Among your others possible talents you are a great satirist. Combining factual information and humor is a difficult thing to do and you do it very well. I actually laugh while reading.
Sir! We parrots could not care less about them ugly pigs and damnable Brussels sprouts, but we looked up the verb "voom" in the dictionary, could not find it, and therefore will have to classify it as a microaggression.
It seems that in Berlin they also won't let the unvaccinated homeless into shelters anymore, and at the same time they are driving them out of the underground stations, because Covid.
A voom is a technical unit - it's what parrots do when you put 4,000 Volts through them. This was discovered by the Monty Python team some time ago now.
Although several methods have now been proposed for measuring voom, electrocuting parrots remains, to this day, by far the best way of measuring it.
In this sea of groupthink it is quite easy to enter despair and question one's own perceptions. I am so glad there is an online community of intelligent, articulate people who care enough to take the time to think, question, reflect and share their wealth of knowledge, experience and insights.
It never ceases to amaze me the certitude with which those around me make their claims about vaccines, immunity, transmission, virulence, lockdowns etc. And yet all I can see are shoddy data collection, correlations, confounders, and inconsistencies. I am riddled with doubts. It could be so, but it could also be so and I will be happy to be proven wrong about my concerns but we should never shy from inconvenient truths.
»The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.« Bertrand Russell
It has been a fascinating time of weirdness - thousands of PhD dissertations will be written about this period of history in the future. It would be very funny, if it wasn't having such appalling consequences.
It really doesn't take a lot of brain juice to see some of the inconsistencies. I mean, how difficult can it really be to be able to see that masks on standing, masks off seated, is absurd?
And, despite hundreds of thousands, probably millions by now, of people packed into football games in places like Texas and Florida - we still have no good evidence (i.e. none at all) for outside transmission. Yet many places mandate outdoor masking. It's unscientific shite - but we're told it's the "science".
I suppose I could live with one or two batshit crazy things - but there's so MANY! They're all over the place - in almost every area of covid "science", stuff doesn't stack up. I've never seen anything quite like it.
Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you! I'm ROFLMAO picturing the building, and parrots, going Voom. There's not much to laugh at around here, but this mind picture will keep me amused for a few days. Thank-you also for your the equally humorous reply to cm27874, in re. Voom being a technical unit.
Is anyone able to explain something for me, a non-scientist? For over a decade I’ve hated science. However, what I hated was not science, it was Scientism. But no one bothered to engage me on this fundamental error of understanding, instead calling me anti-science. I was, up until 18 months ago, confused between science and Scientism, not realising the distinction. Now I am very clear that I do not hate science but I definitely do hate Scientism and bad science. It seems to me, based on listening to scientists these past two years, that many, possibly most, are equally as confused as I once was, ie they think they’re practicing science when they are not using the scientific method at all, which in my view is a method of enquiry used for millennia which science stole and claimed as it’s own. The reason I say this is because I’ve been using the scientific method all my life for things other than science. If this hypotheses that I have proposed is correct (assuming the TV scientists and Independent SAGE (and SAGE) scientists, in particular, are not stupid or evil, just misguided), what has gone wrong in science teaching these past 40 years to produce such imbeciles? Are science students not taught philosophy of science or the scientific method? Thank you.
Great questions - and whole books could be (and have been) written on it.
One of the best people to read/watch on the scientific method is Richard Feynman. If you can find his "Horizon" interviews on YouTube - they're brilliant. He was, of course, himself one of the greatest scientists the world has ever produced - but he also had an astonishing gift for communicating his understanding to people.
The first person I'm aware of to state the scientific method was Ibn al Haytham (about 10th century). The early Islamic scholars did some amazing work - centuries ahead of their Western counterparts. For example, when compiling the Hadith they used the technique of Isnad - which was a reputation-based way of assessing the veracity of a story. Not a perfect technique, by any means, but when you consider that 3 or 4 centuries later William of Monmouth was writing down stories he'd heard about dragons and magic in his history of Britain - you can see how far the western world was behind at that time.
Sadly, for reasons I never got to the bottom of, Islamic scholarship as applied to the natural world sort of stagnated - and the torch passed mostly to the West and the Enlightenment.
As for the general methodology, I found it very hard to effectively communicate. I would say the majority of my students were only interested in getting a bit of paper, and the associated prestige they thought went with it, rather than developing any real understanding. The most common question I heard was "what chapter in the textbook do I have to learn?". My heart sank.
I tried to explain (so many times) that they needed to think in terms of ideas not chapters. The questions should be more like "do I understand angular momentum?". I didn't get as good student feedback (from most) as some of the other lecturers did - but they were better at playing the system than I was (or than I was prepared to be).
They just wanted recipes - they weren't interested in figuring out which ingredients should be combined, and why, to develop a good flavour.
Thank you so much for this explanation! You are a ray of light in the darkness of Scientism! Keep going. We will prevail eventually, we have to, although it may take a while.
I much appreciated this post. The same parts that made me wince also made me laugh, so well done!
I am about to say something insulting about elementary educators, so first off I should say that I not only identify as one, but I am one.
Many who teach young children love literacy education but are not subject matter experts in math or science. Yet we are asked to bring these into the curriculum with increasing rigor, and we do our best, but at the end of the day we may be communicating to children that these are often irrational and with no relationship to their daily lives. The best educators don't introduce children to the kinds of concepts they have to take on faith, but if these kinds of teachers were in the majority, how would we end up with university students (and evidently vast numbers of the adult population) who treat math and science as belief systems? "Trust the science." "Science is real." These sound like religious slogans and yet are repeated most by the most educated among my acquaintances.
Good to know the homeless at least are still communicating loud and clear that they'd rather Little Match Girl it out than sell their bodies for shelter.
Among your others possible talents you are a great satirist. Combining factual information and humor is a difficult thing to do and you do it very well. I actually laugh while reading.
Thank you so much - brought a tear to my eye. And I'm not being my usual snarky self here. I'm humbled and honoured you find my writing worthwhile.
Sir! We parrots could not care less about them ugly pigs and damnable Brussels sprouts, but we looked up the verb "voom" in the dictionary, could not find it, and therefore will have to classify it as a microaggression.
It seems that in Berlin they also won't let the unvaccinated homeless into shelters anymore, and at the same time they are driving them out of the underground stations, because Covid.
Bonus points for mentioning Möbius strips!
A voom is a technical unit - it's what parrots do when you put 4,000 Volts through them. This was discovered by the Monty Python team some time ago now.
Although several methods have now been proposed for measuring voom, electrocuting parrots remains, to this day, by far the best way of measuring it.
Ah, Monty Python! Back then they had real science.
As I recall a Dr. Fauxci conducted those experiments with great success.🤭
Thank you really very much for this post.
In this sea of groupthink it is quite easy to enter despair and question one's own perceptions. I am so glad there is an online community of intelligent, articulate people who care enough to take the time to think, question, reflect and share their wealth of knowledge, experience and insights.
It never ceases to amaze me the certitude with which those around me make their claims about vaccines, immunity, transmission, virulence, lockdowns etc. And yet all I can see are shoddy data collection, correlations, confounders, and inconsistencies. I am riddled with doubts. It could be so, but it could also be so and I will be happy to be proven wrong about my concerns but we should never shy from inconvenient truths.
»The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.« Bertrand Russell
It has been a fascinating time of weirdness - thousands of PhD dissertations will be written about this period of history in the future. It would be very funny, if it wasn't having such appalling consequences.
It really doesn't take a lot of brain juice to see some of the inconsistencies. I mean, how difficult can it really be to be able to see that masks on standing, masks off seated, is absurd?
And, despite hundreds of thousands, probably millions by now, of people packed into football games in places like Texas and Florida - we still have no good evidence (i.e. none at all) for outside transmission. Yet many places mandate outdoor masking. It's unscientific shite - but we're told it's the "science".
I suppose I could live with one or two batshit crazy things - but there's so MANY! They're all over the place - in almost every area of covid "science", stuff doesn't stack up. I've never seen anything quite like it.
Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you! I'm ROFLMAO picturing the building, and parrots, going Voom. There's not much to laugh at around here, but this mind picture will keep me amused for a few days. Thank-you also for your the equally humorous reply to cm27874, in re. Voom being a technical unit.
Is anyone able to explain something for me, a non-scientist? For over a decade I’ve hated science. However, what I hated was not science, it was Scientism. But no one bothered to engage me on this fundamental error of understanding, instead calling me anti-science. I was, up until 18 months ago, confused between science and Scientism, not realising the distinction. Now I am very clear that I do not hate science but I definitely do hate Scientism and bad science. It seems to me, based on listening to scientists these past two years, that many, possibly most, are equally as confused as I once was, ie they think they’re practicing science when they are not using the scientific method at all, which in my view is a method of enquiry used for millennia which science stole and claimed as it’s own. The reason I say this is because I’ve been using the scientific method all my life for things other than science. If this hypotheses that I have proposed is correct (assuming the TV scientists and Independent SAGE (and SAGE) scientists, in particular, are not stupid or evil, just misguided), what has gone wrong in science teaching these past 40 years to produce such imbeciles? Are science students not taught philosophy of science or the scientific method? Thank you.
Great questions - and whole books could be (and have been) written on it.
One of the best people to read/watch on the scientific method is Richard Feynman. If you can find his "Horizon" interviews on YouTube - they're brilliant. He was, of course, himself one of the greatest scientists the world has ever produced - but he also had an astonishing gift for communicating his understanding to people.
The first person I'm aware of to state the scientific method was Ibn al Haytham (about 10th century). The early Islamic scholars did some amazing work - centuries ahead of their Western counterparts. For example, when compiling the Hadith they used the technique of Isnad - which was a reputation-based way of assessing the veracity of a story. Not a perfect technique, by any means, but when you consider that 3 or 4 centuries later William of Monmouth was writing down stories he'd heard about dragons and magic in his history of Britain - you can see how far the western world was behind at that time.
Sadly, for reasons I never got to the bottom of, Islamic scholarship as applied to the natural world sort of stagnated - and the torch passed mostly to the West and the Enlightenment.
As for the general methodology, I found it very hard to effectively communicate. I would say the majority of my students were only interested in getting a bit of paper, and the associated prestige they thought went with it, rather than developing any real understanding. The most common question I heard was "what chapter in the textbook do I have to learn?". My heart sank.
I tried to explain (so many times) that they needed to think in terms of ideas not chapters. The questions should be more like "do I understand angular momentum?". I didn't get as good student feedback (from most) as some of the other lecturers did - but they were better at playing the system than I was (or than I was prepared to be).
They just wanted recipes - they weren't interested in figuring out which ingredients should be combined, and why, to develop a good flavour.
Thank you so much for this explanation! You are a ray of light in the darkness of Scientism! Keep going. We will prevail eventually, we have to, although it may take a while.
I much appreciated this post. The same parts that made me wince also made me laugh, so well done!
I am about to say something insulting about elementary educators, so first off I should say that I not only identify as one, but I am one.
Many who teach young children love literacy education but are not subject matter experts in math or science. Yet we are asked to bring these into the curriculum with increasing rigor, and we do our best, but at the end of the day we may be communicating to children that these are often irrational and with no relationship to their daily lives. The best educators don't introduce children to the kinds of concepts they have to take on faith, but if these kinds of teachers were in the majority, how would we end up with university students (and evidently vast numbers of the adult population) who treat math and science as belief systems? "Trust the science." "Science is real." These sound like religious slogans and yet are repeated most by the most educated among my acquaintances.
Good to know the homeless at least are still communicating loud and clear that they'd rather Little Match Girl it out than sell their bodies for shelter.