Attempting to say that everything is pretty much explained just increases the confidence of someone believing in the flat earth

Except that’s a completely made-up idea of how this goes. I have a lot of experience in this area… the idea here being explained is that there is a very real growing wave of anti-intellectualism, and this is not growing in the fields of science, but dumbasses who spend all their time online listening to cranks like Eric Weinstein or Anti-vaxxers who lean on the idea that we can’t “calculate a system with 3 electrons” as evidence that since science doesn’t know how to do X, then why should we believe that there’s an accurate model for Y?? and people who don’t KNOW anything about the topic connect with that rhetoric because it appeals to feelings, not reason.

People do not fucking turn anti science because someone who knows science tries to explain science any more than this kind of “change in values.”

And nobody says that. I immediately know that someone is constructing a whole straw universe when someone claims anyone representing science ever claims “everything is pretty much explained” because that’s not how science WORKS. it’s just a word that means a process… we look at shit, we come up with ideas for why that thing is like that, then we do tests to see if that model works, and we collect those successes as facts. It’s a process that doesn’t even claim to “explain” anything.

I had about three novels ready to start editing and working on in my younger years, sweeping epics, and I had ideas about time and space and started taking college courses towards a physics degree.

All of that went on hold for so long that when the last big financial crash happened after the housing bubble popped, I’ve been treading water ever since, and sinking a few times, until I am now ragged, worn out and every day is just a mental exercise of if I am making enough money at a job that should be paying salary to afford to pay off debts so I can prepare to charge inevitable major medical expenses to my credit cards if I have to.

Writing? Learning and contributing to the world? Fuck no. I will be LUCKY at this point if I have a job when I hit 68 or whatever the retirement age is now, that doesn’t require manual labor. I don’t have any inspiration or drive to write fiction, I have lost most of my passion for actually learning physics and just catch the latest discoveries on youtube as I literally fall asleep.

The constant pressures of staying above water have turned me from an active participant in the world, to someone who will likely disappear without more than another couple people in the whole world knowing what was going on in my mind.

I was going to talk about our social acceptance of religion despite even knowing it does objective harms to society, but then I realized you’re being performative and don’t really care or you wouldn’t have to put words in my mouth. I won’t see whatever else you have to tell me I am saying.

It’s funny because we allow people to believe whatever crazy, insane fairy tales they want about what magic sky wizard is the real magic sky wizard and even if those beliefs do harm, we say “well that’s their belief.”

I’m saying, if people are going to live in fantasy land, tell better fucking stories because our world is literally burning down on the backs of performative shits sitting on the computer being smug about what their perfect future looks like.

It’s a pretty dumb trolly problem if you rather truth that hurts people than a fairy tale that actually helps people.

What’s crazy is holding onto the ideal that you can get everyone on the same page, interpreting the same things the same way. Our entire civilization is build on a palace of lies we will never have truth for, so I find I don’t feel bothered if people take inspiration from someone who may or may not have existed.

I care more about outcomes nowadays far more than if everyone is on the same page, that’s never going to happen.

I’ve come to accept that reality is far less important to our daily lives than narratives.

I mean, it’s a real depressing understanding of the world, but after you embrace it, you learn to work around it and it can even be a huge asset or tool for getting results and interacting with others.

For me personally, I want to learn the disappointing truth about everything, but for the vast majority of people, they will live their whole lives without ever needing or wanting to learn who actually said or did what in history. It’s fine. We can keep building stories to influence people to do better things. There is no cosmic arbiter of truth who is going to judge people for spreading a story that leads to better outcomes.

I think I did read a recent paper outlining just such a case study.

It’s both deeply essentialist, and insulting to people’s intelligence. If you’re planning on studying hitler’s DNA, who cares, knock yourself out. But it’s ridiculous to think all but the worst people are going to believe there’s an “evil” gene.

If you’re a scientist planning on cloning hitler, you have a lot more problems on your hands, and are obviously not pursuing any kind of scientific results and just want attention and deserve all the ridicule from other that idiots you will get.

There are likely areas we will never have any greater insight on and phenomenon that will never be explained, but my point is just that people use these kinds of short-attention-span quips to go on to say that we don’t know for sure about climate change and vaccines and such.

I haven’t read any of Loeb’s recent anything because, and I cannot stress this enough, he is a crackpot trying to sell books and get media attention. I used to follow him because I liked the idea of being open to studying more areas of astronomy with an open mind to figuring out if there are unknowns we’ve been missing like Von Neuman probes in the asteroid belts and so on.

But since those earlier days of speculation, he has gotten more and more radical and “grifty” and disrespecting his own peers like the head of SETI and declaring anything that moves to be possible signs of aliens, to say nothing of his doubling down on recovering industrial waste from an expensive mission to retrieve ocean gunk on some longshot, hyperbolic narrative that he knew where an alien ship crashed. He does nothing but media and podcast tours and doesn’t take criticism. Not a scientist.

We can do better.

There are clear pictures of multiple nucleuses after it passed the sun, which is entirely common for comets, they are loosely held together balls of rock and ice. Some crackpots (Avi Loeb specifically) are now pushing the media-grabbing narrative that this is just the “spaceship now turning on its thrusters” despite no real dramatic, unexpected changes to its velocity or behavior.

We have observed some unusual properties from the comet, but this is more like “unusual for a long-range comet” and not “OMG ALIENS.” This is likely because it originated in another part of the galaxy a very, very long time ago and thus is made of different proportions of elements and may even have new compounds in it that react slightly differently to light and heat. In some other, better timeline, we would have probes stationed around the solar system to intercept and study interstellar objects and maybe we would make new discoveries.

For now, all we get are youtubers and sensationalist book authors flailing their arms in the air about aliens, because that’s what sells headlines.

This meme was circulated about 20 years ago by my reckoning.

It was clever back then, it’s far less entertaining now in an age when people are discarding science and factual knowledge wholesale.

We have very, very good models of each of those “things” listed. We have such good models for it, that even since this meme first made rounds, we have created new kinds of telescopes that can see gravity, we have created computers that can calculate using individual particles in superposition, we have built tools to view the edge of space and time and have imaged the event-horizons around black holes and we have created conditions close to beginning of the universe in labs and discovered new particles that validate decades or centuries of theorizing.

These models only break down in extreme environments or when they intersect in certain conditions. But by “break down” we don’t mean “scientists throw their hands in the air and become flat-earthers” we mean “we are missing some key data” to make different fields of science work together.

Yeah, when this meme was first cycled around over 20 years ago I didn’t like it then, I like far, far less now in an age of science denial and every fukkin headline on every fukkin major media site feed saying shit like “SCIENTISTS BAFFLED OVER NEW DISCOVERY OF UNKNOWN SIGNALS” or “SCIENTISTS HORRIFIED BY DISCOVERY THAT BREAKS THE LAWS OF NATURE” and so on.

This shit is the reason we have an anti-vaxxer with no qualifications leading the most powerful nation’s health and human services. This is the shit that feeds people deciding that horse-dewormer is as good as the accumulated knowledge of centuries of study and data. This kind of over-simplification is why we won’t see a dozen scrapped space missions and why people spit on scientific data about how helping people with their gender identity helps prevent suicide and on and on and on.

We have to make knowledge “cool” again, and I have no idea how to do that.

No it hasn’t. It broke up around the sun. It’s a rock with ice and shit.

Mold and demons and shit. Nobody is totally sure. He’s been in and out of the hospital and even intubated according to his daughter.

Never discourage that phase, imagine if our population never grew out of questioning the world. Just don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know, maybe you will figure out why and can teach me someday.”

“Look man, shit just be doing what it does because it is what it is. If weren’t that way everything would be soup or darkness.”

Physics at any point when you ask “why” enough.

I don’t know if his pain is mental or physical, but when I saw him on an interview he seemed in pretty rough shape and talking a lot about the end of his life. Becoming quadriplegic is a massive risk to your lifespan and he’s already pretty old and in bad shape. We’re going to send him lots of thoughts and prayers. Tons even.