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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by doctorcrimson@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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.

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[-] reddig33@lemmy.world 103 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Dark matter. Sounds like a catch all designed to make a math model work properly.

[-] PixelAlchemist@lemmy.world 67 points 11 months ago

You’re not wrong. According to the current scientific understanding of the universe, that’s exactly what it is. They just gave it a badass name.

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[-] towerful@programming.dev 34 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yeh, that's how the scientific method works.
Observations don't support a model, or a model doesn't support observations.
Think of a reason why.
Test that hypothesis.
Repeat until you think it's correct. Hopefully other people agree with you.

People are also working on modifying General Relativity and Newtonian Dynamics to try and fix the model, while other people are working on observing dark matter directly (instead of it's effects) to further prove the existing models.
https://youtu.be/3o8kaCUm2V8

We are in the "testing hypothesis" stage. And have been for 50ish years

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[-] admiralteal@kbin.social 24 points 11 months ago

All of physics is a "math model". One we attempt to falsify. And when a scientist does prove some part of the model wrong, the community leaps up in celebration and gets to working on the fix or the next.

Dark matter started as exactly a catchall designed to make the model work properly. We started with a very good model, but when observing extreme phenomenon (in this case the orbits of stars of entire galaxies), the model didn't fit. So either there was something we couldn't see to explain the difference ("dark" matter), or else the model was wrong and needed modification.

There's also multiple competing theories for what that dark matter is, exactly. Everything from countless tiny primordial black holes to bizarre, lightyear-sized standing waves in a quantum field. But the best-fitting theories that make the most sense and contradict the fewest observations & models seem to prefer there be some kind of actual particle that interacts just fine with gravity, but very poorly or not at all with electromagnetism. And since we rely on electromagnetism for nearly all of our particle physics experiments that makes whatever this particle is VERY elusive.

Worth observing that once, a huge amount of energy produced by stars was an example of a dark energy. Until we figured out how to detect neutrinos. Then it wasn't dark anymore.

In short, you're exactly right. It's a catch-all to make the math model work properly. And that's not actually a problem.

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[-] thorbot@lemmy.world 78 points 11 months ago

Can we not push more anti science rhetoric please

[-] BigBlackBuck@lemmynsfw.com 57 points 11 months ago

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?”

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[-] ani@endlesstalk.org 28 points 11 months ago

Chill science should be questioned otherwise it's not science

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[-] quindraco@lemmy.world 75 points 11 months ago

Chiropracty isn't "scientific".

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[-] ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com 69 points 11 months ago

That mothers shouldn't co-sleep with infants. Every other primate I know of co-sleeps with their offspring. Until very recently every human mother co-slept with her infants, and in like half of the globe people still do. Many mothers find it incredibly psychologically stressful to sleep without their infant because our ancestors co-slept every generation for hundreds of thousands of years.

I would bet money that forcing infants to sleep alone has negative developmental effects.

[-] cynar@lemmy.world 95 points 11 months ago

The reason for this is that we tend to sleep deeper now than our ancestors. Because of this, we are more prone to roll onto a baby, and not wake up.

It can still be done, you just have to avoid things like alcohol, that stop you waking. You also need to make sure your sleeping position is safe. Explaining this to exhausted parents is unreliable, however. Hence the advice Americans seem to be given.

Fyi, if people want a halfway point, you can get cosleeping cribs. They attach to the side of the bed. Your baby can be close to you, while also eliminating the risk of suffocating them.

[-] milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 31 points 11 months ago

I think something on the UK's NHS implied the risk is primarily for mothers with various kinds of problems (including drug or alcohol abuse). Made me wonder if it's largely recommended for everyone to cover the many people who are at risk but don't want to think they are.

[-] cynar@lemmy.world 22 points 11 months ago

A lot of the advice is almost insultingly obvious. You get treated like you have a single digit IQ. After a couple of months, I fully understand why we were treated like that! It's a fight to keep your iq in double digits!

The baby shaking one is the big one. It's obvious, you don't shake your baby. It's also obvious that they can be safe, even while screaming. After 2 hours of constant crying, combined with sleep deprivation, I fully understand why they reiterated not to shake your baby, the urge was alarmingly strong! It also made sense why they pointed out you could leave them to scream, if you really needed to. So long as they are clean safe and fed, 10 minutes down the garden is completely acceptable.

With the original advice, telling when it will apply to you is harder than you think. The default advice has to be to play it safe. Some can be deviated from, some can't. Deviations must be consciously made however.

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[-] ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 56 points 11 months ago

I’ve always thought the classic Hunter - Gatherer gender division of labor was bullshit. I think that theory has gone out of fashion but I always thought it seemed like a huge assumption. It seems so much more plausible to me that everybody hunted some days (like during migration patterns) and gathered others. Did they even have the luxury of purely specialized roles before agriculture and cities?

Another reason I think that is because prehistoric hunting was probably way different than we imagine. Like, we imagine tribes of people slaying mammoths with only spears. It was probably more traps and tricks. Eventually, using domesticated dog or a trained falcon or something.

[-] chocolatine@lemmy.world 25 points 11 months ago

You can read the dawn of everything book which is a very interesting take at a lot of those assumptions which are indeed false. This book goes deep into the ideological bias scientists have when interpreting evidence.

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[-] bouh@lemmy.world 20 points 11 months ago

The hunter-gatherer gender division is actually proven wrong now.

Also, hunting mammoths was a very rare activity. I would expect it to be some kind of desperate activity in fact. People weren't more crazy than we are, they would rather live than to be trampled by a mammoth.

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[-] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 55 points 11 months ago

Op: what are some inherently enraging opinions that fly in the face of everything we know about logic?

Also op: omg guys stop downvoting these inherently enraging opinions. I implicitly made that rule ...triple stamped it no erasies!!

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[-] totallynotarobot@lemmy.world 47 points 11 months ago

Yes we should be out to revoke chiropractors' degrees, but I'm not sure why that's coming up here since you asked about science specifically. Which chiropractic is not.

No one should be ok with people who run around pretending to be doctors and occasionally paralyzing babies and crippling people by trying to work magic. It's also revolting that any of it is covered by insurance and health plans, which materially takes real resources away from real medicine for people.

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[-] NegativeLookBehind@kbin.social 44 points 11 months ago

cut funding to your black hole detection chamber

I knew you'd come for my fucking black hole detection chamber you swine

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[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 43 points 11 months ago

The idea that animals do not have feelings. I don't believe complex thought is necessary for emotion. You can take away all our human reasoning, and we would still get mad, or sad, or happy at things.

[-] PunnyName@lemmy.world 100 points 11 months ago

It's definitely NOT science that animals don't have feelings. Maybe 50 years ago.

Now, there's a concerted effort to discern thoughts and emotions in animals.

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[-] derf82@lemmy.world 37 points 11 months ago

Lots of stuff from both social sciences and economics.

Social science suffers greatly from the Replication crisis

Economics relies largely on so-called natural experiments that have poor variable controls.

Both often come with policy agendas pushing for results.

I take their conclusions with a grain of salt.

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[-] hedge_lord@lemmy.world 37 points 11 months ago

The moon not being made of cheese. The moon is in fact made of cheese. I do not care how much a bunch of nerds insist that it is not made of cheese. I am objectively correct about this and anyone who disagrees is wrong.

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[-] mriormro@lemmy.world 36 points 11 months ago

We don't need more anti science rhetoric in this world. Why even start this thread?

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[-] Commiunism@lemmy.wtf 33 points 11 months ago

IQ score is a sham - the tests are quite fallible, and historically they were used as a justification to discriminate against people who are poorer or with worse access to education. Nowadays, I see it quite a lot in the context of eugenics, where some professors and philosophers attribute poor people being poor due to their low intelligence (low IQ score), and that they can't be helped while rich people got where they are due to their intelligence (as in they have a high IQ score on average).

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[-] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 31 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Science articles that reference paywalled journals you can't actually read. Most of them are probably making stuff up because they know no one will be able to call them out on it.

[-] PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world 23 points 11 months ago

First, let me start off by saying that I agree with what I believe your actual premise is (or should be) - that articles in science journals should not be behind paywalls. I’m strictly against the practice, I think it’s a massive scam, and so does everyone I know who does research. I have paid to open source every paper I’ve published. Well, not me personally. But thank you taxpayers for funding me to not only do my work but to make sure you have access to it too. I’ll talk about this more at the end.

With that out of the way, I’d like to mention a couple of things. First, the scam is on the part of the academic journals, not the researchers or the journalists writing the articles. It’s not part of some scam to hide the fact that the journalist is making crap up. If the authors were unwilling or unable to pay the fees for open sourcing their papers ($3-5k when I was doing it several years ago), then you’re either going to be in an institution that has a subscription to the journal or you’re going to have to find some way of acquiring it.

Search for the exact title in quotes. Sometimes the Google Scholar engine will return with the default link to the pay walled page, sometimes it’ll have a link to a prepublication server. Arxiv is one of the more popular ones for physics, math, and computer science of all stripes. Step 2 is to go to the institution web page of the first author. Very often, researchers will keep an updated list of their publications with links to the PDFs. If that still doesn’t work, you can write the author and request the paper. We love those emails. We love it when people read our work, especially when they’re so excited that they wrote to request a copy. None of these involve copyright infringement. That prepub that you get is the same paper (usually but you can confirm with the author if that’s a question), but possibly without the masthead and layout from the journal. It’s still cited the same.

So, why are so many journals behind a paywall? Because the publishers want to monetize what today should be a cost free (or minimal) set of transactions. Here’s what happens:

  1. I have an idea for some research. If it’s good and I’m lucky, I get money from the government (or whomever) to do the work, and I use it to pay my expenses (salaries, materials, equipment, whatever). I also get taxed on it by my institution so they can pay the admins and other costs. When submitting a proposal, those are all line items in your budget. If you’re doing expensive research at an expensive institution, it’s pretty trivial to set aside $10-20k for pub fees. If your entire grant was $35k, that’s a lot harder to justify.
  2. You write the paper after doing the work. You don’t get paid to write the paper specifically - it’s part of the research that you are doing. The point here is that, unlike book authors, researchers see zero of any money you’d pay for the article. If you do locate a copyrighted copy, you’re not taking a dime out of my pocket. Again, just thrilled someone’s reading the damn thing.
  3. You pick a journal and send it in. The journal has a contact list of researchers and their fields, and sends out requests for reviewers. They usually require 2 or 3.
  4. The reviewers read the paper making notes on questions they have and recommend revisions before publication. Reviewing is an unpaid service researchers do because we know that’s how it works. The irony is that it challenges the academic notion of the tragedy of the commons. You could be a freeloader and never review, but enough people do it that the system keeps rolling.
  5. You revise, reviewers approve, publisher accepts and schedules date. There can be some back and forth here (this is a legitimate publisher expense, but the level of effort and interaction isn’t like with a book editor).
  6. Your paper comes out.

As you can see, the role of the publisher is very small in the overall amount of effort put into getting an idea from my head into yours. At one point publishers had an argument that the small circulation numbers for things like The Journal of Theoretical Biology justified their $21k/year institutional subscription price.

And I shouldn’t have saved this til the end, but for the one person who skimmed down to see where all of this was going:

Any science article / press release that cites a paper whether or not you have access to it at least is citing something that has undergone peer review. Peer review can only do so much and journal quality has a wide range, but it’s about the best we have. If it’s a big enough deal to actually matter and the media in question has wide enough reach to care, then it will get back to the author who can then clarify.

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[-] doctorcrimson@lemmy.world 20 points 11 months ago

To add onto that, whenever a newspaper says "based on the findings of researchers at [Random University]" but they don't list the citation anywhere at all. That is just evil, but somehow industry standard.

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[-] Wogi@lemmy.world 31 points 11 months ago

I am out to revoke degrees from chiropractors.

Giving them a degree is like calling myself a writer because I post bullshit comments on Lemmy.

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[-] AnalogyAddict@lemmy.world 29 points 11 months ago

I'm probably going to get eviscerated for this, but that sexuality is purely genetic. I think that for the vast majority of people, sexuality is way more fluid than not, and much more influenced by environment than people would like to think.

I also don't think that has any bearing on people's right to choose.

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[-] RBWells@lemmy.world 27 points 11 months ago

Don't believe in, or can't understand?

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.

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[-] PP_BOY_@lemmy.world 26 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I'm incapable of coming to terms with the scientific fact that a 194cm male could not take a grizzly bear in a fight

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[-] Mango@lemmy.world 26 points 11 months ago

Psychologists branding everyone with a disorder. You can spend a whole lifetime trying to understand yourself and you won't. 4 years of schooling and a book full of labels doesn't give you any extra magical understanding of everyone else.

[-] godzillabacter@lemmy.world 89 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

You know I felt this way for years. I felt that way through psychopharmacology in pharmacy school, and I felt that way during our psychiatry and behavior lectures in medical school. I felt like psychiatry was minimizing behavior to these boxes was far too reductionist. Then I spent a month in an inpatient psychiatry facility as a third year medical student.

While I completely agree that each individual is unique and people are more than their diagnosis, you'd be absolutely shocked by just how similar patients' overall stories, maladaptive coping mechanisms, and behaviors are within the same psychiatric illness. I can spot mania from a doorway, and it takes less than five minutes to have a high suspicion for borderline personality disorder. These classifications aren't some arbitrary grouping of symptoms: they're an attempt to create standard criteria for a relatively well preserved set of phenotypic behaviors. The hard part is understanding pathology vs culturally appropriate behavior in cultures you don't belong, and differentiating within illness spectra (Bipolar I vs II; schizophrenia vs bipolar disorder with psychotic features vs schizoaffective)

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[-] rowrowrowyourboat@sh.itjust.works 22 points 11 months ago

4 years where? To become a real psychologist (not a therapist) in most places you need a PhD or a PsyD. In total, you probably do at least 8 years of schooling.

Not to mention that that "book full of labels" is constantly reviewed and was made based on consensus from psychiatrists, which are medical doctors with a lot more than 4 years of schooling.

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[-] the_q@lemmy.world 19 points 11 months ago

Hey it's ok to be wrong on this one.

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[-] QTpi@sh.itjust.works 22 points 11 months ago

Full moons do not have an impact on people with mental illness, make weird things happen, increase work load, or increase the chance of going into labor. I have worked in three separate hospitals in three separate states and the consensus is: full moons bring out the crazies and the babies.

[-] NAXLAB@lemmy.world 21 points 11 months ago

It's not true. Your observations may be affected by confirmation, bias, or other things.

https://www.dukehealth.org/blog/myth-or-fact-more-women-go-labor-during-full-moon

However, barometric pressure can apparently induce labor

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[-] kandoh@reddthat.com 21 points 11 months ago

There's something up with the placebo effect.

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[-] Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 21 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I saw a study that concluded toilet seats in public restrooms were actually one of the cleanest surfaces in the restroom. Don't dispute that - it just means that the entire area lands somewhere in the spectrum between disgusting and eldritch nightmare. Due to the finding that the toilet seats were cleaner than most other surfaces in the restroom, it further concluded that it was perfectly safe to just plop down bare-assed onto that nastiness.

Abso-fucking-lutely not. The toilet paper bird-nest is a must. A few layers of splash protection toilet paper in the water before I even sit down is a must. 'Ick' factor aside, there are enough contact acquired pathogens to justify extreme caution in environments like that. I ain't risking ass warts over some hypothesis, study, full-blown peer reviewed theory, or anything in between.

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[-] grasshopper_mouse@lemmy.world 19 points 11 months ago

"Fucking magnets, how do they work?"

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this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
111 points (63.1% liked)

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