The hilarity of the very first comment I read after this one being someone complaining that this is the work of the anti christ and nothing will be sacred anymore.
ASSERTING the list is sorted as an assumption is significantly different form VERIFYING that the list is sorted before executing the search. Moreover, type systems can track that a list was previously sorted and maintained it's sorted status making the assumption reasonable to state.
What do you mean when you say "assert" and "verify"? In my head, given the context of this thread and the comment you're replying to, they can both only mean "add an `if not sorted then abort()`."
I know that Solaris (or at least, ZFS) has VERIFY and ASSERT macros where the ASSERT macros are compiled out in production builds. Is that the kind of thing you're referring to?
You can aslo mark certain codepaths as unreachable to hint to the compiler that it can make certain optimisations (e.g., "this argument is never negative"), but if you aren't validating that the assumption is correct I wouldn't call that an assertion -- though a plain reading of your comment would imply you would still call this an "assertion"? AFAIK, no language calls this construct "assert".
This is probably one of those "depends on where you first learned it" bits of nomenclature, but to me the distinction here is between debug assertions (compiled out in production code) and assertions (always run).
I'm not clear what definition of assert anyone is using. Thus I'm trying to create a new one that I think is useful (in the context of this type of discussion only!).
Verify means you checked.
Assert means you are suggesting something is true, but might or might not have checked. Sometimes an assert is "too hard" to verify but you have reason to think it is true. This could be because of low level code, or just that it is possible to verify but would cost too much CPU (runtime, or possibly limits of our ability to prove large systems) Sometimes assert is like a Mafia boss (It is true or I'll shoot - it might or might not really be true but nobody is going to argue the point now. This can sometimes be needed to keep a discussion on a more important topic despite the image)
In many (most?) languages assert is an optional crash if false. The language can choose to run the check or not. A function to check if a list is sorted and return a boolean is not hard to write - but of course you then need to prove that function is correct.
> Moreover, type systems can track that a list was previously sorted and maintained it's sorted status making the assumption reasonable to state.
This is true, but if you care about correct execution, you would need to re-verify that the list is sorted - bitflips in your DRAM or a buggy piece of code trampling random memory could have de-sorted the list. Then your formally verified application misbehaves even though nothing is wrong with it.
It's also possible to end up with a "sorted" list that isn't actually sorted if your comparison function is buggy, though hopefully you formally verified the comparison function and it's correct.
Any budget proposal that cuts Medicare or social security is dead in the water and it's ridiculous for any group to even consider it. Not only would it be political suicide but it would also literally kill people.
Social security lives in a parallel universe to the budget, so they could cancel the program entirely and it wouldn't affect the deficit. Mixing it up with the regular budget is a way to confuse people into being open to killing it, a long-term goal of the cadre of financial geniuses who brought us The Great Depression.
Medicare is another story, and until the US has a come to Jesus moment on single payer healthcare and confronting the regulatory capture in healthcare it will only get worse.
> Social security lives in a parallel universe to the budget, so they could cancel the program entirely and it wouldn't affect the deficit.
100% true, if you're operating in sane-world where anything makes sense.
Here in insane world, my pet theory is that, given another year (maybe two, they might wait until after the midterms, assuming they hold on to congress) we're going to see an attempt to nullify the government debt owned by Social Security by converting it into some convoluted scheme involving crypto-backed-by-the-stock-market or something. Ta-da, debt reduced, deficit reduced (by the amount of interest on the debt owned by the trust fund)! Plus sooooo many opportunities to steal.
This'll kill the program stone-dead, but it'll take a little while. Kinda like how they already killed Obamacare by removing the individual mandate, and they're just waiting for the death-spiral to hit bottom so they can declare the program a failure and proof that we should never try to fix healthcare in any kind of actually-decent way again.
Haha. Last time it took the great depression and intense economic pain for americans to snap out of it and actually build a slightly better world (New Deal). I wouldn't expect it to take anything less this time around. Europe required 2 world wars and over 100M dead.
> they could cancel the [social security] program entirely and it wouldn't affect the deficit
I don't think this is true. During the surplus years the savings vehicle was US bonds. So social security lent the US government money.
Now that we are not in a surplus situation, we are using money from those bonds to pay benefits (we are also using SS revenue of course, only part of the payouts come from the bonds).
So if the program were cancelled, the bonds could revert back to the US government - in other words a bunch of debt would be forgiven and would not need to be paid out. Deficit (and debt) reduced.
> So if the program were cancelled, the bonds could revert back to the US government - in other words a bunch of debt would be forgiven
That seems like a passive-voice way of saying "We could steal from millions of people, pocketing the retirement savings they worked for their entire lives."
Also, there's nothing stopping Social Security from upping the cap and thus returning to surplus, aside from the group of people who would absolutely love to steal from the fund.
>That seems like a passive-voice way of saying "We could steal from millions of people, pocketing the retirement savings they worked for their entire lives."
You brought up cancelling the program. I was just pointing out that your statement about it having no effect on the deficit was incorrect.
> That seems like a passive-voice way of saying "We could steal from millions of people, pocketing the retirement savings they worked for their entire lives."
For a lot of younger people the view is they promised themselves something unsustainable and expect young people to cover it.
Is it? Is that a thing that has been shown to motivate young voters?
If anything I would believe that younger voters would be in favor of more social safety net. Many would be comfortable with the government outright nationalizing most industries.
More social safety net that goes to everyone, not just the people directly responsible for destroying this one. It's hard to be asked to bail out people who intentionally spiked the ball.
I guess "the children are our future" really was what they meant, we just misinterpreted it.
Our health system already kills people, and people seem essentially okay with that.
But, I agree about the political suicide. I unfortunately don't believe anyone is even going to attempt reform after how successful the Republican party's attacks on Obamacare were. People will just conclude there's no reward for trying.
A couple of points:
1) The deficit applies to discretionary budget. Medicare and Social Security are not discretionary.
2) Really. You can't cut anything out of medicare and social security (both of which are the most expensive program of the kind compared to any other first world equivalent) without killing people? There is not a cent of waste in these programs?
You're proving my point. At least in the US half of the country is right wing. If you want an accurate crowd-sourced opinion you need to take that into account, regardless of your own beliefs.
But facts in real life are rarely that isolated and provably correct or not. Something like Tylenol vs autism or Covid lab leak theory is hugely emotionally charged and people get bogged down in details and then questioning the experts and the expertise and then there's always the discussion of what even are experts. It's horribly exhausting and hey, what do you think about the ice wall theory? Facts in the real world are fuzzy and dependent on the bubble you inhabit. Does chocolate cause acne or heartburn or gout? Is a glass of wine bad for you? This is the Internet, so someone can chime in with a list of studies on the latest facts about whichever of those, but the question you have you ask yourself, is in what way does it matter how correct someone actually is? If I say the store is closed because it's going to snow, and I'm the store owner, and I'm totally wrong about that, it doesn't matter that I'm totally wrong because as the store owner, my store is closed. I look like an idiot tomorrow when it hasn't snowed, but me looking like an idiot doesn't open the store for you to buy what you need.
There's a saying, attributed to Max Planck: "science advances one funeral at a time". Sure, there's facts. Avogadro's number is a specific fact and is incontrovertible. But how about gravity? I mean, 9.8 m/s² is it and that's also a specific fact, but then you start looking up into the heavens and what's this dark energy and now there's dark matter and okay so MOND's been disproved?
Facts also have framing. If you pay attention to the incidence of crimes on the nightly news, it feels like society is falling apart, but then you look at the bigger picture and real statistics and things aren't actually that bad?
In the sloppy real world of facts that are messier than 2+2=4, we don't have anything to go on other than what most people around us believe, and because there's only so much time in the day, as humans we emotionally believe whatever we want. There are some crazies who have spreadsheets output facts for them to bet on, and they make a lot of money off of that, but they're a minority.
It's possible for the majority opinion to be wrong and contradict hard facts that are grounded in reality. For a couple thousand of years the opinion was that the universe was composed of 4-5 elements (earth, water, air, fire, and maybe ether).
If you believe something and there's no evidence to the contrary that's understandable. The majority were wrong but they had no reason to think otherwise. They also lacked the formal science, like the scientific method (widespread) to properly investigate.
A person from the 1200s is not stupid for believing everything was made from four elements but a person from 2025 would be.
That is not true. Labels aren’t for normies. There’s a reason a lot of center-right people love Bernie. And it’s not because of your incorrect use of political labels.
Your comment was balanced and respectful and yet the reply was denigrating. "All right wing, or simply non-left wing opinions are conspiracies" is the implication. This site is very left wing also.
"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing."
No but it puts you on higher ground to discuss differences of opinion like adults instead of trading insults and treating each opposing side as an out group
What action would you like? In this case everyone says it was likely a rare disease and not sepsis. Like, I'm sorry that this is and will be the reality of healthcare for the rest of our lives, if you have a rare thing pop up that can kill you in a matter of days you're going to need an absurd amount of luck for a doctor to notice.
> What action would you like? In this case everyone says it was likely a rare disease and not sepsis.
I'd like them to follow the legally required prompt instructing them to test for/treat as sepsis, rather than ignoring it but falsely asserting they followed it, so they can rule that out instead of guessing about what "likely" happened.
You can hand-wave all you want about how medicine is complicated, but a doctor checking a box for something they didn't do is objectively incorrect in my eyes, regardless of what "might have happened" had they done their job correctly. All of the discussion in this thread blaming the design of the checklist that the doctors didn't follow anyway is insane to me.
What I meant by "legally required prompt" was that others in the thread have tried to explain the "poor UX of the pop-up" by saying that it's probably required to display for legal reasons (whether directly, or to avoid liability). Regardless of that, checking an item off that you didn't perform is still logically incorrect whether it's illegal or not.
We don't know. It's probably a combo of genetic factors and bacteria. It's at the very least complicated and multifaceted, because you can't just take a culture or biopsy of inflamed skin and say "A ha! This is clearly different!"
All the most effective treatments try to turn off parts of the immune system, and even though have minor success with some patients going through multiple different immunosuppressants to find the right one, or even cocktail, that adequately manages the disease.
It's also the case that there is a bewildering variety of things that get sort of lumped together as "IBD." Crohn's and ulcerative colitis are two of them, but there's no particular reason to assume inflammatory bowel diseases all have the same set of causes. Pretty much all of them are made worse by an e. coli infection, though, so a drug that can target just those bacteria is helpful!
During my own IBD journey, I've managed to stump the heck out of two different teams of GIs. I had been diagnosed with UC by biopsy during colonoscopy, and then at my last colonoscopy, despite not having been on medication for more than two years, they determined not only that I don't have it now, but that I never did. They told me "remission" would look different from "this bowel has never had IBD." But they also insisted I had not been misdiagnosed.
And yet they told me with a straight face that it is incurable. I had it in the past, confirmed by pathology. I don't have it now. And it's incurable. I give up.
In the end, I don't care enough to fight them about the contradiction, because the part I most care about is the "I don't have it now" part, and we're all in agreement on that.
(Note for any who are interested: I stopped medication after successfully reducing my inflammation markers within normal limits by eating the exact same thing for every single meal for 20 months with no cheating of any kind. They told me that shouldn't have been possible either, but it worked. And yes, it was as miserable as it sounds, but less miserable than living with UC.)
Sounds like you first decimated the bacteria with antibiotics, and then made it heavily disadvantaged by eating something that preferentially feeds other gut bacteria. What was the food, out of curiosity?
Actually when I medicated it, it was with mesalamine, not an antibiotic. I didn't do anything to attack the bacteria.
The meal consisted of well-boiled meat (pork/beef/chicken together, slow cooked, overnight), and carrots, zucchini, and butternut squash cooked in its juice until it mostly wasn't soup anymore.
It's possible it still had some antibiotic properties, lots of commonly used drugs interact with our gut bacteria in varying ways. And indeed a quick search suggests that this might be the case: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5514548/
The meal consisted of well-boiled meat (pork/beef/chicken together, slow cooked, overnight), and carrots, zucchini, and butternut squash cooked in its juice until it mostly wasn't soup anymore.
I wanted it to be soft/easy to digest, but also nutritious. This was at least a wide enough variety of nutrients that I didn't feel miserable (just bored).
As someone with IBD who is on their fifth trip to the toilet since midnight (BST) I'd love to get the recipe. I've got a few months of steroids ahead and anything more long term and high impact is of enormous interest.
The meal consisted of well-boiled meat (pork/beef/chicken together, slow cooked, overnight), and carrots, zucchini, and butternut squash cooked in its juice in a pan until it mostly wasn't soup anymore. Salt to taste, but it's never gonna be delicious. It's tolerable. It's even fairly enjoyable once or twice. It's not a bad meal. But boy is it a tedious one after awhile.
I wasn't aware of any diet that excluded these things for reactivity reasons, and once boiled half to death, they were so soft as to be practically "pre-digested." I was trying to make it as easy on my gut as I could manage.
CRP and fecal calprotectin. The meal consisted of well-boiled meat (pork/beef/chicken together, slow cooked, overnight), and carrots, zucchini, and butternut squash cooked in its juice until it mostly wasn't soup anymore. Picked things that were very soft/easy to digest, with at least some nutritional value, because it didn't bother me. I just wanted to buy time for things to calm down.
It was meant to be an elimination diet with reintroduction, but every reintroduction attempt failed miserably for 20 months. Then, suddenly, it was fine.
I still mostly eat food I would recognize in its ingredient form instead of highly processed stuff, but if everybody's going out for pizza, I can have a couple slices and be fine. I just can't do that all the time.
Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style and breaking the site guidelines? Your account has been doing a great deal of this, and we've already had to warn you many times:
Not the person you're replying to, but my own IBD went away completely after I did keto for an extended period. This was a decade ago and it hasn't come back even as my diet returned to normal.
In my n=1 experience, it seems maybe significant dietary changes can perturb the gut ecosystem out of whatever state corresponds to IBD.
I had a similar experience, i.e. strict keto for 9 months and fully came off meds with no signs of UC or asthma. UC came back after around 2 years and I don't remember how long before I had to start asthma meds again. I can no longer do keto though, each time I try I get palpitations now after around a week.
Yeah my asthma went into remission as well, though this was also a period of my life when I was very physically active and in the best shape of my life, so it's hard to say what was the cause there.
They sometimes can, but most properly gut-adapted microbes only have their relative prevalence reduced by diet changes, by and large people unfortunately tend to snap back once diet is discontinued.
Ideally, you'd combine that with doing a stool transplant first, since it's the main thing (other than just antibiotics) that causes permanent compositional changes.
I'm not a scientist on any level, so my theory only went as far as "stop irritating the thing and let it heal itself."
When they started talking about putting me on immune-suppressant drugs during a pandemic, I thought that didn't sound like a very good idea, but maybe my body could sort itself out if I gave it the opportunity.
Not a terribly sophisticated take, but it works for things like not popping blisters or picking at scabs, so it seemed worth a shot.
i do the same, eating same thing for 2 years. While i don't have big IBD symptoms, i cannot now introduce new food, every time i try to introduce even very very small doses, i get a strange disproportionate reaction of my gut.
Gosh, I'm sorry. It does suck. For me, it was like that until it suddenly wasn't anymore. Nothing obviously changed. I kept "testing" reintroducing very small amounts of other food to try to end the elimination diet, like a bite every two months or something, and after 20 months, suddenly it went fine.
I say that just in hopes of encouraging you that healing might be right around the corner and you just might not know it yet. I certainly didn't know it was about to be over when it ended.
Doctors are the only people I’ve encountered who are ready to inform you of their poorly supported contradictory conclusions with full confidence, and are fully ready to meet any pushback with gaslighting or the dreaded “difficult patient” label.
They approach the phenomenon of dropping trust and respect for their profession in much the same way.
It’s really frustrating. I don’t get why they feel entitled to acting this way when no one else does.
After making you wait 40 minutes later than when your appointment was supposed to start, I’ve looked at your chart for about 2 minutes and have spoken to you 60 seconds I’ve confidently diagnosed you with X. Here’s a prescription, let’s see you back in 6 months.
My favorite is the "bless your heart" head tilt that strongly implies you're just too damn stupid to follow what they're saying, when it's obvious on its face that they're contradicting themselves.
"I was correctly diagnosed with it before."
"Correct."
"I do not have it now."
"Correct."
"It is not 'in remission.' I just do not have the disease."
"Correect."
"But it isn't curable."
"Correct."
"So if it wasn't 'cured,' what did happen to it?"
{head tilt} "You tell me. Follow it through. You used to have it. You do not have it anymore. It's not in remission. But it also hasn't been cured. What does that leave?"
"#$%^! I don't know! That's why I'm here, asking you! As far as I know, all it leaves is contradiction and impossibility!"
"Now, now. There's no need to be difficult."
(This is almost word for word the last conversation I had with my GI. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not paraphrasing. I went through it exactly like this, and she responded to me exactly like this.)
My trick is to learn the terminology/jargon of the specialists by buying meds students used textbooks. It completely changes the conversation dynamics even if initially it appears to slightly confuse them.
Sometimes it angers them but then it's a clear signal that you must see someone else ASAP. When we grilled my wife first oncologist on his protocol, he broke down and said that he was not up to date on the latest research. We requested someone else, he was a much better fit and most importantly she is still alive, her metastasis disappeared and the latest scans and bloodworks results are still NED (no evidence of disease).
Awesome for you and props! Let me tell you, doctors will gaslight patients who cure themselves because it is some kind of mental disorder they have I cannot figure out. They said THE EXACT SAME THING to my friend who also cured his UC with diet. "Well, you never had it because if you did you could not cure it." He is a Dentist and he literally yelled at them because he knew how unscientific it was what they were saying.
I am a FUT2 non-secretor who suffered with IBS-D for years. I had to cure myself as well. Very strict diet and high seaweed (it contains fucose (not fructose)). Not one doctor cares. I tell you, it is a mental disorder.
Yes, that was one of the inflammatory markers they checked. At diagnosis, I was in the mid-400s. After medication, I was in the low-200s. After 20 months of this elimination diet, I was in the 20s.
Multiple doctors told me it would not be possible to decrease the score without medication, one of them even while holding the results in his hands proving that I had done it.
Single payer absolutely does something it's insane you would suggest otherwise. It's a basic counting argument: if 60 out of 100 are paying into the system but we have to pay ER fees for the other 40 not paying, then there is an undo burden on the original 60.
If everyone is paying then the burden is shared. Let's not even imagine the utopia of a progressive healthcare tax! The shame of a "self-made business man" losing 5% more of their income earned over 200k!
The earth is not flat. This is indisputable fact. Yet, much ink has been spilt on arguments to the contrary. Refuting some of these arguments is quite difficult, honestly, but none of the arguments really matter because they reject all the convincing evidence as conspiracy or magic.
In this way, what you suggest demands significant labor on the part of the person arguing an obvious fact against an ideologue who will proclaim an open desire to change their belief but whose world view is entrenched in magic making it fundamentally impossible to actually change it.
Long story short I don't buy it and think what you said is full of shit.
"The earth is not flat. This is indisputable fact. "
Well, the earth you walk is indisputable flat. That all of earth is round, comes not from direct observation (except for the very few people who have been in space).
So I dare you to actually argue with flat earthers. It is a good way to test your basic scientific knowledge.
If you poke deep, you will find, that most people learned science the way people learned religion before. By memorising it, not by applying the scientific principle of questioning everything and aim for confirmation via experiment. Some flat earthers are actually more "scientific" in the way that they try out (weird) experiments and not just believe things. (But most probably do have a serious mental condition)
Long story short, this could have been the start of a interesting debate, if you would not have finished your argument with that insult.
The thing about this particular topic is that humanity has known this fact for millennia, not because we flew or went to space, but because we sailed. Any human who has watched ships come in to a harbor would be able to trivially tell you: We see the masts before the ship.
Where I grew up you can stand by the shore on a clear day and see the tree tops on the neighboring island, but not the beach. Sailing there, the beach emerges from the horizon.
The only way anybody can come up with "Flat Earth" is by living in the middle of a continental landmass.
"The only way anybody can come up with "Flat Earth" is by living in the middle of a continental landmass."
The main cause I could determine was rather a deep trauma of some sort or the other and with the result of them now mistrusting everything mainstream by principle and only now trusting their eyes and "intuition".
And believing the earth is flat is maybe the most anti mainstream position ever.
Edit: and my conclusion sort of was, that the only thing, that would really convince some of them is indeed to let them see it with their own eyes. So maybe I will organize a high altitude baloon trip for some people some day, but personally I also always wanted to get as close to space as possible at least once in my life..
Greeks calculated the circumference of the world based on the shadows of obelisks. Parallax was used to calculate how far the moon was, & from that how large
(people didn't think Columbus would fall off the edge of the world, they thought he wouldn't make it to India, which to be fair, if it was only ocean between the Pacific & Atlantic, him & his crew most definitely would've perished)
> Any human who has watched ships come in to a harbor would be able to trivially tell you: We see the masts before the ship.
Of which, until recently, there were very few. Civilizations developed not just on the coasts, but along the rivers, and until ~industrial revolution, the bulk of people at any given time didn't really have a chance to see the sea.
> The only way anybody can come up with "Flat Earth" is by living in the middle of a continental landmass.
Yup, that is still true for humanity; what's changed in the last few hundred years is trains, cars, airplanes, and them all becoming broadly accessible to people.
Still, that was then. Today, "flat Earthers" are mostly just peer groups of shitposters or extreme contrarians.
It varies somewhat by continent, but living very far from the ocean is what’s new. Humans have historically had by far the densest population near shores - river deltas, archipelagos, and so on.
The notion that “seeing the ocean” was a very special thing to most people in history is unlikely. To a Hungarian peasant or a Mongol shepherd, sure, but there were far more people along the Mediterranean coast, the Pearl River delta, and so on.
Well, the main thing I learned in such debates is, you are free to believe what you want
I don't feel responsible for grounding the facts you somehow believe in.
But in another mood, I might have shared links to certain Telegram groups, or connect you with some people I know personally. They would be eager to enlighten you, if you are in for that.
It means I debated very often with weird people and the proof that I did, is that I don't feel the need to make the poster above believe, that I actually did that.
(Otherwise I would have shared links where you can find me debating the topic at length with various people)
Because indeed, most flat earthers are immune to reason as they are in the realm of irrationality.
So at some point someone needs to accept that and that helped my attitude towards my need to correct wrong information in people in general.
And if you believe now, I am a flat earther, because I said I discovered some flat earthers that act somewhat scientific sometimes and are open for arguments, well, so be it.
Whether or not you believe the earth is flat is a yes or no question, but you responded with a paragraph that wasn't a real answer. This reads as defensive, which leads a reasonable person to believe that you are in fact a flat earther.
I was defensive about the accusation of never having engaged with a real flat earther, despite saying so. And this part of the debate actually reminds me of engaging with them, so I rather stop that.
Have you ever watched a we-have-never-been-on-the-moon conspiracy freak engage a flat earther?
With both trying to top each other who has the most superior knowledge and who is the real sheep?
But yes. All that borderlines on the dangerous mental crazy side, so I cannot really recommend it, unless you have a fascination with the abyss of the human mind.
I mean, I just checked, it seems under ideal conditions one could see the curvature of earth at 10.5 km height, but to me it was not really a convincing curvature last time I did a long flight. Your experience was different?
The standard nonsens reply to this is something with perspective. Like a train track in the distance get closer together, the ship gets closer to the ground and then infinitely small. Doesn't make sense, but abstract enough to make some believe there is another explanation possible.
Standard answer: Ships do not get infinitely small - they visibly "sink" behind the horizont. Starting with the bulbous bow, which you stop being able to see at a distance of, i estimate, 10 kilometers?
Yes and standard reply then is quickly distracting (also themself?) with lots of other "facts" they quickly throw in, or some more vague mystic mumblings about perspective.
Edit: Oh and also there is some "proof" with a certain camera model they present. Where they zoom in closely to ships on the horizont, while not knowing the difference between optical and digital zoom. I am still not sure what they were trying to proof with that, but I did saw a visual glitch of the image processing on high digital zoom. Some vague impression that indeed you can enlarge the ship again fully, despite it being over the horizon. To me it was rather pixel soup, but for them confirmation. So to be on topic a bit again, if you want to influence irrational people of anything, logic only gets you so far and appealing on emotion quite further.
I know some who fucked up their whole life, because they believe that crazy shit for real. (Living now alone in a remote hut and waiting for the day when they come to take him away from there, because he also does not believe in paying taxes)
I can give you the adress, but maybe be a bit careful. To him you might be one of the evil NASA brainwashers.
Yes, I did. I also grew up watching scientific space videos before I could read and frequently making holidays at the sea as a kid.
But other people grew up in flat areas, far from the sea and maybe exposed with too much BS and maybe drugs at some points in their life, so ended up with a very different point of view.
It was interesting for me to find ways to maybe guide them back to reality and sometimes I succeeded a bit, but I don't think that argument would have helped me. On average and to our senses the earth is pretty undisputable flat.
> On average and to our senses the earth is pretty undisputable flat.
That's very easy to dispute
> have you never seen a hill or a hole?
Ok, fine, "other people ... maybe exposed with too much BS", but let's not pretend sticking to some patent nonsense can be traced to simple observations when those don't exist, that's not how you become a true believer
Ok yes, you can totally dispute that the earth we walk around is flat. It was mainly rhetorical reasons, why I used that wording. And I actually believe nothing is indisputable.
(But that does not mean I waste energy seriously trying to negate flat earth theory for good, I am more interested in the psychological reasons that makes people think like that)
The most significant evidence that the earth is flat is that you can just look out your window and it's obviously flat, but all the round-earth evidence is complicated sciencey stuff.
If someone doesn't believe in complicated sciencey stuff, they just won't believe you, and they'll conclude they have evidence and you don't. At what point do you just walk away from the argument?
This is the core problem of scientific communication. Flat earthers are an extreme example. The process of arguing it etc can be a good exercise.
Edit: my favourite argument is to look at a half moon, and what angle the "shadow line" on the moon is relative to the horizon. Then ask your friends around the globe to report what angle it looks like to them. Because we are all standing on the side of a globe, we see it at different angles relative to our local horizon, which should perfectly correspond to each person's latitude etc. Fun easy experiment for an online community!
Yes, but the round earther can provide a model that matches your observations. Round earth is a better model because it matches reality more often while also accounting for a lot of the obvious flat earth arguments (mostly, that they hold true locally).
Atmospheric refraction. (See? The flat earther knows complicated sciencey stuff too. You won't accept their complicated sciencey stuff, so why should they accept your complicated sciencey stuff?)
We’re not trying to come up with a convincing argument - there’s thousands - but we’re trying to understand how it’s even possible to conceive of such idiocy for a person who is otherwise reasonable.
They mean “flat” in the sense of “straight” (i.e. not curved), the same way a sheet of sandpaper is flat despite being rugged. There are plenty of simple ways to disprove Flat Earth theories, but you’ll never be able to convince anyone by refuting their arguments with something which clearly misunderstands what they’re trying to say.
Instead of refuting their arguments, ask them to prove it to you. Whenever they say something you don't understand, ask them to explain it. Eventually they will get stuck.
That’s a tremendously high bar. Who defines what constitutes “legitimate” evidence? Anyone can disagree on what that means and you’re back to square one.
Look up “The Final Experiment” and its aftermath. Despite convincing the flat earthers who participated, the ones who observed it via livestream dug their heels in further.
I mean to some extent if you doubt the results of your experiments you’re not going to get anywhere, because you can never prove a model. At some point the simpler model is the one that wins out and some very small number of observations that go against it can be accounted by sampling error or hoaxes or whatever. Where you draw that line is up to you of course but generally the scientific community does fairly well on extremely well-supported theories.
> generally the scientific community does fairly well on extremely well-supported theories.
Then you step outside of the scientific community into the flamethrower of public opinion, and suddenly you have to deal with people who think it's a good idea to give their kids measles.
Ideally, you explain your position and they explain theirs and it’s an open dialogue. Truthfully, you could be wrong about any number of things you have resolute conviction about- even things you believe are well evidenced.
The cynic in me is aware that actually us as individuals have finite time and mental energy to keep debating things which are base, and our lives are improved by just accepting some base assumptions and engaging our energy at higher levels instead of litigating the basics.
We don't even really have time or energy to debate the higher levels with other people. Maybe if it's a friend or family or someone you're close with. But arguing with strangers, at least imo, is a total waste of time most of the time.
Seems more likely the downvotes are related to the last sentence. Telling someone they are “full of shit” is not the type of curious discourse HN wants to promote.
That being the case, you might be getting downvoted for incorrectly assessing the situation and inaccurately placing blame.
I’m speculating, as it’s impossible to know what went through the heads of those who came before, but seems like a reasonable explanation to me.
No, I think they are being downvoted because they dismiss a thoughtful comment that makes a good attempt at providing an actual answer to the question at hand as "full of shit".
> actually us as individuals have finite time and mental energy to keep debating things which are base, and our lives are improved by just accepting some base assumptions and engaging our energy at higher levels instead of litigating the basics.
Which is precisely why most people considered Earth to be flat until it became more fashionable to consider it spherical, and continue to believe it's spherical because that remains in vogue.
I mean, it's not like people in general suddenly got gained some intrinsic reasons for getting to the true nature of things. Nah, all that changed is what you have to say so others don't think you're stupid.
Call it a more realistic take: humans are social animals. Ever since we started cooperating in groups, the social reality became more important to our survival than actual physical reality. For better or worse, that is a fact of nature. You may argue all you want that the sky is blue, but if the rest of your tribe calls it green, all you'll accomplish is to get yourself shunned and cast out and then eaten by wild animals.
"Is Earth flat or round", from the perspective of a regular person across all history: why are you asking me that question?. The answer has no direct, immediate relevance to anyone's lives - so either you're contrarian, or trying to pick a fight, or have some political angle, or just have too much idle time. Either of that means you're a potential threat. The right answer is always "flat" or "spherical" depending on the time period you live in, followed by "go away and do something useful for a change".
Note: I'm not promoting idiocy or lack of interest into the nature of things - all I'm saying, one needs to cut other people some slack. Most people aren't idiots; if they're holding on to "wrong" beliefs there's probably a damn good reason for it, and with some politically charged questions they may actually be smarter, on a pragmatic/survival level, in giving the "wrong" answer, than someone rocking the boat.
If you want to convince people, don't assume they're idiots - rather, try to connect your arguments to their experience, so getting it right matters to them, and then - that's the pragmatic/cynical part - be ready to accept that, in some cases, having the right answer doesn't matter in practice.
School has two competing goals and this will never change:
1. Have the kids learn new things
2. Have the kids reach a desired level of competency
Learning happens where you are at, not where the teacher wants you to be. Every student is at a different place in understanding. It's impossible without 1-on-1 instruction to really maximize learning.
Competency is only determined via testing. Learning doesn't require testing at all, you can just speak to a student to get a good idea if they're making some progress, any progress. Competency? That basically demands a test, because it has a particular bar in mind.
Now students know they need to pass the bar, somehow, but the anxiety of that is going to cause issues with them just trying to learn. This is unfixable though, because the outside pressures demand students have some level of competency otherwise teachers are viewed as failures.
I agree. Imo, #2 is becoming more of an emphasis over time. Teacher don't have much time/energy to pursue #1. Eventually, most of them stop caring and rely on testing metrics because that's what the admins want.
It's amazing what kids can learn if they just spent a little bit of time with a 1-on-1 instructor/advisor. The anxiety you mentioned can be crippling and something I deal with regularly. Even some of the "gifted" kids (perhaps due to the expectations) have trouble avoiding the trap of overindexing on productivity/competency metrics. They're not even self aware of it, just accepts it as normal.
For most kids I have to go through the exercise of separating these two concerns, the learning part and the signaling part, early so they can put things in perspective.
