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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • No I don’t think that’s how the argument was meant to work. I think the point was that since most eggs people eat aren’t fertilised, the initial comparison fails down, but if most eggs were fertilised it wouldn’t. I’m not sure that’s a convincing position myself, but w/e. tbqh I don’t think most people would eat a fertilised egg… Like, you can really tell. I forget where I was going with this. Think I’m gonna go to sleep now. Goodnight.


  • Mate, first of all: chill. Second of all: me, mincing words? You’re the one who’s decided the phrase ‘natural philosophy’ only applies to ancient Greeks. It’s literally just what science used to be called. Being very very hung up on a specific definition of a word or phrase and excluding other common usages is not a good basis for an argument. There need have been no argument at all. ‘We call it science now’ seems to be what you meant, but it’s not coming across well

    Oh. And you can still do science without a theory. It’s called data collection and it is absolutely vital.

    Edit: a good example would be Rosalind Franklin’s work on the structure of DNA. She did some incredible science with x-ray diffraction which was vital to Crick and Watson’s theory of the structure.

    Edit X2: also ‘doing it implicitly’ is totally fucking fine if the result of being invalidated is you create a more refined model of reality. Which is, like, pretty much what the whole thing about astronomy is…


  • silasmariner@programming.devtomemes@lemmy.worldDeep thoughts.
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    3 months ago

    That sounds plausible but is, in fact, kinda a made up distinction you just came up with. People up to and including Isaac Newton used the phrase ‘natural philosophy’ to describe what they were doing. ‘Testing’ in any meaningful sense of the word was a part of that more often than not. Even Pythagorean astronomy was implicitly testing things by making predictions of the movement of celestial bodies. So, no, but thanks.

    Edit: also worthwhile, I feel, mentioning that a lot of good science is purely observational and involves no direct testing, even of theorems. E.g early paleontology would, I feel, fit into that theme





  • Many years ago, my aunt bought an old, terribly specced laptop and couldn’t get Windows to run on it. I installed Ubuntu and everything was fine - she could check her email and browse toxic conspiracy theories on Facebook and all was good with the world.

    Two years later when visiting I got my first support request - would I mind showing her how to print something? No problem, but would you mind showing me what you were trying? She was selecting menu items to send to a virtual printer, not the one on the network. I show her the correct printer to send to and the thing prints. Easy. Out of curiosity, I check the outbox queue for the virtual printer. Over a hundred documents, going back two years.

    For two years she’d been unable to print, and every single time she’d ever attempted to print something she’d followed the exact same steps that didn’t work, and just accepted that this was the way things were.

    SMH.



  • This is not a natural landscape. You don’t get fields of grass like this without human intervention. This started in the bronze age, so just because your local human-made landscape is green, make no mistakes.

    Bit by-the-by, though, because obviously computers are completely awesome, but real nature is not this placid homogeneous scene