.g. “Computability Theory of Closed Timelike Curves” – “We ask, and answer, the question of what’s computable by Turing machines equipped with time travel into the past: that is, closed timelike curves or CTCs (with no bound on their size).”
My inner physicist (no graduate education in physics) is feeling inadequate.
Bill Arnold
@Florida Frog:
The main difference now from a decade or more ago is that on-line research sources are so much better that it is often/usually possible to brew a pot of coffee (or whatever) and dive into some entirely unfamiliar field, find the key writing/papers, and get a feel for the field within several hours (or less). Not expertise; that takes much more time, but enough to talk with an actual practitioner; just make the lack of expertise clear up front. It’s exhilarating. And new. And quickly getting better and more open.
Another Scott
@Ruckus: Sorry I wasn’t clear.
I agree that some people need to know how to derive the important equations, and figure their solutions, from (nearly) first principles in physics (and most/all of the other STEM fields). I was browsing the old Bell System Technical Journal years ago and came across a paper from the 1960s that derived the various equations of motion, and the solutions, for figuring out the best path to the Moon for the Apollo missions (including the various orbits around the Earth and the Moon). The physics really does work and it was vitally important for that program.
But physics (chemistry, and physical chemistry, and biochemistry, and chemical physics and …) is such a huge field now that a strong case can be made that such an over-emphasis on classical mechanics that was present when I was nearing the end of college and thinking about graduate school (and what to study in graduate school) in the early ’80s was misguided.
You’re absolutely right that an understanding of the closed-form physics is required even in numerical simulators if you’re constructing new models or applying an existing simulator to a new problem. There are standard ways of making a numerical model (finite difference, finite element, etc.), but one has to decide the boundary conditions and that depends on the physics. But one can effectively use those simulators without knowing the details of which trick to apply to solve the analytical form of the physics.
There are only so many hours in the day. Hours spent on closed-form equations solving spinning tops on spheres (or beads on spinning rings) is time that isn’t spent on understanding modern measurements and characterization techniques, or modern simulation techniques, or understanding the limits of our understanding and inspiring students to think outside the box.
Yeahbut, nobody can know enough these days to do everything on their own. The fields are too big, and growing too rapidly, and too fractured. Just physics is too big these days. If you’re writing a CAD/CAM system, you don’t need a surface physicist or a chemical physicist or a particle physicist or an astrophysicist. ;-) You need someone who has some understanding of machine tools and materials, and solid geometry, and computer data structures and efficient ways of constructing “views”, etc., etc., as well as understanding advances in computing algorithms. Being an expert in solving problems in Jackson or Arfken isn’t likely to help too much there (maybe except in important corner cases).
Some of my griping is sour grapes and an inferiority complex – I feel that I should have done better in math at the time. ;-) But I think we have to think carefully about the ways we weed students out at all levels. Keeping exam questions in place because that’s the kind of problems that the existing profs had to solve isn’t a good enough reason. Theorists and people writing simulators need to understand the closed-form math much better than someone who creates new materials, new processing techniques, all kinds of new ways of manipulating the physical world.
My too long $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
RSA
@Matt McIrvin:
Nice! I’ve had comparable feelings in deriving well-known probability formulas. Most often I’ve found out before telling someone else. :-)
Another Scott
@dmsilev: Glad to hear it! :-)
My exposure to the qualifying exam there was during an undergrad recitation session given by some grad students who were studying for it (probably in ’82 or ’83). I went to college there thinking I wanted to be an astronomer. Not doing great in physics – there were students who lived and breathed the stuff, subsequently finding out that there were something like 50 full-time astronomers in the whole country with very little turnover, and then seeing the ungodly painful qualifying exam questions, convinced me that physics graduate school wasn’t for me. I got a EE PhD elsewhere. Could I have made it through it at the UofC? Maybe, maybe not. But the qualifying exam questions made me never consider physics grad school (at UofC or elsewhere) seriously.
I don’t know how to make the qualifying exams better, other than carefully considering that the questions be relevant to the modern world. Of course, anyone with a doctorate in a field should have a basic understanding of most of the field as a whole. But as I said above in a reply to Ruckus, there are only so many hours in the day.
I can’t find it now, but I vaguely recall a story that PhD candidates in the UK in 1900 were solving the same problems that had been set in stone for at least 30 years (since Maxwell). They acted as if everything about physics had been solved, so all that was needed was to make sure new students could also do those same problems. Physics exploded (heh) over the next 40 years, yet I’m sure they were doing spinning tops on spinning globe problems, also too. ;-)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
RSA
@Another Scott:
I think this is a huge problem today, in formal education, in informal education, and for the role of public intellectual.
In my field, computer science, we have curriculum recommendations that are updated every five years or so by a national professional organization, but there are always tensions. What’s critical for students to know? In a practical field, what matters can change rapidly, even if the underlying science and engineering principles change much more slowly.
As for informal education, @Bill Arnold correctly observes that it’s really easy to find key research papers in an area and come up to speed–at least, to some level of so-called transactional expertise. But that also makes it easy for some naive readers (not meaning Bill :-) to think that they’re real experts. I’m thinking of climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers, who combine ignorance with paranoia and typically a heavy dose of intellectual arrogance to reach incorrect conclusions that they will defend to the ends of the earth. What fundamentals are they missing?
As for public intellectuals, this typically also involves some intellectual arrogance. Who has thought the most deeply about artificial intelligence, for example? I’d argue that it’s philosophers of mind, cognitive scientists, and computer scientists who work in the area. Who’s disproportionately quoted in the popular press? Physicists and billionaire technology businesspeople. Stephen Hawking: I don’t claim expertise on black holes and the origins of the universe; Elon Musk: I don’t know squat about rockets or electric cars. Please shut the hell up about AI.
Another Scott
@schrodingers_cat: Removed in 1998 from American History.
It was neat.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
Your too long $.02 is what we were both saying.
I wrote a 4 page answer but it all boils down to the above.
Bill Arnold
@RSA:
What they are missing is the self-awareness that the part of their mind that “Believes” has been manipulated by propaganda. Roughly, and IMO. (And akin to religious belief, just in service of the mundane, e.g. Exxon-Mobile, and the like.)
They Believe what they think, which makes falsification a really involved process, akin to religious conversion.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
The pendulum is also how a gyrocompass (My specialty in the navy) works to tell direction. You start it rotating in a direction, in this case north and it will continue to do so until it breaks/wears out or you shut it off. It remains in the same orientation, the earth/in this case ship moves around it. Today we have other forms of devices that provide the same effect in different ways. Your cell phone probably has one or more.
Another Scott
@Bill Arnold: rofl.
:-)
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Ruckus: Sorry. Quite often I’m agreeing with posts that I reply to, but express it poorly in trying to amplify a point. Sorry for stealing your thunder.
You can see why I’ve never joined Twitter. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@RSA:
Probably science fiction writers and especially Mary Shelley, author of “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.”
I’m not sure that the types of experts you name, particularly philosophers of mind, would be my go-to people on artificial intelligence. I also admit that I have a bias against philosophy as having much to say about the world. I think the field is largely obsolete, and what is valuable has been absorbed by other disciplines. Science was originally natural philosophy, but lives on in the various recognized studies.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
No worries whatsoever.
You can see why I have never twitted, I start counting when the number of words reaches 140. Me saying hello would exceed their limit.
No One You Know
@Citizen_X: Does this still work if they lack stereo vision?
Cain
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Even if it was flat, wouldn’t the rotation throw you out into space? I mean, what difference does it make if you’re on sphere or if it is flat. It’s like being on a record player.. jeezus.
RSA
@Brachiator:
I’m sure I’m biased, but I was thinking that experts in two of the areas I mentioned (cognitive science and computer science) are the people who are building AI systems and understand their strengths and limitations. I can’t judge science fiction writers.
I like some philosophers of mind, especially those who work with researchers in other areas like computer science or neuroscience; they can sometimes provide useful guidance and a broader perspective than is typical within a given scientific or engineering field. As for philosophy in general, I’m glad we have philosophers who think about personhood, agency, ethics, and related topics; some of these are covered in the social sciences, but not completely. (And sometimes they’re covered badly, outside of philosophy.)