site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

9
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

we have done experiments and have mathematical models and so on that have been verified.

I've seen experiments verifying modeling with the Navier-Stokes equations, finite-strain elasticity equations, Cahn-Hilliard equations for phase decomposition, Laplace-Young for surface tension ... and yet I can't help but notice that all of those equations are continuum mechanics, whereas with other experiments we've become very confident that atoms are things which exist. Set up other experiments where a critical length is in Angstroms (or just one where the Knudsen number isn't negligible, for the Navier-Stokes case) and you'll get a result where the otherwise-well-verified continuum model fails. Perhaps "All models are wrong; some are useful" is too pessimistic to be true forever, but it's a good one for now, because the idea that we have a model which is never wrong is currently false.

And that's not just a matter of engineers being lazy about avoiding expensive atomistic models. Even in the most fundamental physics, there are no mathematical models currently in existence which do not fail verification in experiments outside their individual range of applicability. The goal of finding such a model, a "Theory of Everything", is naturally at the top of our list of unsolved problems in physics, but scroll down that list and you'll find our existing models failing to fit the bill because of a number of cases that are much worse than the continuum/atomistic divide. At least atomic models converge to cheaper continuum models in the limit.

A trillion years from now, F=ma will still be true as will E=mc^2

F=ma isn't even true today, except in the special case where both are 0. It's a simplification of F=d(mv)/dt which neglects that inertial mass m is itself a function of velocity. You might say it's "mostly true" - our fastest spacecraft so far hit a speed a bit over 150 km/s, and at 0.0005c Newton is 99.99998% accurate - but the difference between "mostly true" and "relativistic effects are a thing" is where E=mc^2 came from. So at that point, I guess the question is, what would you count as "massively wrong"? If Newton got things 99.99998% right, but hidden in that 0.00002% was "there are rocks with a million times more energy than coal", does 0.00002 count as tiny or does 1000000 count as massive?

Our current theories seem to have gaps bigger than 0.00002. We've been unable to directly observe 95% of the mass-energy in the universe. Five times more than what we've observed is "dark matter", which we don't yet know the identity of but can indirectly observe via galaxy dynamics and gravitational lensing, and double that is "dark energy", which we can only infer by looking at the local shape and accelerating expansion of the universe. From a practical sense, perhaps none of that will turn out to be important - we discovered barely-interact-with-normal-matter neutrinos a lifetime ago and we haven't accomplished anything more than a little interesting astronomy with them, so the prospects for interacts-even-less-with-normal-matter technology don't look good to me - but from a theoretical sense, our best theories say there are gaping holes in our best theories! We are bound by the laws of physics, but we don't actually know what all the laws of physics are yet.

Yes, and I’d agree that in cases where what our experiments show breaks down that I don’t have a problem with putting a bookmark there and saying “we don’t yet understand this part” or something similar. If the data shows a problem as recognized by people working in that field, then sure, I’d trust them to understand the problem and what it implies and what kinds of solutions make sense in that particular breakdown point. On the other hand, breakdowns of specific theories in specific circumstances doesn’t issue us a blank check to put in whatever speculative ideas we particularly want to believe in. We know about relativity, even if we don’t understand it perfectly I think it safe to say we understand a lot of it. Our physics is good enough to be useful in 99% or more of ordinary interactions to fairly high degrees of accuracy. We’re talking about edge cases, and yes they’re important, but it seems like using edge cases to imply that we don’t know what the laws are, when we have a pretty good approximation of those laws, and they work well enough to predict the existence of phenomena long before we can detect them by simple observations. In fact we predicted the existence of black holes long before we ever saw one and we knew quite a bit about their behavior beforehand.