Curt Doolittle

Category: Science, Physics, and Philosophy of Science

  • WHY DOES SCIENCE ‘GO WRONG’? (or anything else for that matter) Do you understan

    WHY DOES SCIENCE ‘GO WRONG’?
    (or anything else for that matter)
    Do you understand where mathematics and physics ‘went wrong’ and why?

    Well I do.

    But then, that’s my occupational specialization. And the re-introduction of magical thinking has led to stagnation in those fields, and it spread to other fields, because math and physics are no longer the gold standard of epistemology precisely because they ‘went wrong’.

    To study truth, I study lying. If you know how people lie, you know why they can. If you know why people can lie, then you know why people are vulnerable to lies. If you know how people are vulnerable to lying, you know why people can lie to themselves, and why they engage in ignorance, error, and bias as well: because they are vulnerable to it.

    And once you know the cause of that vulnerability is the bias to obtain discounts on every want or need, conscious or unconscious, you also know why people bias toward ignorance, error, bias, fiction, fictionalisms, fraud, denial, undermining, projection, social construction, and canceling. Because we evolved to negotiate on behalf of our genes.

    We only discovered ‘truth’ because it was necessary to cooperate at political scale, and resolve differences to do so. So error, bias, wishful thinking, loading, framing, suggestion, obscurantism, fiction, fictionalisms, frauds, denial, undermining et all, are natural to man. Truth is unnatural. That’s why it’s difficult.

    -Cheers.

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-27 22:17:05 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1630331211435343872

  • Predictability decreases over time, population, and sequence of actions. So, is

    Predictability decreases over time, population, and sequence of actions. So, is it true that we have lost that illusion? Or, like gravity do we just incrementally comprehend it with greater precision changing our perception of that illusion?

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-27 04:01:23 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1630055467270512640

    Reply addressees: @ScottAdamsSays @elonmusk

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1629918062886682624

  • I’d suspect so. Hard to imagine not. I just don’t have even one paper that has t

    I’d suspect so. Hard to imagine not. I just don’t have even one paper that has that data. (shouldn’t be horrifically hard to figure out tho.)

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-24 10:50:10 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1629071179490250753

    Reply addressees: @gillisisgod @HannahDCox

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1629065356613681152

  • SO PAINFULLY TRUE 🙁 (Also: IMO the autism=allergy correlation is the best avenu

    SO PAINFULLY TRUE 🙁
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbOu-QxtbI4

    (Also: IMO the autism=allergy correlation is the best avenue for investigation.)

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-22 20:49:09 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1628497144242966537

  • Not sure I see the conflict: –“Our results indicate that rare coding variants w

    Not sure I see the conflict:
    –“Our results indicate that rare coding variants will implicate a tractable number of large-effect genes, that common and rare associations are mechanistically convergent, and that rare coding variants will contribute only modestly to missing heritability and population risk stratification.”-
    vs
    -“Our results imply that rare variants, in particular those in regions of low linkage disequilibrium, are a major source of the still missing heritability of complex traits and disease.”-

    Plus testing for complex diseases versus height/body mass – even if H/BM is distributed it’s not the same as disease like schizophrenia. These results are what I’d expect.

    But again, I’m happy to be wrong and be educated as a consequence.

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-21 20:14:25 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1628126015481344000

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1628119545691996160

  • PROBLEM: ADAPTING TO THE UNIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES (our resistance to the form

    PROBLEM: ADAPTING TO THE UNIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES
    (our resistance to the formalization of the behavioral sciences)

    FWIW: One of the problems we (all) face is that people don’t expect to understand the physical sciences but oddly enough, expect to understand the behavioral, ethical, and moral sciences of cooperation and dispute resolution. Why? It’s more tangible to us. Why? It’s the means we use to pretend our negotiating position (justification) of our biases is moral rather than within the limits of what is moral without prosecution and retaliation. 😉

    So, just as we have paid the high cost to transition populations to scientific understanding in the physical world – and the profound returns – we will now have to pay the high cost of transitioning populations to the scientific understanding of the behavioral and evolutionary world – to obtain the even greater profound returns.

    So, in that sense, I expect even greater resistance than Socrates, Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin, because the progress of science is moving from producing decidability in that which is abstract to the individual, to that which is tangible to his beliefs, to that which is tangible to his display word and deed – and eliminates one’s ability to engage in magical thinking as a means of sedation.

    So I expect far greater resistance to my work than we saw even to Darwin’s. In fact, the post-war ideological warfare consists almost entirely of a counter-enlightenment against the Darwinian explanation for nearly all of existence. So we are still in the throws of denial of Darwin 170 years later. I would expect the same people on the right and left who resist the Darwinian revolution to resist this completion of the unification of the sciences – and for the same reasons.

    Institutions lag. Humans change only when the people who have malinvested in a previous set of errors, die off, and give opportunities to those who invest in something less erroneous. We can thank Kuhn for that uncomfortable truth.

    Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-20 05:58:34 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1627548243612561408

  • I would say that if we discover a law of nature that we can make use of it, and

    I would say that if we discover a law of nature that we can make use of it, and we can obey it, but we will pay the costs of disregarding it – and there are no exceptions that I know of.

    I’d also say that the universe, the solar system, the geology, the climate, the flora, and fauna have done everything possible to kill us with disturbing regularity. In fact, the universe is a vast irradiated wasteland hostile to life, particularly ours.

    The evidence would strongly suggest that not mother nature, nor gods, nor God care for our condition – only that we achieve their ambitions for us. And those ambitions consider us domesticated animals until at some point in the distant future we face extinction or transformation by evolution into gods ourselves.

    Jesus told us the only way to tolerate the tragic conditions during our journey: the extension of kinship love to all until we determine it’s fruitless.

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-19 03:53:38 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1627154415714029568

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1626807406536839168

  • James, (all) If you have the option of a religious, philosophical, or scientific

    James, (all)
    If you have the option of a religious, philosophical, or scientific explanation of these ‘origins’, then why do you choose the religious and not the scientific?

    We can explain the same behavior (Gnosticism) in the method of the wisdom literature of every civilization. What’s so fascinating about the religious frame? (Same criticism I have of Peterson.)

    We use what we understand, and we understand what we know. Is the religious frame the one you understand? Why wouldn’t you (or anyone) just explain the behavior using incentives – where the method (logic) of a culture’s wisdom literature is just a means of justifying those incentives and objectives?

    The reason I ask is that you’re accusing (correctly) the opposition (and others who failed) of the anti-empirical enlightenment trap, but aren’t you just backdating the same problem to the religious? (yes)

    I’m curious more so than anything else. Partly because there are limits to the frame you’re building just like there have been to the previous generations of thinkers for the same reasons you identify.

    Cheers.

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-19 03:16:32 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1627145080040574982

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1627129955405508609

  • RT @DrEliDavid: 97% of scientists agree with whoever is funding them

    RT @DrEliDavid: 97% of scientists agree with whoever is funding them.

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-18 18:12:28 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1627008158798413828

  • I can’t believe, that in my lifetime, vertically landing a rocket on a pad, espe

    I can’t believe, that in my lifetime, vertically landing a rocket on a pad, especially one floating on the water, has become possible. Every time I see it I think “I know how hard that is and I can’t believe they did it. Humans are amazing.”

    Source date (UTC): 2023-02-17 22:08:10 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1626705088176615425

    Reply addressees: @SpaceX @elonmusk

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1626663252624285696