Serious PC thread

[Kieran]

Activists are everywhere nowadays. Here’s a blue haired activist (natch) telling us that the universe is queer. This stuff goes further and further beyond the reach of satire every day. If a comedy sketch featured a blue haired professor telling us that the universe was trans, I’d easily mistake it for being a true story featuring another American educated activist, who qualified from their dodgy universities.

I always liked the occasional Ted talk but I’m not surprised they have no standards either now. But what about the science, indeed.

 

[tented]

Activists are everywhere nowadays. Here’s a blue haired activist (natch) telling us that the universe is queer. This stuff goes further and further beyond the reach of satire every day. If a comedy sketch featured a blue haired professor telling us that the universe was trans, I’d easily mistake it for being a true story featuring another American educated activist, who qualified from their dodgy universities.

I always liked the occasional Ted talk but I’m not surprised they have no standards either now. But what about the science, indeed.

My favorite comment: “It sounds like no one has ever told this woman ‘no’ in her whole life.”

 

[Kieran]

My favorite comment: “It sounds like no one has ever told this woman ‘no’ in her whole life.”

Yeah

And “best argument against affirmative action ever.”

“Best argument against student loan forgiveness..”

 

[mrzz]

Activists are everywhere nowadays. Here’s a blue haired activist (natch) telling us that the universe is queer. This stuff goes further and further beyond the reach of satire every day. If a comedy sketch featured a blue haired professor telling us that the universe was trans, I’d easily mistake it for being a true story featuring another American educated activist, who qualified from their dodgy universities.

I always liked the occasional Ted talk but I’m not surprised they have no standards either now. But what about the science, indeed.

Being a physicist myself, I tried to listen to it seriously. There is a fine line between theory and interpretation, but this lady completely ignores it. You could stop her at almost every sentence and ask "why are you making this conceptual leap? please elaborate", and most times there would be no answer apart from "I want to see it this way".

But this is not the biggest problem. I get that people want to see what they want to see, but... when you say what you want to say, you hear what you *do not* want to hear:

Quantum physics is built over binary quantities. The whole thing is complicated, but you can safely say that the only context where you can find something that is physically real and that is absolutely binary is the "quantum world", to use her words (note to initiated, yes, superposition principle messes things up, but we are still talking about 2 states vector spaces, that is, binary). In other words, from all metaphors, she took probably the worst one.

 

[Kieran]

Being a physicist myself, I tried to listen to it seriously. There is a fine line between theory and interpretation, but this lady completely ignores it. You could stop her at almost every sentence and ask "why are you making this conceptual leap? please elaborate", and most times there would be no answer apart from "I want to see it this way".

But this is not the biggest problem. I get that people want to see what they want to see, but... when you say what you want to say, you hear what you *do not* want to hear:

Quantum physics is built over binary quantities. The whole thing is complicated, but you can safely say that the only context where you can find something that is physically real and that is absolutely binary is the "quantum world", to use her words (note to initiated, yes, superposition principle messes things up, but we are still talking about 2 states vector spaces, that is, binary). In other words, from all metaphors, she took probably the worst one.

Thank you, mrzz, so what the hell is happening here? How is she giving a Ted talk on nonsense? Is she even qualified as a physicist? Who hands out these pieces of paper willynilly to activists? “I’m a black Mexican blue haired queer neurodivergent addict of fashionable causes, and I’m of a certain size. Oh, and I’m 1/1024th red Injun.”

The lunatics are certainly running the show, but how can she be a physicist and say all this rubbish? They’re allowed to get away with it! The same as the activist sent by Democrats to the senate to answer questions and the same as activists asked to practice as therapists, and abusing young children.

By the way, your description was very interesting! Must make your teeth grind witnessing a fraud and an oaf getting so much opportunity just because she’s…oh the list of her identities are too long to list again…

 

[Kieran]

Thank you, mrzz, so what the hell is happening here? How is she giving a Ted talk on nonsense? Is she even qualified as a physicist? Who hands out these pieces of paper willynilly to activists? “I’m a black Mexican blue haired queer neurodivergent addict of fashionable causes, and I’m of a certain size. Oh, and I’m 1/1024th red Injun.”

The lunatics are certainly running the show, but how can she be a physicist and say all this rubbish? They’re allowed to get away with it! The same as the activist sent by Democrats to the senate to answer questions and the same as activists asked to practice as therapists, and abusing young children.

By the way, your description was very interesting! Must make your teeth grind witnessing a fraud and an oaf getting so much opportunity just because she’s…oh the list of her identities are too long to list again…

And before anyone jumps on me for the “1024th red injun” bit, saying I’m being racist, I’m pointing out that it’s them who are racists, making a big bragging show of their identity markers, either to claim victimhood or to express superiority. It’s the weirdos on the left who are making such a big thing about group identities - and they’re racists when they do it. Creating hoax philosophies around “whiteness.” I mentioned this in the post about the cartoon character saying the golden age of Hollywood was “white as hell.”

Keep coming, son. You’ll not only provoke white racists to bite back but you’ll also make normal white people wonder about these group identity allegations, leading them to find that there’s plenty to go around, if you want to go that route.

The racialising of everything in a bad and provocative way is one road to hell nobody wants to travel…

 

[britbox]

Being a physicist myself, I tried to listen to it seriously. There is a fine line between theory and interpretation, but this lady completely ignores it. You could stop her at almost every sentence and ask "why are you making this conceptual leap? please elaborate", and most times there would be no answer apart from "I want to see it this way".

But this is not the biggest problem. I get that people want to see what they want to see, but... when you say what you want to say, you hear what you *do not* want to hear:

Quantum physics is built over binary quantities. The whole thing is complicated, but you can safely say that the only context where you can find something that is physically real and that is absolutely binary is the "quantum world", to use her words (note to initiated, yes, superposition principle messes things up, but we are still talking about 2 states vector spaces, that is, binary). In other words, from all metaphors, she took probably the worst one.

Well, "theory" is just another term for an idea mate. It stops being a theory when it's proven and demonstrated. Unfortunately, far too much textbook science is based on theory and presented as fact.

 

[mrzz]

Thank you, mrzz, so what the hell is happening here? How is she giving a Ted talk on nonsense? Is she even qualified as a physicist? Who hands out these pieces of paper willynilly to activists? “I’m a black Mexican blue haired queer neurodivergent addict of fashionable causes, and I’m of a certain size. Oh, and I’m 1/1024th red Injun.”

The lunatics are certainly running the show, but how can she be a physicist and say all this rubbish? They’re allowed to get away with it! The same as the activist sent by Democrats to the senate to answer questions and the same as activists asked to practice as therapists, and abusing young children.

By the way, your description was very interesting! Must make your teeth grind witnessing a fraud and an oaf getting so much opportunity just because she’s…oh the list of her identities are too long to list again…

The fraud here is a big one, and goes way beyond the person talking in this video, who is, in a sense... a victim of the process (I cannot believe I am writing this).

I explain myself: physics (as a lot of other "big sciences") is vast ocean of knowledge, with many areas and fields, sub-fields, topics inside those sub-fields, sub-topics... and inside those sub-topics you generally find the particular expertise of a given physicist. This is her case here, as she puts it herself: she is a particle physicist (a field of physics that deals with sub-atomic, actually sub-nuclear particles, constituents of nucleons like protons and neutrons). In this field, there is no completely established theory to describe things. People are trying, at the same time, to understand the mechanisms and the theory behind them. It is pretty hard.

So, there is an army of people doing this. Each one studying his tiny little bit, one particular sub-atomic reaction that you try to describe with one particular theoretical approach. There is the expression that you cannot see the forest from the trees, well you surely can´t from within the leaves of the branches of those trees as well. Your "leaf" is bunch of equations, computer simulations, strange and complicated empirical data about one specific little thing. Most likely this lady knows pretty well her own "leaf" (at least I hope so).

A few of us, by merit, but also counting on being in the right place at the right time, get to talk about "the forest" -- and be listened. See, hardly even those guys have a chance to do actual science with so large a scope as "the forest", but this happens. Mostly you get a chance to talk about the forest when you are doing science communication/popular science (for example, Hawking's Universe in a Nutshell). Even guys like Hawking, when doing hard science, hardly are talking about "the forest" -- even if they are talking about something more general than one just tiny leaf). It is generally left to the community to interpret the interesting results/advances in the big context.

So, after those long paragraphs (sorry about that), I can get to the point: the "fraud" here is that this person was given this huge spotlight, this huge opportunity to talk about the forest that most people don´t get. It is obvious that she got that opportunity because she ticks all those boxes that you mentioned. She probably faced obstacles and difficulties to get her degrees -- a lot of scientists do, specially from developing countries, I personally know some very beautiful stories. But this does not specially qualifies you to talk about "the forest".

I mean, everyone can talk about it, it is basically opinion and some loose analogies. The problem is this scent of "truth" that a "TED talk" gives to it. This person "identifies" as queer, and sees the whole universe as "queer" -- whatever that means. It is very comforting for sure.

So the end result of the fraud is that some innocent bystander can see those talks and say "oh, physics has proven that the universe is queer". The sentence itself has basically the same meaning that "geography has proven that cheese is brave". There is a whole "industry" that participates in this fraud. The one given the talk was simply the one who could not resist the temptation of being in the spotlight, trying to tell the forest from the trees...

But to finally answer your final comment, yes, it does sting to witness that. It is *very* hard not to get personal about it...

 

[mrzz]

Well, "theory" is just another term for an idea mate. It stops being a theory when it's proven and demonstrated. Unfortunately, far too much textbook science is based on theory and presented as fact.

This is complicated -- and it is connected to what I replied to @Kieran above. Yes, in day to day language theory is used exactly as you wrote - roughly speaking, it is used as synonym to "hypothesis".

But here we are a bit more restricted, we are talking science, and "theory" has a different meaning. For example, we talk a lot about "Relativity Theory", right? Well, it is a "proven" thing, as you said. Same goes, actually, for Newtonian mechanics (Newton's three laws of motion). It is "proven", but it is a theory (Newtonian mechanics theory) as well.

Where is the catch? Hard sciences usually define pretty well the scope were theories apply. So, within this scope, it is "proven". Newtonian mechanics describes pretty well a falling stone -- because it is "proven" in this scope. It does not describe that well a falling "stone" made of a few molecules -- even if it is on vacuum, etc and etc. So, scope and context matters to identify the facts.

And, still, this is not the fun part yet. Even within the scope, you describe reality using the terminology of a given theory -- the "glasses" with which you look at reality, to borrow a term from Darwin, who understood it perfectly quite a while ago. So the whole process is subtle in the end.

But we -- obviously -- are still able to to a lot of objective stuff with it. We do not look for context when we turn on the lights. We go to the switch knowing that it will work, and it does. One giant problem with the giant frauds known as post-modern thinkers is that they are always claiming that ultimately this objectivity does not exist. There are no "facts" for them -- which is what infuriates you, and me.

"Theory", in the sense I am using above, is all about a dictionary between a given method to describe reality, and empirical facts. With this you can make predictions. The point I was making is that the same theory can have different interpretations. That is, you can talk a lot of different stuff about this dictionary.

Back to the context of that TED talk: the "theory" itself behind that vast scope she was talking about is not clear. There are disputing theories, the very distinction between a model (something which is built within a theory, like for example when we model a physical body by a dimensionless material point in Newtonian physics) and theory is not clear in sub-atomic physics. So neither, and obviously, are interpretations. In other words, people are making leap after leap after leap -- and not even good ones, IMO. Analogies are too easy too make. The crazy thing is that people take them for facts.

 

[britbox]

This is complicated -- and it is connected to what I replied to @Kieran above. Yes, in day to day language theory is used exactly as you wrote - roughly speaking, it is used as synonym to "hypothesis".

But here we are a bit more restricted, we are talking science, and "theory" has a different meaning. For example, we talk a lot about "Relativity Theory", right? Well, it is a "proven" thing, as you said. Same goes, actually, for Newtonian mechanics (Newton's three laws of motion). It is "proven", but it is a theory (Newtonian mechanics theory) as well.

Where is the catch? Hard sciences usually define pretty well the scope were theories apply. So, within this scope, it is "proven". Newtonian mechanics describes pretty well a falling stone -- because it is "proven" in this scope. It does not describe that well a falling "stone" made of a few molecules -- even if it is on vacuum, etc and etc. So, scope and context matters to identify the facts.

And, still, this is not the fun part yet. Even within the scope, you describe reality using the terminology of a given theory -- the "glasses" with which you look at reality, to borrow a term from Darwin, who understood it perfectly quite a while ago. So the whole process is subtle in the end.

But we -- obviously -- are still able to to a lot of objective stuff with it. We do not look for context when we turn on the lights. We go to the switch knowing that it will work, and it does. One giant problem with the giant frauds known as post-modern thinkers is that they are always claiming that ultimately this objectivity does not exist. There are no "facts" for them -- which is what infuriates you, and me.

"Theory", in the sense I am using above, is all about a dictionary between a given method to describe reality, and empirical facts. With this you can make predictions. The point I was making is that the same theory can have different interpretations. That is, you can talk a lot of different stuff about this dictionary.

Back to the context of that TED talk: the "theory" itself behind that vast scope she was talking about is not clear. There are disputing theories, the very distinction between a model (something which is built within a theory, like for example when we model a physical body by a dimensionless material point in Newtonian physics) and theory is not clear in sub-atomic physics. So neither, and obviously, are interpretations. In other words, people are making leap after leap after leap -- and not even good ones, IMO. Analogies are too easy too make. The crazy thing is that people take them for facts.

Interesting discussion... and I like to mesh a bit of philosophy into these discussions also.

So, if we go back to the source story of Newton having a Eureka moment by an apple falling from a tree... why didn't a man of such high esteem simply put it down to the long established observable laws of density, rather than creating a new theory that he couldn't even adequately explain himself?

With the light switch... we know the light came on because you switched it on and the electric systems were in place. Science can explain the electric system but the philosophical approach would be to ask why the light came on. You chose to flick the switch. For a reason... no doubt. Maybe you couldn't read a book or see where you were going without the artificial light. Cause and effect... The science explains how the light came on, but not why it came on.

As for her talk... there are bigger questions... if you're subscribing to binary then you automatically have a Base 2 dualism, which makes sense on one level. My background was as a programmer and you're usually compiling down to a Base 2 instruction set. If you think of games programming... you can create semi sentient beings with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Then look at Human DNA - another instruction set - double helix with Chemical Bases of 4 (Base 4).

Once the penny drops, you know an intelligence has created you, and that you can also be a creator. And as a scientist, you should know Tesla's quote that a little scientific knowledge takes you miles away from that, and a deeper understanding brings you full circle.

 

[britbox]

The fraud here is a big one, and goes way beyond the person talking in this video, who is, in a sense... a victim of the process (I cannot believe I am writing this).

I explain myself: physics (as a lot of other "big sciences") is vast ocean of knowledge, with many areas and fields, sub-fields, topics inside those sub-fields, sub-topics... and inside those sub-topics you generally find the particular expertise of a given physicist. This is her case here, as she puts it herself: she is a particle physicist (a field of physics that deals with sub-atomic, actually sub-nuclear particles, constituents of nucleons like protons and neutrons). In this field, there is no completely established theory to describe things. People are trying, at the same time, to understand the mechanisms and the theory behind them. It is pretty hard.

So, there is an army of people doing this. Each one studying his tiny little bit, one particular sub-atomic reaction that you try to describe with one particular theoretical approach. There is the expression that you cannot see the forest from the trees, well you surely can´t from within the leaves of the branches of those trees as well. Your "leaf" is bunch of equations, computer simulations, strange and complicated empirical data about one specific little thing. Most likely this lady knows pretty well her own "leaf" (at least I hope so).

A few of us, by merit, but also counting on being in the right place at the right time, get to talk about "the forest" -- and be listened. See, hardly even those guys have a chance to do actual science with so large a scope as "the forest", but this happens. Mostly you get a chance to talk about the forest when you are doing science communication/popular science (for example, Hawking's Universe in a Nutshell). Even guys like Hawking, when doing hard science, hardly are talking about "the forest" -- even if they are talking about something more general than one just tiny leaf). It is generally left to the community to interpret the interesting results/advances in the big context.

So, after those long paragraphs (sorry about that), I can get to the point: the "fraud" here is that this person was given this huge spotlight, this huge opportunity to talk about the forest that most people don´t get. It is obvious that she got that opportunity because she ticks all those boxes that you mentioned. She probably faced obstacles and difficulties to get her degrees -- a lot of scientists do, specially from developing countries, I personally know some very beautiful stories. But this does not specially qualifies you to talk about "the forest".

I mean, everyone can talk about it, it is basically opinion and some loose analogies. The problem is this scent of "truth" that a "TED talk" gives to it. This person "identifies" as queer, and sees the whole universe as "queer" -- whatever that means. It is very comforting for sure.

So the end result of the fraud is that some innocent bystander can see those talks and say "oh, physics has proven that the universe is queer". The sentence itself has basically the same meaning that "geography has proven that cheese is brave". There is a whole "industry" that participates in this fraud. The one given the talk was simply the one who could not resist the temptation of being in the spotlight, trying to tell the forest from the trees...

But to finally answer your final comment, yes, it does sting to witness that. It is *very* hard not to get personal about it...

As for Stephen Hawking, mate. These people running the psyop are rolling over with laughter... You're being mocked. There's been at least three "Stephen Hawkings"

If you think a guy writes all those books, does the lengthy required research required, attends seminars all around the world, runs University departments by twitching his cheek... and completely changing his teeth, well, don't shoot the messenger. Think carefully, and carry out a scientific study. It is quite funny though, you need a sense of humour for all this crap.

 

[Kieran]

As for Stephen Hawking, mate. These people running the psyop are rolling over with laughter... You're being mocked. There's been at least three "Stephen Hawkings"

If you think a guy writes all those books, does the lengthy required research required, attends seminars all around the world, runs University departments by twitching his cheek... and completely changing his teeth, well, don't shoot the messenger. Think carefully, and carry out a scientific study. It is quite funny though, you need a sense of humour for all this crap.

I’m genuinely confused - ‘There’s been at least three “Stephen Hawkings?”’

What does this mean?

 

[Kieran]

Interesting discussion... and I like to mesh a bit of philosophy into these discussions also.

So, if we go back to the source story of Newton having a Eureka moment by an apple falling from a tree... why didn't a man of such high esteem simply put it down to the long established observable laws of density, rather than creating a new theory that he couldn't even adequately explain himself?

In fairness, he didn’t say “eureka”. There are rumours that when the apple hit his head he said, “Now that’s bloody queer!” But the patriarchy covered it up. The truth is simple, apples landing on the ground are queer!

 

[mrzz]

As for Stephen Hawking, mate. These people running the psyop are rolling over with laughter... You're being mocked. There's been at least three "Stephen Hawkings"

If you think a guy writes all those books, does the lengthy required research required, attends seminars all around the world, runs University departments by twitching his cheek... and completely changing his teeth, well, don't shoot the messenger. Think carefully, and carry out a scientific study. It is quite funny though, you need a sense of humour for all this crap.

Maybe for the publishing world this is true. There is probably a large team of people behind any of his popular science books. But the physicist is just one guy... and I mentioned him by chance, could have mentioned others. I don't even like the kind of science popularization these folks are doing nowadays. They are miles behind someone like Sagan, for example (in this regard).

 

[mrzz]

So, if we go back to the source story of Newton having a Eureka moment by an apple falling from a tree... why didn't a man of such high esteem simply put it down to the long established observable laws of density, rather than creating a new theory that he couldn't even adequately explain himself?

That is the whole point. The old theories could not do the trick. Remember, the Eureka moment is not realizing that things fall, but that things falling and astronomical objects in orbit where different manifestations of the same phenomenon. The old theories were completely incapable of doing that, so he came up with a new one, that, as you say, even he could not explain it perfectly. But this is the beauty of it -- yet the theory explains and predicts a lot of other stuff. It always has a set of hypothesis underneath it -- it remains being a theory. But it has a huge explanatory power, so big that until today we all still think in Newtonian terms. From the fact that apples fall from trees Newton understood a way more generic fact that massive bodies attract each other (well, he also knew a thing or two about orbits). But, again, all those facts are only facts in a given context (in this case the context is: bodies of macroscopic scale in velocities way smaller than speed of light).

With the light switch... we know the light came on because you switched it on and the electric systems were in place. Science can explain the electric system but the philosophical approach would be to ask why the light came on. You chose to flick the switch. For a reason... no doubt. Maybe you couldn't read a book or see where you were going without the artificial light. Cause and effect... The science explains how the light came on, but not why it came on.

Agreed. My point here was that the science explains why the light came on, and there is not a single freaking post-modern thinker that doubts that it will come, but yet they keep doubting "objectivity". There is a plethora of objective things in our life, but some people (well, a lot of people) conveniently forget it.

As for her talk... there are bigger questions... if you're subscribing to binary then you automatically have a Base 2 dualism, which makes sense on one level. My background was as a programmer and you're usually compiling down to a Base 2 instruction set. If you think of games programming... you can create semi sentient beings with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Then look at Human DNA - another instruction set - double helix with Chemical Bases of 4 (Base 4).

Good point. And in the end artificial intelligence and machine learning end up in a low level code in Base 2 (which I guess is your point). I would not say "bigger", but different questions though.

 

[Kieran]

Great explanations @mrzz , really glad to read the actual science behind these things. The lady with the list of identities in the video is just another blue haired activist passing herself off as something she’s not. She’s an example of a trend, where universities in America seem more interested in churning out ideologues and far left mouthpieces, rather than teaching students how to think independently, learn objective truths, and pursue excellence in their studies. It’s lowbrow and terrible now, but imagine it in twenty years? The village idiot in any other country would stroll through the American education system, succeeding not through effort and scores, but by listing off their intersectional brownie points.

But really, reading your posts and the replies by @britbox - there’s no substitution for understanding and learning…

 

[britbox]

In fairness, he didn’t say “eureka”. There are rumours that when the apple hit his head he said, “Now that’s bloody queer!” But the patriarchy covered it up. The truth is simple, apples landing on the ground are queer!

Give it a couple of years and he'll be Irene Newton.

 

[Kieran]

Give it a couple of years and he'll be Irene Newton.

You have a point, we’ve been misgendering skeletons for years!

Don't give skeletons a gender or categorise their race as this 'contributes to white supremacy', woke activists demand ​

 

[mrzz]

Great explanations @mrzz , really glad to read the actual science behind these things. The lady with the list of identities in the video is just another blue haired activist passing herself off as something she’s not. She’s an example of a trend, where universities in America seem more interested in churning out ideologues and far left mouthpieces, rather than teaching students how to think independently, learn objective truths, and pursue excellence in their studies. It’s lowbrow and terrible now, but imagine it in twenty years? The village idiot in any other country would stroll through the American education system, succeeding not through effort and scores, but by listing off their intersectional brownie points.

But really, reading your posts and the replies by @britbox - there’s no substitution for understanding and learning…

Thanks! Good to know that we are being useful for a change!

 

[Kieran]

Thanks! Good to know that we are being useful for a change!

Scientists are always useful and good to listen to! The problem is when activists are also scientists, which we see in gender stuff, then their allegiance to their catastrophic cause overrides their scientific qualifications and integrity. We’ll see biologists saying that there are more than 2 sexes, that biological sex is fluid, with absolutely no data to defend this abnormal statement, but they won’t have to defend it because to question this will be deemed to be transphobia. You’ll be literally killing people if you ask for a scientific explanation. And this is going to be where the battle will be most poisonous, and already is in some ways, where academics will be berated, harassed and threatened into submission, so that they agree with the most absurd, dishonest, unscientific and lunatic assertions…