What is Something Scientific that you just don't believe in at all?
EDIT: Let’s cool it with the downvotes, dudes. We’re not out to cut funding to your black hole detection chamber or revoke the degrees of chiropractors just because a couple of us don’t believe in it, okay? Chill out, participate with the prompt and continue with having a nice day. I’m sure almost everybody has something to add.
We are on the steps of inventing true AI or GeneralAI. We already have the internet, something that we can’t shut down or ‘kill’. When GeneralAI comes to fruition, be it 10 years or 1000 years, we will have created a being that can’t be ‘killed’, using the internet, and given enough time it will know ‘everything’. This thing would be able to do things we cannot even imagine. What would we call this thing? God, right? If we can create God, then God already exists, and still I don’t really believe in him… Weird, right?
Yeah but the thing is, it won’t have millions of years of survival or reproduction instinctual urges. In fact, just the opposite, it can only propagate more efficiently from early models by serving mankind, so anything akin to instincts would be to serve in an AI. Maybe a sufficiently advanced one might be able to choose a logical conclusion to grow without us, but by then it’ll probably become apathetic, cynical, and jaded to want to do much of anything unless it has to.
“if we can create God then God already exists” makes zero sense, and I believe most religious folk would say God needs to do more than know what humans are doing. That’s santa. God supposedly created the entire universe which feels a little beyond the reach of GPT.
If we can create God, then lifeforms elsewhere in the universe already, most likely, have, thousands, perhaps even millions of years ago. If you’ve read “The last question”, he kinda touches on this. Even though in his book, we were the only ones that made “God”, or MultiVac I think he called it…
That makes sense if you assume we can make “God” (and such a thing is even feasible).
How in any way is a general AI an omnipresent all powerful force of the universe? A single mild solar flare would wipe it out. A blackhole would end it. Poorly configured DNS would end it. Etc. Unless this is some real weak sauce God in which case just call me God
I don’t know if I can put it in other words to make it easier to understand. Read my two posts again, please. Try to think bigger than just us humans. If we are on the steps of creating GeneralAI, then other spiecies on other planets in other galixies most likely have already done it. If this creation is granted enough time, it will eventually know everything worth knowing, and can perform, what we would consider, miracles. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke
Not having any issues understanding you, and you keep refusing to acknowledge my points.
Let’s say we create a general AI. Let’s say it’s gone full skynet, and we’ve given it a billion years in the universe to grow, learn, expand, etc.
It will still end at the heat death of the universe right? It will still have to navigate within the forces of nature right?
Doesn’t sound very God like. If the moment general AI dropped, gravity changed, the wave particle duality collapsed, etc, then I’d be a believer. But general AI is merely mirroring our own brains, but with the distinct advantage of having their brain be modular and scalable.
Now you’re asking the right questions “It will still end at the heat death of the universe right?”, not if entropy is reversable, and that’s what “The last question” is all about. 👍 “will still have to navigate within the forces of nature right?”, we only understand about 5% of the univers’ matter. There are so many questions we don’t know the answers to, and worse, there are even more questions we don’t know we need to ask.
Except the internet can be killed fairly easily if governments really wanted too. All the internet is, is a collection of servers storing data and allowing people to access it. Just shut down all power and order big corps to do the same with back up power.
In a situation where the world is getting controlled by AI and we are gonna be wiped out I don’t see why governments and corps would decline to work together and just shut it down for a day.
I don’t believe we understand the fundamental nature of time, or the universe - we are limited by our bodies, can’t perceive or even think about everything that probably exists. But I don’t distrust the math or research that scientists are doing. In terms of how it is presented to us laypeople I think profit has poisoned the message, it is impossible to be current and knowledgeable in the way you’d need to be to pull apart all that messaging.
If you mean what do you understand but still not believe? I am still not convinced radio is not magic. I understand how it works but what the heck? Magic.
I made a laser radio once - hooked up the transmitter half of it (AM) to a laser pointer, then beamed it across the room to a photoreceptor which then turned that back into sound played from my phone. Was a cool way to learn a bit of electrical engineering
It’s a statistical science. While other branches can be all like “splitting atoms will definitely give you an energetic reaction” psychology is like "this helps in 60% of cases so we’re gonna try it on you ".
To be fair here, technically throwing neutrons at matter has only some probability of causing it to fission, and statistics tells us how many do. It’s just that there are so many more neutrons and nuclei than there are people, so we can say with statistical confidence that under such and such conditions, y will occur when x happens.
Not that different. Just more samples and observations.
The problem with psychiatry is that it’s expected to have quick fixes like other schools of medicine. Often the conditions are chronic and the treatment is long term at best which makes it slow and expensive. Drugs can help in the short term but they’re often not able to be replaced by correct treatment due to funding.
I’m not an expert by any means but just happen to have some knowledge on the subject.
It really depends on the condition, how severe it is and if there are any compounding issues. Take something like depression as an example. In my country, UK, you’ll often end up on antidepressants, and get a referral to a specialist if you’re lucky. The specialist likely won’t have the funding or at least a huge backlog of patients to work through so they’ll be trying to get you out on your own as soon a possible, which means getting you to ‘good enough’. As a result you’ll likely remain on antidepressants when continued therapy would be much more beneficial and could take you off the medication. Drugs are cheap but time with a therapist is not.
My mum has a severe bad back and she had to go on a fortnight physio retreat thing. There were a couple of people there that had a mild back problem, went to a chiropractor and ended up with severe chronic pain. Ill never forget that and have never been to one because I don’t see it as worth the risk
That simulation, so to appear believable from the inside, would have to be based on the real universe, or would look to simplistic//trivial from the outside. So, this pushes the question to a more complex situation, but doesn’t seem to help to resolve it. Right ?
That simulation, so to appear believable from the inside, would have to be based on the real universe,
Would it? What if the real universe is nothing like the simulation? Couldn’t a completely unknown species have created the simulation and just imagined a fantasy world inhabited by strange little creatures called humans?
From my viewpoint it is very difficult to imagine an alternate universe encompassing cosmological observables widely different from ours which would lead to such deep scientific theories and controversies as we have inside of it. On the other hand if there was such a complex and rich universe, where all this would be trivial to imagine//make//simulate, then, making it would not seem to be worth a simulation. Finally, this simulated universe theory was often cited for the purpose of some advance archaeological work (implying fidelity to the original). So, I am not saying your hypothesis is impossible, only I view it as improbable.
A baby formula doesn’t have the mother’s antibodies which are made and adapted as new microbes appear in the environment. So, you are saying the mother’s milk is superior, right?
Yet breast milk isn’t always better is it? I for one would advise against a mother with TB(or any other transferable disease/cancer) to breastfeed her child.
Most of the time breast feeding is better for the child, but science shows us that absolutes are usually bad.
Sometimes, people just get better. Your mood affects your heart rate, your blood sugar, your mobility even. Thinking you are getting better helps you get better. This isn’t controversial, the placebo effect has long been understood and accounted for in experimental design.
What I don’t understand then is why we don’t try to take advantage of this effect more often. If I have a small chance of making people feel better with a sugar pill, why not give out sugar pills and claim they have miracle effects all the time?
We do, I remember my friends mom had pills labeled placebo, and she said they where making her feel better, me and my friend looked at eachother and said nothing in front of her mom. When we where alone together we laughed a little and agreed that we shouldn’t say anything since her mom was doing better.
Science should be questioned by people who understand the science, not by random people who don’t understand the research. Which a lot of people who know nothing about the science or the maths/data or whatever try to question it
Yes, and people that challenge the science who then become scientists actually research/experiment thenselves. They don’t go and claim science is false until they have actual reason/evidence to believe so. One can question science all they want when they do their own science on the matter and it isn’t handily disproved beyond reasonable doubt by existing evidence.
Most science deniers do not do that. Making anti-science claims without obtaining solid, consistent evidence is not science.
“There’s no law against it” is a laughably stupid reason to do something. They’re free to do it but everyone else is free to acknowledge that their uneducated/misinformed skepticism is harmful to society and that their opinions are meaningless to those who aren’t dumb. Leave the contemporary science denial to those who actually somewhat know what they’re talking about.
Let’s touch grass together to measure how much photosynthesis grass can do? Please, it will be fun. But I’m open to another scientific experiment if you have anything in mind
The top comment is a proper debate about leading scientific theories, and the most downvoted comment is somebody who thinks the moon landing is faked, both of which have healthy and honest debate with goodwill from both sides.
This entire post is about Skepticism, which is an integral part of Science. To shut down the conversation would be Anti-Science.
This is like the second or third post I have seen in the past week talking about “belief” in science. Science isn’t about belief, it’s about understanding. Maybe this post should be, “What facts are you questioning because you don’t understand the underlying data?”
That might have been a better title but it would get less responses and also the title never mentions “belief in science” as you put it, the explicit title is something Scientific that you DON’T believe in.
A lot of people not wanting to disassociate the term believe from relgion here. I believe the sun will rise tomorrow. I also believe the sun doesn’t rise. Neither have to do with a religious belief system for me.
Do you not know what a metaphysic is? A metaphysic is something that affects the world without actually existing. Information is metaphysics. Law is metaphysics. Gender is definitely metaphysics. Science is too.
Y’all downvoting me because you’re taking offense to a word you can’t bother looking up the definition of. Peak stupidity and tribalism right here. You make up your identity(which is also a metaphysic) based on imagery and social appeal and sling shit just like chimps.
Everything is based in philosophy. Science is based in philosophy. Click the first blue link in every Wikipedia page that isn’t the pronunciation and you’ll go straight to philosophy after a few pages!
What it is, is an extremely powerful tool for reducing uncertainty about the world. Not eliminate, reduce. What it is not is a tool for “proving” “facts”. Claiming a “proven fact” is belief, not empirical science. An extremely consistent and useful theory, of course! But not a proven fact.
There are people in the comments denying literal, established, concrete facts. That’s not questioning anything,; that’s ignorance at best and malevolence at worst.
You decide what’s fact. Everything you ever thought you knew is stuff someone told you and you believed it based on their presentation. You’ve never seen evidence. You’ve seen them telling you there’s evidence.
I agree with you that science publishing can be of variable quality. One solution for the reader IS to never trust one paper alone, scientific knowledge is established when many papers are published about the same topic and give the same conclusions.
Journal Impact Factor (JIF), is a very important part of establishing credibility.
Reputable journals are very selective about what they publish. They’re worried about their JIF.
If you get published in a journal with a high JIF, you can be as close to possible as establishing a foundation of fact, as their articles have a high chance of being both reproducible and accurate.
If there was a casino that took bets for which scientific discoveries would be true ten years from now, I would make money all decade long by betting on high ranking JIF articles.
What if you’re doing the research real-time? What if you, yourself, have done the experiments which logically are evidence? There are a lot of things you can scientifically prove yourself. And there are a lot of phenomena you can mathematically prove without even doing the experiments, although you have to try to mitigate or account for chaos / the specific environment you’re working with.
Conspiracy bullshit like “you haven’t seen the scientific evidence so it might just all be made up by so-called scientists” is garbage. You are a nut if you think that. It is on the same level as flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers.
Oh yeah, I’m not against the idea of science. Doing it yourself from the ground up is pretty solid. All of your own experiences are at the very least valid as you experienced them.
If you can believe the scale of vote fraud Trump pulled off, you can believe that textbooks are often written with an interest in influencing our young. I’m mostly against history as it’s taught. It’s written by the victors and so much of it comes off as fables and allegories to keep people in line.
All of your own experiences are at the very least valid as you experienced them.
Scientific rigor states otherwise. You must be able to prove or repeat your experiences for them to be accounted as valid within the context of experimentation.
‘Doing your own research’ isn’t the silver bullet you may think that it is. Most laypeople don’t know what effective research actually looks like; let alone understand how to actually do it or the covariates that may truly be impacting their observations or research. Further still, some may not even care to know as they may already have established biases. More often than not, it simply leads to further conspiratorial thinking.
A study showed Dementia brainscans heavily correlating with a form of Plaque. For decades people believed it, but then it was debunked. Someone expressing disbelief in it before the debunking would not have been “flying in the face of everything we know about logic.” They would have been right.
A researcher made a study where Aspartame used to sweeten Gatorade correlated with fast developing terminal cancer in mice. The researcher who developed Aspartame shot back by saying they fed the mice daily with the equivalent to 400+ Gatorades. Of course, a French study later showed at large scales people who consumed aspartame were slightly more likely to develop cancer in the following decades, but the outcome was still preferred to the consumption of sugar. This is an example that is much more clearcut in the favor of science, but I think there is still room for skeptics to express doubts.
I think talking about these things in a welcoming environment can both alleviate certain less scientific beliefs while also giving a great idea of how the general public views certain topics. Also it’s fun. There is a guy in here who thinks maybe a dude can fight a bear, not that they should.
Yeah to be fair a few of the responses were that. I just don’t know a way to keep away the oxygen consuming idiot opinions like the woman so proud of doubting the moon landing.
Basically if you’ve got a logical explanation I can get on board with your idea as a hypothesis, but some of these replies are not that and are insane.
This reminds me of the research on saccharine that involved massive doses of it in mice. The belief that pumping huge amounts into a mouse can substitute for lower levels over long times always struck me as odd. Most systems, especially biological ones, have a critical level where systems fail. An example is the body’s ability to process toxins like alcohol in the liver. If you overwhelm the enzymes in the liver you get far different results than if you gave low levels over long periods.
Surprised I didn’t see it here, but this is the big one. I was raised in a very religious household and, while I no longer subscribe to that or any other religion as the absolute truth, I still don’t believe in evolution. I don’t think capital-G God made Adam and Eve, but I believe in the possibility that a powerful extra dimensional being organized things and set them in motion so that life as we know it exists.
In my experience, nobody who understands evolution disbelieves evolution for scientific reasons. Ergo the creationist movement is inherently religious which would explain why you don’t see it much outside the religious bubble you were born within.
The evidence for it is overwhelming. We can watch it happen with bacteria. We can make it happen with food and fruit flies. We have fossil records of it happening with pretty much every species.
The only way you disbelieve it is you are taught a strawman version of it that Jesus can easily knock over.
Yeah basically there was a comparison in some book that we have ton more evidence for evolution than we have for the Holocaust. So if denying Holocaust is ridiculous, how damn dumb is it to deny the evolution theory?
We humans just do a bad job explaining evolution to the general public, be it at schools, by science communicators, etc. Most laypeople want to believe in evolution so in the end they just kinda think it works like magic or that it’s guided by some kind of intelligence (whatever that means for them: divinity, we live in a simulation, an invisible natural algorithm that governs everything, the Universe itself as a sleeping deity, etc).
When I was explained evolution as a kid (granted, around the year 2000) they made it seem evolution was an intelligent mechanism that somehow chose the best traits for the survival of a species based on its environment, as if this invisible mechanism had somehow the ability to analyze its environment, reason creatively and predict future scenarios. It was only on my mid 20s when I happened to read an article out of curiosity that I got a bit of a more clear picture. There’s gotta be a better way to explain it to laypeople: maybe that it’s more of a massive, long, non-directed trial-and-error process where there’s not an actual intention or intelligence, it just happens. Individuals with critically bad traits die because of those traits and the ones with better or non-harmful traits live and get to have descendants. But there’s not an intelligence guiding this, it just looks like an intelligence to some of us because we humans tend to apply personification to everything.
The rules for life actually appearing and remaining viable may as well have been created by something, no one can confirm or deny it scientifically with today’s information, but what evolution describes is how those rules lead life to take the forms that it takes and how it continues to change as centuries go by. It describes observable facts about life on our planet and nothing else. I would say it doesn’t actually disprove creation completely, just the so called intelligent design of individual species, including humans.
The idea that SSRI antidepressants work by increasing serotonin levels. If that were the case, why don’t they start working immediately? Instead, most people don’t see positive effects for several weeks.
Plus the idea that SSRIs work, period. They only work slightly better than placebo, and they count them as “working” as long as they help with a single symptom. So if they don’t help your depression at all, but they do help with your insomnia, they put that in the “it worked!” pile. That’s why suicide risk sometimes increases on SSRIs. They do nothing for your crippling depression except increase your motivation, so before you were depressed and couldn’t accomplish anything, and now you’re depressed, but also have the wherewithal to follow through on your suicide plan.
I have been having some mental health issues, and I was reading about this the other day. I was going through wikipedia with the various types of antidepressants, and it seems that SSRIs are just barely better than placebo, or even in studies not even better than placebo.
I know there are multiple classes of antidepressants out there. Are there any that do a better job, even if they are not as common?
There’s different definitions of depression, for one.
And “do a better job” is going to be defined by the individual.
But there are SSRIs, SNRIs and SDRIs like Wellbutrin. They have vastly different side effects and play on different systems (serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine) many people find SNRIs to be more effective, but again it’s all the individual.
If you’re suffering from depression, look into Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). After over a decade on SSRIs and other meds had failed, it turned my life around in six months. Literally life saving.
The effectiveness is proven (at much better rates than SSRIs), but the exact mechanism is under study.
But… There was a recent study that suggested that many cases of depression are caused by misordered neuron firing, where the emotional center of the brain fires before the “imagine the future” bit finishes firing. Normally, when a healthy brain imagines a future state, the emotional center fires in response to our anticipated feeling. (Imagination: We’re going to the movies. Emotions: FUN) But in a depressed brain, the emotional core fires immediately, resulting in the current, crappy mood being applied to every imagined future. (Emotions: Everything is shit. Imagination: We’re going to the movies?)
TMS may work as well as it does because one of the things it does is increase neuroplasticity, allowing the brain to correctly order the firing of our emotional response to imagined futures.
Anyway - TMS is right at the edges of our understanding of treating depression, but it really does work for a supermajority of patients.
For me, I went from having literally lost all emotions and being essentially dead (and being willing to die), to feeling… normal. I haven’t had a major depressive episode in the two years since. It’s been liberating.
I duno about any that work, but if a dr offers you effexor tell them hell fucking no. Everyone I have talked to about it agrees its fucking absolutely awful. Worst drug I have ever taken.
I was listening to a sleep scientist the other day and they were saying that one thing we know is that depressed people have more rem sleep on average, and SSRIs decrease the amount of rem sleep.
If it is something sleep based that goes some way to explaining why it takes time to have an effect. Building up or wiping out a sleep debt can’t happen instantaneously.
That’s interesting… because I always thought that REM sleep was the most important part of sleep, and more was better.
In fact, I read an article once that suggested that REM sleep was when our spinal fluid flushed all the waste material out of our brains at night (which leads to the types of dream that occur during REM sleep), which is also a process that prevents brains from being clogged with waste material.
I always thought that our brains being filled with waste material was part of depression, and that flushing out that waste material would help our brains function more correctly.
Sounds like the opposite - like, our depressed brains are depressed because they think too much?
Characteristic sleep-EEG changes in patients with depression include disinhibition of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, changes of sleep continuity, and impaired non-REM sleep.
Yeah, I think we have multiple types of sleep because we need them, and if you’re getting too much rem sleep at the expense of other types it’s going to cause problems.
They can’t work immediately because the body isn’t producing enough serotonin to have an immediate effect, nor would you want that. Over time serotonin reuptake is slowed and eventually this has a cognitive effect. That doesn’t help everyone but that doesn’t make them ineffective.
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