Clearsky

Unseen wrote:
[…] There’s Reddit and Youtube, for example, where Musk gets lots of criticism, and people who prefer to live under a dictatorship of anonymous censors or an impersonal AI can still find a place to hide.

Reddit is still diverse. It includes non-censored sub-reddits, and everyone has a wide choice of what kind of sub-reddit to “…[Read more]

I agree, this is the clearest presentation on particles I’ve seen to date. But I think researching this kind of “pure science” often does lead to further, useful invention.

I was looking for a good place to cite the following science & medicine story without starting a new topic, and this here topic seems appropriate, even if just as another brief reminder of the monumentalness of science & medicine. Side note, mention was made about how the vaccine will contribute to herd immunity. This has been overstated many…[Read more]

About the use of AI in various decision making, I think it’s increasingly both useful, and risky. Ultimately, how AI is programmed and given credence will always depend on who owns and runs the AI… at least until AI is allowed — intentionally or accidentally — to take over completely, with no one able to control it or warn others about…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
Anyone know whether natural immunity plus vaccine is better than either standing alone?

An excerpt from https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/vaccine-induced-immunity.html

Substantial immunologic evidence and a growing body of epidemiologic evidence indicate that vaccination after infection…

[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Because gaps in knowledge always matter, do they not? Maybe when the gap is filled, it’s trivial, but maybe it changes everything.

Sure, all the gaps matter, to different degrees, and the W-boson mass discrepancy seems to indicate further research could uncover something pretty significant.

I could be relatively out of touch with p…[Read more]

It’s important to me to differentiate intellectualizations vs feelings of spirituality. In the former, yeah, there’s a lot of bullshit and over-intellectualization about it. In fact writings and discourse about religion are largely bs and over-intellectualizations. Full of fluffy words and virtue signals, too.

But feelings are different. It’s…[Read more]

Jake I remember a story like that… didn’t look into it but am looking forward to further talk about it.

Related to causation of everything, JWST will probably provide a treasure trove of insight. For example, finding galaxies and other objects that serve as gravitational lenses that magnify and make visible objects even farther away than the…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
Pope i am not certain i know the answer but my hunch is that without knowing what causation is we can never understand the cosmos. Nothing fundamental will be understood only shadows of the flickering fire on the walls of the cave.

I can agree with that. Maybe we’ll have to stick with (e.g.) “quantum mechanics works in…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
we have not penetrated causation

So why does that really matter? We’re assuming we’ll never be able to predict quantum behaviors in other than probabilistic terms, but we’ll still keep working at understanding the ramifications of quantum dynamics.

First off, we’re not omniscient, so we cannot immediately explain every cause or causation. Every explanation is necessarily limited by its context, among contexts we define. E.g. classical and quantum physics explain causation in different contexts, in spite of our inability to merge the two realms of experimentation and explanation into one,…[Read more]