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Toying with an idea...

Started by hackenslash, February 08, 2022, 10:19:53 PM

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Mr. B

hackenslash said:

QuoteSo, I need a little help, hopefully with some discussion. I need examples of common knowledge that aren't true, and examples of common sense that isn't sensible. The more common the examples, the better.

Karma is a kind of common knowledge that isn't true. Bill Maher explains. Americans view karma as a revenge type of instant karma in this life time. (Think, "My Name Is Earl") A logical fallacy. Post hoc, ergo proptor hoc. "after that, because of that".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLLzVw70nSs

How did we twist it so far from it's original meaning? And why is our misunderstanding of the concept so widespread?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - Evelyn Beatrice Hall

hackenslash

There is no more formidable or insuperable barrier to knowledge than the certainty you already possess it.

hackenslash

Quote from: Tank on February 11, 2022, 07:47:48 PM
It's common sense that you'd never find soft tissues preserved from dinosaurs.

However https://www.history.com/news/scientists-find-soft-tissue-in-75-million-year-old-dinosaur-bones

That's a good example, and highly instructive. That the result was surprising even to those of us with reasonably well-developed intuitions for the subject matter tells us something important to our intuitions, especially the notion that they have to be developed.
There is no more formidable or insuperable barrier to knowledge than the certainty you already possess it.

hackenslash

Quote from: Mr. B on February 11, 2022, 10:36:07 PM
There are quite a few ideas being tossed around here but there is one common thread connecting them. Common sense is not so common and it sometimes changes based on new discoveries in science. Most people are reluctant to change so maybe they continue to believe that you will have 7 years bad luck if you break a mirror. Or some people may still be wary of black cats crossing their paths. Or hesitant to inject a brand new anti viral chemical engeneered to stimulate their body's mRNA response. Or question the age of the earth based on soft tissues found in relatively poor fossil specimens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0_2Wq9Aos4

Are chicken eggs good to eat or not?

This is kind of where I'm ultimately going, which is why I wanted to explore what other people thought about the notions of common sense and common knowledge. There's a deep connection to patterns, intuition, prejudice, superstition, ritual and survival which makes even the poorest examples difficult to shake.
There is no more formidable or insuperable barrier to knowledge than the certainty you already possess it.

hackenslash

Quote from: Tank on February 12, 2022, 08:08:00 AM
Another thought. Could 'Old wives tales' be considered common sense? And is another term for Common Sense, Received Wisdom?

;)

Two quotes are apposite, one from Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits:

Quoteshow me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.

And Einstein:

QuoteCommon sense is the collection of prejudices we accumulate by the age of eighteen.
There is no more formidable or insuperable barrier to knowledge than the certainty you already possess it.

Icarus

Hacks' tagline is ever so true.  Way back in time one of the Greeks, Aristotle or one of the others, said that we don't know what we don't know.  Of course that was spoken in Greek language.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson has an opening remark on some of his Youtube ads.  It is that we know enough to think that we know, but we do not know enough to understand that we are wrong.

hackenslash

Funny you should say that, since I've just published a new post touching on all that.

Completely Incomplete
There is no more formidable or insuperable barrier to knowledge than the certainty you already possess it.

Icarus

Heady stuff Hack. Please continue at will.

Icarus

Heady stuff Hack. Please continue at will.

hackenslash

I'm going to apologise. My reaction to this was because it felt a lot like JAQing off. Let's give it the respect it warrants.

Quote from: billy rubin on February 11, 2022, 05:28:19 PM
i have one. it is commonly taught that eratosthenes proved that the earth was round.

I'm not sure this is what's commonly taught, though I suspect quite a lot of people come away with that impression.

Quotethis is false. eratosthenes merely calculated a circumference, based on a preexisting belief that the earth was round, which he held for other reasons.

And that's accurate. The notion that the Earth was spheroidal had been around for a long time for other reasons. What Eratosthenes really provided was a new line of consilience for the long-mounting evidence.

Quoteid have to check again, but when i took his protocol and crunched some numbers, i found that his results are perfectly consistent with a flat earth and a sun orbiting the north pole at a constant altitude of 536 miles.

iirc

I'd be interested in seeing your working out on this, because my gut tells me that can't be, not least because the angle of incidence is opposite, though I could see a parallax projection giving an odd result depending on how everything lines up.

Thinking about this example did make me think of a couple of things that 'everybody knows about science' that simply aren't true.

The first is that science tells us that time began at the big bang. It never has, although there was a time when there were so few who understood quantum theory that it looked an awful lot like it did. In reality, the extension of GR that led to the notion of time beginning at the big bang only ever pointed to a singularity which, itself, would not experience time, but there's no good reason to assume that means that time doesn't exist.

The second is that GR predicted gravitational waves. This is the Einstein myth of the current generation, coming up of course because we've detected gravitational waves. In fact, the prediction of gravitational waves wasn't even a prediction of gravitational waves, it was a prediction that gravity would be shown to be a distributed process, which Einstein had done ten years earlier with SR, In Newtonian mechanics, time and space are absolute and immutable, with the result being that gravity propagates instantaneously. Einstein, by showing that time and space are interdependent variables, showed that nothing can propagate instantaneously, and that therefore gravity MUST be a distributed process. Indeed, it was this and only this that motivated the formulation of GR, because SR said gravity must be distributed, and ALL distributed processes propagate in waves.
There is no more formidable or insuperable barrier to knowledge than the certainty you already possess it.

Tank

If religions were TV channels atheism is turning the TV off.
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." ― Richard P. Feynman
'It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.' - Terry Pratchett
Remember, your inability to grasp science is not a valid argument against it.

billy rubin

#56
Quote from: hackenslash on February 18, 2022, 09:46:47 AM
I'm going to apologise. My reaction to this was because it felt a lot like JAQing off. Let's give it the respect it warrants.

not to worry. its not something i think about much, but your use of it as an example jogged my memory.

Quote
Quoteid have to check again, but when i took his protocol and crunched some numbers, i found that his results are perfectly consistent with a flat earth and a sun orbiting the north pole at a constant altitude of 536 miles.

iirc

I'd be interested in seeing your working out on this, because my gut tells me that can't be, not least because the angle of incidence is opposite, though I could see a parallax projection giving an odd result depending on how everything lines up.



well, trying to find out exaclty what eratosthenes did is hard to do, because first, he didnt write it down, and it was just reported secondhad by another guy writing about celestial mechanics or something. and second, everybody has a different story about what he actually did. but apparently it was something like this.

eratosthenes lived in alexandria, up on the coast. he heard about a well in a town south of him called cyene, about 5000 stadia away. the stadion was not a consistent measure, but lets arbitrarily pick 157.7 metres because thats what i just found on the web.

this well was notable, he was told, because on th esummer solstice at noon the sun shone down the well vertically, ie the sun was absolutely perfectly overhead, it being at a latitude of 23.5 degrees north. in other words, there was no shadow in the bottom of the well. in his own town on the same day the sun was not perfectly overhead, and vertical objects did cast a shadow. accounts differ as to whether he looked down his own well, or went downtown and measured the shadow of an existing obelisk, or stuck a stick of his own in the ground and measured that. whatever he did, they say he got a discrepancy of 7.2 degrees between vertical and his own solar angle of incidence on that day. so something different was going on between where he was and where that other well was.

people dont say this, but then he made three assumptions. first, that light rays travel in straight lines. second, that they are parallel. third, the earth is round. the first is pretty obvious by inspection from nature. the second not so obvious, and the third was what he already believed.

anyway, i cant find his actual numbers, but the 7.2 degree angle is all you need. given all this and some careful thinking, he established a circumference of the earth which turns out to have been pretty close. thats whjat everybody talks about, and thats what th eschoolkids do on science day. if the sun is out, anyway. that's also where you hear people say that eratosthenes proved the earth was round.

but theres another way to get that 7.2 degree discrepancy between vertical and your local gnomon. instead of assuming the earth is round and light rays are parallel, just use what your own eyes tell you, that the earth is flat, and make no assumptions about parallel light. look at this sketch:



the line on th ebottom is a flat earth, showing the distance between cynene and alexandria at 5000 stadia, or 788,500 metres. th esun is vertically overhead at cyene, and is NOT overhead to the tune of 7.2 degrees at alexandria. the 7.2 degrees is the difference between a vertical light ray at cyene, and the non-vertical light ray that casts a shadow over in alexandria. i havent drawn a pole or a well over in alexandria, but you can see from the angle of the incident light that anything vertical would have a shadow whose length was fixed by the 7.2 degree angle of the suns rays.

so, just do the trigonometry. tan equals opposite over adjacent, and the tangent of a 7.2 degree angle is 0.12633

therefore

0.12633 = 788,500 / x

where x is the adjacent side, or the altitude of the sun. solve for x, and you get 6,241,589 metres, or 6241 km, roughly, or about 3878 miles, the height of the sun above the surface of a flat earth.

not the same as what i calculated out way back when, but i cant remember what i was using for stadia, and im not a mathmatician anyway.

so here is a customary model of the flat earth:



theres lots wrong with this model, but it shows the general idea. if the sun rotates around the north pole at a constant altitude of 3878 miles, then all of eratosthenes calculations are accounted for, without a round earth. mostly the flat earth models hold the sun to be only a few hundred miles up, but this set of numbers shows it higher. stll no need for a reound earth to explain it, tho.

one more thing. if you hold ockhams razor to be of any use, then its worth pointing out that the round earth model requires three assumptions: light travels in straight lines, the rays are parallel, and the earth is round. the flat earth model explains the data the same way with only a single assumption, that light rays travel in straight lines.

so if we were to choose the explanation of eratosthene's calculations on the basis of the most parsimonious model, we would reject his round earth and choose a flat earth instead. all other things being equal.


News has been received from the Punjab that the Amritsar mob has again broken out in a violent attack against the authorities. The rebels were repulsed by the military and they suffered 200 casualties.

billy rubin

lol

i swear i just found this

https://www.themathdoctors.org/proving-the-earth-is-round-or-not/

^^^this guy used the same method i did and got 3958 miles. probably a different stadion.


News has been received from the Punjab that the Amritsar mob has again broken out in a violent attack against the authorities. The rebels were repulsed by the military and they suffered 200 casualties.

Ecurb Noselrub

What about some common sayings that are held to be "wise" (sensible?)? 

"Early to bed, early to rise, makes on healthy, wealthy and wise."  I doubt it. There is no necessary causal connection between this particular sleep pattern and health, wealth and wisdom. There are probably many people who go to bed and get up early, and are poor, for example, and many who are rich who sleep a bit later and go to bed a bit later.

"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."  Really?  So, take it now rather than allowing an opportunity to develop? Sounds like instant gratification to me. What about two brothers who receive stock by inheritance, and one of them sells it now to get the cash (bird in the hand) while the other waits and his investment grows exponentially.

I'm sure there are others, if you think they qualify as common sense.


Bad Penny II

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I wonder if Dave is home, knock knock, wait ... wait ...wait, I'll try again tomorrow
I wonder if Dave is home, knock knock, wait ... wait ...wait, I'll try again tomorrow
I wonder if Dave is home, knock knock, wait ... wait ...wait, I'll try again tomorrow
I wonder if Dave is home, knock knock,
Ye what?
Hey Dave!
Take my advice, don't listen to me.