Physics: oh, and if you look close enough, it’s actually all probability too.
Theories on Theories
Submitted 2 weeks ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/ae20b21a-8dc9-4810-928e-b62524539ec7.jpeg
Comments
IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
or far away enough…
CuriousRefugee@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Engineering: We only care if it works, even if it breaks math/physics/chemistry/biology.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You can bother figuring out why. Or I might be forced to in order to iterate…
hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
The failure rate falls within the tolerances
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
If pi is not exactly three why hasn’t my bridge fallen?
Check mate mathematicians.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
fucking computer science is going from on par with mathematics to worse than biology
thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“why do you guys do it that way”
“Look because if we don’t sacrifice the goat on Thursday the code breaks, idk what to tell you”
erev@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
turns out the thursday goat service brings in Dianne from networking who remembers she needs to reboot a apecific device weekly, but its not documented anywhere. When Dianne doesn’t do this everyone freaks out and grabs another goat to sacririce which brings her back because who is she to say no to some good goat, and the cycle is continued and reinforced
Chakravanti@monero.town 2 weeks ago
Aye, Iris.
four@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Economics: the law is true as long as people believe it’s true.
Kind of like fairies, when you think about it
Soup@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Alternatively, with capitalism giving all the power to the richest: “The law is true because I’ll hurt you if you try to defend yourself and I have plenty of class traitors to help me.”
Sir_Premiumhengst@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
5715@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Social sciences: Mayhaps, but very specific
sbv@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The author’s barely disguised
fetishpreconceived notionarrow74@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
There are 3 positions. Mayhaps, yes, and no.
Yes and no hate each other, but for some reason they hate mayhaps more
fossilesque@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Bisexual problems.
Ziglin@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Meanwhile the mathematicians who got a bit too close Philosophy are still arguing about which logic to use and if a proof by contradiction is even a proof at all.
sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Exactly.
HERE’S A THEOREM: IF IT’S PROVEN, IT’S TRUE EVERYWHERE, FOREVER
But at the same time, even if it’s true everywhere forever, it might still not be provable, because Gödel.
yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Worse: If the chosen axioms are contradictory, then the theorem is effectively worthless.
And it is impossible to know whether axioms are consistent. You can only prove that they are not.
ytg@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
even if it’s true everywhere forever, it might still not be provable, because Gödel.
No. Gödel’s completeness theorem says that if something is true in every model of a (first-order) theory, it must be provable. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem says that there exists statements that are true sometimes, and these can’t be provable.
The key word is “everywhere”.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
I think saying that a theorem is true presumes the axioms upon which it is based and so the entire system is “true everywhere forever”.
I often find it helpful to think of chess as my axiomatic system. When we say the king is in checkmate, it presumes that we accept all the underlying rules of chess. And these pieces that theoretically form a checkmate will always do so forever… Assuming the regular rules of chess, etc.
When you put things in terms of chess, these “deep” statements about “math” often become banal.
HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Ehh…
Gödel basically showed we can never know which “mathematics” is the “correct one”.
“Proven true assuming my axioms are true” is closer to reality.
GraniteM@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Psychology furiously staring from the corner but afraid to speak lest it be made to sit at the folding table with Astrology and Tarot readings.
fossilesque@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
They’re sharing a table with economics.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Psychiatry in the front of the class covered in blood and sitting on a pile of cash.
ranzispa@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
I’m a chemist, I just gave a class to students today. The main topic of the whole lesson was this: we have all these theories and methodologies, we are not going to study how they work and how to use them, let’s discuss now all the limitations they have and when they do not work.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Former chemistry student here. In chemistry, every single thing you ever do gets multiplied by a ridiculously big number. A few drops of water has 6.02*10^23 molecules in it. So even the tiniest chemical reactions are massive exercises in parallel processing, and measuring in human-scale units means you might miss by a few hexillion in either direction.
Isn’t it amazing internal combustion engines…ever work?
Alwaysnownevernotme@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This is why engineers are insufferably smug.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
I wish doctors would do the same.
LustLive@fedinsfw.app 2 weeks ago
Economics. You forgot Economics. Heres a bunch of rules.
Let’s Assume you are an Economist. Now if you first overestimate and then underestimate, on average, you are correct in your estimates, Ceteris Paribas .
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Economics: Figure out what rich people want to hear and get funded forever.
LustLive@fedinsfw.app 2 weeks ago
As an economics student, I tend to disagree.
Economist are themselves Economic Agents. Their mind, by nature of market, is often split between what they understand to be correct analysis versus what their pay master wants. Add to it competition, and we’ve two persons either who sees but cannot talk, or who talks but is blindfolded. That’s shit, but that’s how things are.
fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Math also fails sometimes, we’ve had to invent new math along the way because math is always correct only in the given constraints of how we currently understand math. If those constraints are challenged math evolves.
Example, imaginary numbers weren’t a thing for a good while and some stuff didn’t work correctly. All math stands upon 1+1=2, we don’t know if that always holds true, for now we asume it.
Thalfon@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
In fact, the entire foundation of math – its system of axioms – has had to be fixed due to contradictions existing in previous iterations. The most well known perhaps being Russell’s paradox in naive set theory: “Let X be the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. Does X contain itself?”
In fact, there have been many paradoxes that had to be resolved by the set theory we use today.
mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
There are no correct axioms. You can change the axioms as you wish and make your own math2.0. And you will be able to apply it to things that follow thoose axioms but finding such things that follow them is the only hard part. We define 1+1=2 and that is true because we define it that way. If it does not hold true in any physical or something then it is that you are applying a correct math for a system which doesnt work with that math(i.e, you are the problem for assuming the same axiom is true for the real system)
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
I might go even further and say there’s no “math”. There are a wide variety of axiomatic systems. None has the sole claim to being “math”.
NannerBanner@literature.cafe 2 weeks ago
Example, imaginary numbers weren’t a thing for a good while and some stuff didn’t work correctly
And here’s Lewis Carroll to regale us with a tale that absolutely won’t be misunderstood and taken at face value by later generations about how foolish these silly mathematicians are with their wonky numbers.
for_some_delta@beehaw.org 2 weeks ago
Axioms serve as a starting point.
mineralfellow@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Geology: laughs in multiple working hypotheses.
fossilesque@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
They’re too busy licking rocks.
FinalRemix@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Behavior analysis: we don’t even care what species you are.
okwhateverdude@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Now. Get in the box. There are a couple of levers. You’ll figure it out. Don’t mind the cameras.
Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Quantum Mechanics has entered the chat
bunchberry@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Surprisingly that is a controversial view. Most physicists insist QM has nothing to do with probability! But then why does it only give you probabilistic predictions? Ye old measurement problem, and entirely fabricated problem because physicists cannot accept that a theory that gives you probabilities is obviously a probabilistic theory.
Amir@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
The wavestate is entirely deterministic, and we don’t fully understand where the probabilistic measurement happens. The Copenhagen intrpretation makes it probabilistic but is not proven.
(even many worlds doesn’t explain why we ourselves only see one macroscopic section of the wavefunction)
Chakravanti@monero.town 2 weeks ago
Logic isn’t MAEth.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Isn’t that mostly probability as well?
5715@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Climate science: It’s political
ZC3rr0r@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
It really isn’t, but it got made to be by parties with vested interest in maintaining the oil and gas status quo.
Also, I realize this is probably a woooosh on my part.
5715@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
I’m mainly talking about the endless fights at the IPCC, where every word and sentence is a debate, but yes, it really isn’t.
emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
All science is done by humans, and so biases are inevitable. Climate science, and a few other fields like medicine, have big enough vested interests that this needs to be accounted for. The physical scientists think they are safe, but one day a mathematician will discover Polymarket and then they’ll understand why climate science journals have a ‘conflict of interest’ section.
bedwyr@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
This guy you used for your meme is a piece of fucking shit.
ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Ontology - Fuck you, buddy
arrow74@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Archaeology rifles through the pockets of other disciplines and takes what it wants
Agent641@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Alvaro@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Except the physicists and the chemists would both argue that everything is all about probability
hansolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Quantum physics: everything literally is probabilities.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I think chemists would use the word “averages” but basically yeah.
Carl@hexbear.net 2 weeks ago
physics: laws, unless you look reeeeeally close, then it’s all about probability.
bomberesque@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Economics has entered the chat
Derpenheim@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Physics: Every macro state of reality is a collapsed position of micro states that change because you saw them
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Probability: well sure, this all works under the assumption of independence, but that’s not realistic in your scenario. Have you tried reading more measure theory and stochastic differential equations?
Fedizen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Aka
- Math: Here’s a dozen assumptions and how they interact
- Physics: Here’s math models we can apply to several observable groups of things.
- Chemistry: Here’s math models we can usually assume work to a lot of things, but there are so many assumptions they only actually work in very well observed conditions.
- Biology: The creatures you are studying are weaponizing your observations against you
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Statistics is the bottom text and first picture
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Biological physicists in shambles.
woodenghost@hexbear.net 2 weeks ago
Math: here’s a theorem, if it’s proven, it’s true until someone finds an error in the proof or in the compiler, if it’s a computer assisted proof (and the compiler can never be proven not to be flawed - Turing) or in one of the assumptions or in their proofs or until the axiomatic system used is proven inconsistent (and it can never be proven not to be inconsistent - Goedel) or until you decide you need to work in a different systems or technically if we stay in the system, but language or culture shifts and we change what we mean by the specific words and symbols used in the theorem.
Even if it’s true, unless you’re a platonist, it’s not true in the sense that it corresponds to a factual state of affairs in the world (there are no triangles). It’s only true within the system you’re using, just like the sentence: “Sherlock Holmes lives in Baker Street” is only true in the fictional world of the novels by Arthur Conan Doyle. Or even less so, because unlike novels, math statements are tautologies, reducible to a small number of axioms or axiom schemes.
Gust@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
All models are wrong, but some are useful
Chakravanti@monero.town 2 weeks ago
Bloodywood well regard that guy in Gaddaar.
Three months after broadcasting that song, WWE bought the UFC.
Co-Cain is the most hilarious joke ever planted around.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Economics: Our findings our just as rigorous as these other sciences we swear!
sbv@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Image
Chakravanti@monero.town 2 weeks ago
Well spoken, no less.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I once called economics a pseudoscience in a reddit comment and some libertarian-capitalist type got suuuper butthurt about it.
He said I don’t understand the word pseudoscience. I said, “no I understand it just fine. You don’t understand economics.”
His only response was to call that a “no, you” argument. Dunning-Kruger on full display.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Basic foundational “observations” by Economics aren’t based on the Scientific Method.
I wish the Scientific Method didn’t have “Method” in the name because while it is a sensible name it also is misleading.
Science is method agnostic, that is a necessary and sometimes brutal aspect to scientific progress, a new promising method may uncover other methods and theories that totally pull the rug out from under old theories.
Economics, because it began and is sustained for the most part as a system of methods searching for justification for their continuation, is largely incapable of undergoing these necessary “method resets” that come periodically in any scientific discipline.
Thus no matter if locally good science is being done in economics it is undermined by the uncomfortable need to preserve the survival of the foundatinal contextualizing methods and axioms they invoke implicitly from the truth uncovered, a vice that plagues any human endeavor consciously and subconsciously and not only keeps Economics from being a real science it also largely sucks the oxygen out of the room for actually scientifically rigorous study of these phenomena.
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
What definition of pseudoscience would capture economics without capturing medicine, ecology, or meteorology?
Everyone’s just using models here, and the way we incorporate statistical observations to define the limits of the models’ scope, and refine the models over time, or reject the models entirely, applies to economists, meteorologists, seismologists, and many branches of actual human medicine.
Popper would define pseudoscience as predictions that can’t be falsified, but surely that can’t apply to the idea of the weatherman predicting rain and being wrong, right?
Kuhn came along and argued that science is about solving problems within paradigms, and sometimes rejecting paradigms in scientific revolutions (geocentrism vs heliocentrism, Newtonian physics versus Einstein’s relativity), but it wasn’t a particularly robust test for separating out pseudoscience.
Lakatos categorized things further at explaining how model-breaking observations could be handled within the structure of how science performs its work (limiting the scope of the model, expanding the complexity of the model to fit the new observations, proposing specific exception handlers), but also observed the difference between the hard core of a discipline, in which attempts at refutation were not tolerated, and auxiliary hypotheses where the scientists were free to test their ideas for falsifiability.
But when you use these ideas to try to understand how science works, I don’t think economics really stands out as less scientific than cancer research or climatology or other statistically driven scientific disciplines.
bunchberry@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s amazing how nonsensical the actual foundational axioms of modern day economics are.
Classical economics tried to tie economics to functions of physical things we can measure. Adam Smith for example proposed that because you can recursively decompose every product into the amount of physical units of time it takes to produce it all the way down the supply chain, then any stable economy should, on the average (not the individual case), roughly buy and sell in a way that reflects that time, or else there would necessarily have to be physical time shortages or waste which would lead to economic problems.
Many people had philosophical objections to this because it violates free will. If you can predict roughly what society will do based on physicals factors, then you are implying that people’s decisions are determined by physical parameters. Humans have the “free will” to just choose to buy and sell at whatever price they want, and so the economy cannot be reduced beyond the decisions of the human spirit. There was thus a second school of economics which tried to argue that maybe you could derive prices from measuring how much people subjectively desire things, measured in “utils.”
“Utils” are of course such ambiguous nonsense that eventually these economists realized that this cannot work, so they proposed a different idea instead, which is measure things into marginal rates of substitution. Rather than saying there is some quantifiable parameter of “utils,” you say that every person would be willing to trade some quantity of object X for some quantity of object Y, and then you try to define the whole economy in terms of these substitutions.
However, there are two obvious problems with this.
The first problem is that to know how people would be willing to substitute things rigorously, you would need an incredibly deep and complex understanding of human psychology, which the founders of neoclassical economics did not have. Without a rigorous definition, you could not fit it to mathematical equations. It would just be vague philosophy.
How did they solve this? They… made it up. I am not kidding you. Look up the axioms for consumer preference theory whenever you have the chance. It is a bunch of made up axioms about human psychology, many of which are quite obviously not even correct (such as, you have to assume that the person has evaluated and rated every product in the entire economy, you have to assume that every person would be more satisfied with having more of any given object, etc), but you have to adopt those axioms in order to derive any of the mathematics at all.
The second problem is one first pointed out, to my knowledge, by the economist Nikolai Bukharin, which is that an economic model based around human psychology cannot possibly even be predictive because there is no logical reason to believe that the behavior of everything in the economy, including all social structures, is purely derivative of human psychology, i.e. that you cannot have a back-reaction whereby preexisting social structures people are born into shape their psychology, and he gives a good proof-by-contradiction that the back-reaction must exist.
If it exists, then your model must take social structures to be just as “fundamental” as human psychology. The idea that you can derive everything based upon some arbitrary set of mathematical laws made up in someone’s armchair one day that supposedly rigorously details human behavior that is irreducible beyond anything else is just nonsense.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
nytimes.com/…/overreliance-on-the-pseudo-science-…
Chakravanti@monero.town 2 weeks ago
He was just a delusional living knot bot.
FundMECFS@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
hahah same for psychology
ViatorOmnium@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Do they claim that though? Neo-liberal economists often adopt praxeology openly, and the other ones are mostly deluding themselves.