this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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Basically this https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
Not like he's ever been a competent physicist but he has always had the attitude of STEM chauvinism down pat.
Everything obeys the laws of math and logic, right? Let's just Russel&Whitehead everything out of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. Or better yet, something I personally came up with based on vibes and NIH.
This also informs his anti-empiricism. Why bother actually looking or listenging when you can just work everything out from a handful of assumptions.
I had a coworker once who was vehemently opposed to lights on the bike path because, he showed us through a chain of impeccable logic, being able to see victims would make it easier to assault people.
But what about all these studies, I asked, showing empirically that lighting pedestrian/bikeways leads to less assault?
Nonsense data, he informed me. Correlation not causation.
Nothing at all to do with him living behind the path & not wanting lights. Nope. Just unassailable logic.
Why are so many people who aren't actually employed doing stem things stem chauvinists?
I think there's a big difference between scientists and what I call science enthusiasts.
Prior to actually trying to do science (or any other of the adjacent disciplines) you're exposed to a grossly simplified version. This simplified version is a combination of uncontroversial facts presented as obvious and propaganda about the correctness and virtue of the cartoon scientific method from whence those facts are alledges to have solely come from.
The propaganda is a result of how our institutions derive much of their authority from this notion of being ascendent by their obvious correctness according to the impartial and objective methods of cartoon science.
So if you believe that science is this magical set of practices that deliver solely objective truth, and those practices are clearly defined, and it feels to you like you are doing them: well it must be that you've arrived at objective truth. If anyone else is doing something different they, the poor fools, must simply be unenlightened.
If you actually practice science you realise that it's deeply political, stupidly time consuming and difficult, limited by cultural values, frequently full of bullshit, and largely composed of stuff that looks much more like obsessive measurement with intuition than the scientific method.
It makes you much more sympathetic to the idea that maybe you're wrong and other people know what they're doing. Even if often none of us can precisely articulate why we're doing it.
edit: this might come across too negative on science so to be clear it's awesome and way more useful than pulling things out your arse. It's just not the only way to know stuff and it is a human, and thus flawed, thing in practice.
Obviously lots of awesome stuff like antibiotics and vibrators owe their existence to science so yaaay. But also chemical weapons, terrible past abusive child rearing advice, and rapey prescriptions of vibrators so booo.
Problematic when treated dogmatically or when used by horrible people.
When you actually work in STEM things you often get to work and spend time with people outside STEM as well and often end up realizing their work is challenging, valuable and not something you can do better than them just because you still remember the quadratic formula long after high school.
because it's a source of authority and power