That's Structural

Science is the process of iteratively replacing models with slightly more accurate models - it's important to note that they are models, however.  And it is important to note that all of them are - right and wrong are not the right words, but first, the model is not the same thing as the thing that is being modeled, and second, models don't predict anything perfectly accurately.  "This is not a pipe" is a criticism once raised of art, that is equally valid raised of language, and indeed science, itself.  The word pipe is not a pipe.  An explanation is always relative to a (possibly implicit) model.

There is no such thing as an "atom".  An "Atom" is our way of thinking about a phenomenon; the referent for the word always points at what we think the word represents, not anything in reality.  The word means indivisible; we didn't "discover that we could split the atom", we discovered there's no such thing as the atom-as-we-then-conceived-of-it, and there was an entirely different phenomenon which we merely used the same name for.  There was one model; now there's another.

And there's a LOT of sleight of hand in the sciences with this kind of thing; where we pretend that the people arguing for an atom were just arguing for the phenomena that the atom ends up doing a pretty good job of describing.  No.  The original people arguing for the atom were arguing for a bedrock scale; a scale below which there wasn't anything smaller.

(They were fundamentally and deeply wrong - but their model was actually pretty good for predicting behavior anyways.  That's it's own topic, and it is one other authors have dealt with more thoroughly than I will: Map-territory relation)

A similar sleight-of-hand takes place with the word "science" itself.

 In science, anyone can participate; I can sit down and start digging through data; I can start creating my own data, and analyzing that.  I've done both of those things.  A problem arises with the very large set of people who do not participate.  Most people talking about science, either for or against it, have done neither of those things.

And most arguments come down to "You should sit down and listen to what my smart people say, instead of listening to what the stupid people you think are smart are saying."  Most people who argue with flat-earth people have no personal evidence that the Earth is not flat; they are just insisting that somebody listen to -their- smart people.  And they call this "science".

They are more accurate, not because of any intrinsic benefit of a scientific outlook - because they don't practice anything like that - but rather because they have chosen the right group of people to take the word of.  And even then, not because of any intrinsic merit on their part, but because other people have carefully constructed the world to lead them to those people to listen to.

And there is nothing constraining the people who construct the world to lead people to particular conclusions, to construct the world to lead them to the -right- conclusion.  We saw that with Soviet sciences.  The forces that make people believe in a round Earth, could easily be applied to make them believe in a flat Earth, if it served those who constructed the systems in question to do so.

If I don't know why the Earth is round - or more specifically, why the science says the Earth is round - what good does the fact that the Earth is actually round do my beliefs?  I lack an objective truth sensor.  If it turned out tomorrow that the Earth actually is flat - that we have been lied to our entire lives, and somebody put us in a plane, flew us to the edge of the world, and showed us the tortoise the world is sitting on top of - how would we go about convincing the world that this is the case?

You can't just convince the world that everything it knows is false.  Now realize that there are multiple "worlds", with their own network of ideas, beliefs, wise men, self-reinforcing evidence structures.  If you grew up with "science" as your world - if you grew up with that network of ideas, beliefs, wise men (scientists), and self-reinforcing evidence structures - then sure, all of this sounds great.  The wise men are always right, they follow the ritual (science) correctly, and get the right results; we should listen to them, and we can follow the ritual ourselves, and get the same results, because that's what the ritual does.  That's how the world works, right?

Now, this is very important: Science is different.  Belief in science is not.  Belief in science looks like every other belief out there.

And scientists talking about science are rarely so up-front about that, either.  To pick a current political item, did Dr Fauci, when he was saying people shouldn't wear masks because they weren't effective, preface it by saying how often science is wrong?  Now that he's saying masks are effective (which he claims to have secretly believed all along), is he prefacing that?  When the pro-maskers were anti-science, because science is what the FDA, CDC, and WHO says it is, was anybody cautious about the nature of science then?  How about now, when it is the anti-maskers who are anti-science?

"Science" and science are two very, very different things.  Science the process is fucking fantastic; it's literally the best idea humanity has ever had.  Science the institution - the academia, the officials, the coalitions of experts, the consensus, the journals - all of that is fucking cancer.  Science the institution is a religion.  No, it isn't different.  No, it isn't special.  It's a religion.  A belief structure.  And it strangles the very thing it is built upon.

Just because a scientists says something, doesn't mean the evidence supports it.  The only evidence this actually represents, if you are honest with yourself, is "My wise man said this."  The only evidence you have for any beliefs based on what scientists tell you is the same evidence anybody ever has for the words of a wise man - how helpful/accurate the words that wise man says are.  And when people lose faith in science, because science keeps being wrong - that's because they're accurately updating their information about the wise men.  Insisting the wise men are right, when they keep being wrong?  That's religious dogma, isn't it?

There's a critical support structure, that lets science the institution get some of the accuracy-discovering benefits of science-the-process.  It is that the institution is incentivized to be correct, because status in the institution is determined by being correct, and - and this bit is the load-bearing bit - anyone can point out that somebody is incorrect.

The very idea of "anti-science" is the most anti-science thing I have ever encountered.  It is synonymous with "heretic", and it has kicked the load-bearing support right out from underneath science, as an institution.  Science, as an institution, is nothing more than another group of wise men, without that support structure.

Mutual Understanding

 The right-wing view of economic systems:
* With welfare: Poor people make $20,000 today, and their earnings go up by 3% yearly
* Without welfare: Poor people make $10,000 today, and their earnings go up by 8% yearly

So welfare is making things better in the short term, but substantially worse in the long term, by depressing growth by taking money away from more productive enterprises; the right-wing view of economic systems is that welfare is eating the seeds you should be planting for tomorrow.

The left-wing view of economic systems
* With welfare: Poor people make $20,000 today, and their earnings go up by 8% yearly
* Without welfare: Poor people make $10,000 today, and their earnings go up by 3% yearly

So welfare is making things better in both the short and long term; by investing in people now, they can become more productive members of society tomorrow; the left-wing view of economic systems is that the only reason not to engage in welfare is that you hate poor people.

 

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If you think only one of these views is correct, you have not been paying attention.

An Exercise in Self-Observation

 Consider the following question:
Who is smarter: Atheists or Christians?

How does this question make you feel?

Consider the following question:

Who is smarter: Atheists or Muslims?

How does that make you feel?

On Teachers

I wouldn't mind if we paid teachers more, but with the stipulation that we fire all the existing teachers and force them to re-apply for their own jobs, and on a regular basis fire any teacher who can't pass the same tests students take (you'd be surprised how many can't), and whose students performed, on average, a standard deviation below the district average on those tests over the last two years.  What's the point, after all, if we aren't improving the quality of the teachers we have?

But most "Yay higher salaries for teachers" people lose enthusiasm when you begin to suggest that the current status of teaching is "Full of egotistical power-over-small-children-corrupted rejects of real professions".  The exceptions to this prove the rule - oh, you had a teacher that actually -taught- you something?  Hey, I, too, remember the names of the two teachers who met the minimal criteria of being competent at their jobs, out of the two dozen or so I encountered.  I also remember a host of people who wasted a third of my childhood on crosswords, word finds, and other makework nonsense (such as doing sheet after sheet of addition, subtraction, and multiplication, year after year, until most of the kids that started out enjoying math are driven to hatred of it - or insisting we do work in paper and time intensive ways, which has only gotten worse since I got out of that incestuous hellhole of an institution), and got petulant if I insisted on reading instead of engaging in their pitiful idea of curriculum.  (Or worse, the teacher who, after I finished my work in the usual five minutes, insisted on threat of detention I -sit there doing nothing- for the next forty five minutes instead of reading.  I have choice words I'd share for that one if I met her in the street today, and the lost opportunity cost she alone imposed on my education was sufficient to entirely erase the benefits of one of the two competent teachers.)

Overall, I say, entirely without exaggeration, that the sum effect of all the teachers I've had has been negative, in terms of time lost that could have been better spent doing just about anything else.  So yeah.  Increase the salaries.  But fire them all first.

What is Entropy?

Anyone who thinks they know is going to absolutely hate this answer.

Entropy is a measurement of how much work, with current human knowledge, can be extracted from a system.  It is a measurement of all potential energy that is yet untapped, combined with a theoretical maximum of "useful" work that can be extracted from this energy.  It is a useful fiction, but it is still a fiction.  So is the second law of thermodynamics.

In truth, entropy has the potential to change with every change in human knowledge.

If we discover a new force - say, a subtle attractive force far weaker than gravity, but attenuating far less quickly - the entropic values of all systems change.  You can use this information to extract slightly more energy from the system by building an engine that somehow takes advantage of this new source of potential energy.

In more down-to-earth terms, suppose we just discovered fire today.  Suddenly the potential energy that can be extracted from coal increases enormously - previously, we could just extract whatever energy we could get from its falling, much as we extract enormous energy from the gravitational potential energy in water.  We have to rewrite all of our entropy tables, which previously just concerned themselves with height relative to, say, sea level.

Fortunately for the industrial revolution, we already discovered fire, so we already had enormous amounts of potential energy to extract - although never as much as we would have liked, which produced our obsession with calculating exactly how much energy we -could- extract.  Entropy is an engineer's concept which arose from that obsession.

Entropy is really just an elaborately-dressed up way of saying that time flows in one direction - that the physical processes flow in one direction.  Coal burns; carbon dioxide doesn't draw heat in and convert itself into coal, raining down upon us.  If the reverse were true - carbon dioxide drew heat in and converted itself into coal, it would be an endothermic, instead of exothermic, reaction - these kinds of processes do in fact exist in real life.  If it did -both-, we couldn't extract any useful energy from the process, because as we "burned" coal it would re-consume the energy and re-precipitate carbon - these kinds of processes -also- exist in real life, they're called reversible reactions.

Now, it sounds like a compound like this would be really useful, and you'd be right.  It's exactly what water does - absorbs heat to evaporate, then gives off heat to re-precipitate.  If coal behaved as I described, you'd require a heat source to re-precipitate the carbon dioxide after you've extracted work - and thus heat - from the system, since it would require that energy to re-bond.  (Actually, coal -sort of- works as I described - exposed to the right sort of energy and conditions, it -does- re-precipitate, which is part of what plants do when they convert carbon dioxide into carbon.)  The difficulty is that managing the boundary conditions to make the process cyclic requires something -else- be providing useful work.

Entropy, as a concept, is made much more mysterious than it really is.  In its shortest form, the second law of thermodynamics is just stating that all the laws of physics -continuously- apply.  Time flows in only one direction.

The fiction is in the implication - that a given amount of energy can ever only do some finite amount of work before it is spent for good.  There's nothing we have yet discovered in the laws of physics that says you can't have a perpetual motion machine, or that you can't extract an infinite amount of usable work in a closed system.  There's just nothing in the laws of physics we have yet discovered which -permits- an infinite amount of usable work to be performed in a closed system.

It's an important distinction, because there's a -lot- we haven't yet discovered.

Lossy Transformations and Mathematics

I'll lead with a question:  What is X divided by X?

The immediate and obvious answer is "1", but this is, in fact, incorrect.  The answer is, roughly, "1 except where X equals 0".  This is both pedantic and important - 0 divided by 0 isn't 1, it's "Undefined".  5 times 0 is -also- 0.  "Undefined" in this case really means something like "Every answer simultaneously."

Division, as it is typically defined, is a lossy transformation - you have the potential to lose information in performing the operation.  So is multiplication - the equation "5 = 3" can be "made correct" by multiplying by zero, a conceptually valid operation.

Squaring numbers is too.  5^2 is 25 - but once you've done this, you can no longer determine, from the current properties of whatever it is you're working with, whether you started with five or negative five.  You've lost information about your starting configuration by performing what we usually consider a perfectly valid operation.  Reversing the operation doesn't give you what you started with.

The issue is one of simplification.  There isn't one single zero.  There are an -infinite- number of 0's.  Zero apples isn't the same as zero oranges - they're different zeros.

Squares are similar; a rectangle five feet long and four feet wide has twenty square feet, but it's not the same square feet as from a rectangle ten feet long and two feet wide.  A square value doesn't maintain information about its constituent parts - this information is simplified away.

Division, again, is similar; 5 / 5 equals 1.  Is it the -same- 1 as provided by 4 / 4?  No.  They're different 1's, but once we've reduced to a single number, that information is lost to us.

This simplification is great, if you don't need that information, and terrible, if you do.

Every mathematical operation results in a loss of information.  Again, this is helpful, if you're looking for a simple result, and worthless, if you end up needing that information.  Knowing that the combined length of two walls is 10 doesn't tell you anything about the individual length of the individual walls - you lost that information when you added the two numbers together.

The purity, the cleanness, of mathematics is an illusion, produced by rules which encourage you not to notice the information that goes missing with every step.  Mathematics, in truth, is a very messy process, the process of crossing out information until you're left only with the information you think you need.  The erasure is intellectually satisfying, but it is wholly the act of hiding complexity to make the complex -seem- simple.  The complexity is still there, and knowing the square footage of a room you're tiling tells you next to nothing about the number of tiles you need to cut, and how.

Obvious Things Part 3: Entitlement

I don't think anybody -likes- an entitlement mentality, it's just that none of us can agree on exactly what this means.  Loosely speaking, entitlements are just expectations to things we personally don't agree should be expected.  Remember, however, that your position in society is dependent entirely upon your conformance to others' expectations - entitlements, therefore, are most injurious to the upper classes, which is exactly why entitlements are fomented by those who oppose the stratification of society.

Entitlements are fomented as a form of political brinkmanship, by either those who have power and intend to make power to difficult to aspire to, or by those who don't have power and seek to push those in power out.  This is obvious if you think about it for a moment - that's exactly what political promises -are-, the setting of expectations, of entitlements.

The difficulty, however, is that this is a ratchet, a one-way process that keeps going until everything destabilizes, until the promises exceed the ability of those in power to fulfill them.  I can point to several eras in history where exactly this happened - the result is never pretty, although it does generally do a pretty good job of resetting everybody's expectations.

Because there is always a benefit to some party of creating expectations - of creating entitlements - I suspect this process is inevitable, and social stability cyclical.  Of course, as time has gone on, the ability of powerful people to meet promises has increased, producing longer and longer periods of stability - and with technology, it's possible the cycle may be broken already, as ever-increasing productivity ensures the ever-increasing promises of the powerful can perpetually be met.

There's thus an incentive for those seeking power to destroy the advance of technology.  The question, of course, is whether they realize it.  I suspect some have, given the degree of effort taken towards precisely that goal.

Consider that in a Democracy, the public is ultimately in charge.  The Party Leaders are jealous of this.  Consider what this means in the long term.