Lazy ring-tone discipline predicts bad science
Weird thought hit me in the shower:
I haven't heard a ring-tone in years.
The best was when that awkward rap song would blast in a quiet movie theater.
Can't remember the last time that happened.
I think the last time was close to 10 years ago when one of my students blasted the class with awful trash rap. I laughed at her and told her to get out of my class for her awful taste in music.
Just kidding. I didn't throw her out.
(I did laugh at her for listening to awful music.)
it's funny, the little changes. How they sneak up on you.
Little things can make a big difference, even if you don't notice them.
It's like when you know something that most people don't know. It can irritate the pants off you and nobody else gets it.
Like when I read science journalism. It seems like every month scientists have discovered that the world is an illusion, a hologram, or a simulation in a computer.
(I always want to know who is running that computer, and whether they are also simulated. Turtles all the way down, I guess.)
Turns out there's been no serious, world-changing revolutions in physics in around 100 years. Physicists still have no idea what matter is or what their best theories tell us about the world. It's all up to the interpretations of the observer.
John Carpenter made a cool movie about this once.
Kinda wild to think that our best scientific theories leave us with a huge glowing "?" about what reality really is.
Me being me, I'm extra sensitive to all the ideas in these articles.
The sloppiness of them, I mean.
They write these articles like hundred-year-old questions are the latest shocking discovery.
They get hella mad when you point them at 200 year old books that already made the same point.
And they get bonus mad when you tell them that modern science is based on philosophical ideas that aren't scientific in the least.
If you ever want to get on the nerves of one of those IFL SCIENCE! people, give them a copy of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and watch the rage-tears flow.
(And definitely don't point out that Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, and many other fathers of quantum physics were big-time interested in the philosophical ideas behind their field.)
Most of the general public doesn't care about this stuff at all, you understand.
The small % that do care eat it up without a question, and this is how confused nerds are born.
It's left to me and other cranky curmudgeons to spot the head-scratching stuff.
The line between intelligible ideas and nonsense is thinner than Hunter Biden's excuses.
Everybody else is blasting crappy rap on their phones because that's easier than finding the "vibrate" setting.
Tech comes and tech goes, but the human world remains the same.
Mainly, that world is lazy.
Always bet on the path of least resistance.
Be good & take it easy.
Matt Perryman
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