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There are likely areas we will never have any greater insight on and phenomenon that will never be explained, but my point is just that people use these kinds of short-attention-span quips to go on to say that we don’t know for sure about climate change and vaccines and such.

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ranzispa@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Recognizing our knowledge is limited does not mean we believe the earth is flat or that we have no reason not to believe it is not. Attempting to say that everything is pretty much explained just increases the confidence of someone believing in the flat earth, as that is very clearly false. There’s a bunch of things we can not explain and there’s a bunch of things that in theory we can explain and forecast, but in practice we can not. Go ahead and do some quantum mechanical calculations to describe a system with more than 3 electrons with the nuclei of the atoms moving…

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ranzispa@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Recognizing our knowledge is limited does not mean we believe the earth is flat or that we have no reason not to believe it is not. Attempting to say that everything is pretty much explained just increases the confidence of someone believing in the flat earth, as that is very clearly false. There’s a bunch of things we can not explain and there’s a bunch of things that in theory we can explain and forecast, but in practice we can not. Go ahead and do some quantum mechanical calculations to describe a system with more than 3 electrons with the nuclei of the atoms moving…

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- ameancow@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  Attempting to say that everything is pretty much explained just increases the confidence of someone believing in the flat earth
  
  Except that’s a completely made-up idea of how this goes. I have a lot of experience in this area… the idea here being explained is that there is a very real growing wave of anti-intellectualism, and this is not growing in the fields of science, but dumbasses who spend all their time online listening to cranks like Eric Weinstein or Anti-vaxxers who lean on the idea that we can’t “calculate a system with 3 electrons” as evidence that since science doesn’t know how to do X, then why should we believe that there’s an accurate model for Y?? and people who don’t KNOW anything about the topic connect with that rhetoric because it appeals to feelings, not reason.
  
  People do not fucking turn anti science because someone who knows science tries to explain science any more than this kind of “change in values.”
  
  And nobody says that. I immediately know that someone is constructing a whole straw universe when someone claims anyone representing science ever claims “everything is pretty much explained” because that’s not how science WORKS. it’s just a word that means a process… we look at shit, we come up with ideas for why that thing is like that, then we do tests to see if that model works, and we collect those successes as facts. It’s a process that doesn’t even claim to “explain” anything.
  
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