[Arm-netbook] Totally derailed topic

[Bill Kontos]

On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 4:03 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net>
wrote:

> On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 11:12 AM, Bill Kontos <vkontogpls at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Nobody "believes" in science.
>
>  sadly, they do.  they're usually the ones who tell you that the
> climate's absolutely fine.
>
This contradicts itself. Science never said the climate was fine, it said
we don't know if it's fine and then it said that it's not fine. Therefore
those who claim that the climate is fine are neither believers nor
supporters of science.

>
> > The entire point of logically describing and
> > explaining the world via the means of science is to get as close to "the
> > truth" as you can. Accepting the results of scientists is unlike religion
> > not a matter of absolute truth. It is a matter of realizing that for
> every
> > given time the scientific answer accepted by the community is the closest
> > one to "the truth" that we have. Understanding this is key to having a
> > stable worldview while still being open-minded. The entire point of
> science
> > is to constantly question the validity of your theories.
>
>  ah.  i'm glad you qualified this finally in the last sentence.  the
> prior paragraphs give the impression that there *is* some form of
> "absolute certainty" that can be reached / experienced / perceived.
>
>  whereas what is *actually* the case is that most of our lives -
> science or not - are an "approximation that seems to do the job for
> most use-cases".
>
>  if we used the *actual* formula which *was* dead-accurate we'd go
> completely insane... or all be total geniuses.  i'm reminded of a
> story that a friend told me, about an eminent scientist and
> mathematician friend.  he told him the joke, "a bird flies between two
> trains that are on a collision course, at 60mph which start 120 miles
> apart.  the bird turns around each time it reaches a train until
> finally it's squashed.  how long does the bird fly for?"
>
>  and after a couple of seconds his friend answered, "one hour!"
>
>  so he asked, "you spotted that the time of the flight of the bird
> isn't relevant, you can just use the trains to work out that they'll
> meet in the middle, each travelling 60 miles, right?"
>
>  and he replied, "oh no!  i just did the sum of an infinite series in
> my head on the bird's travel flight between the trains".
>
>  the usual example is the one about KE= 1/2 mv^2 being an
> approximation when v <<< c but i thought the above true story would be
> funnier.
>
> l.


I tend to think of" the truth" as something that exists and is like a
mathematical lim(x). All we can do is calculate closer and closer to it.

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