Trump throws a lot of stuff against the wall to see what will stick. Hopefully the response to this was bad enough to make him abandon any ideas he may have had.
The Overton window isn't shifting. It's shattering.
Take gay marriage, for instance. There was a time when 95% (number made up, but I think it's roughly right) of the population thought that obviously gay marriage wasn't real marriage. There was a clearly defined window, and 95% of the population's position fit within 95% of the population's idea of what the window was.
Now you have maybe 40% of the population thinking that if you don't support gay marriage, you're a fascist oppressor and persecutor. You still have 30% thinking that no, gay marriage does not fit what marriage is. And you have the middle 30% thinking some variant of "they can marry, but you can question that without being a nazi". And each of those positions holds their own idea of where the Overton window is supposed to be.
In that landscape, there is no view of where the Overton window is that is 1) held by the majority of people and 2) the majority of people hold views that fit within that window. That's what I mean by the window shattering, not just moving.
You stopped too soon in your analysis. Why is there so much fear? Why is there more than, say, the 1980s? The 1970s? (Or was there this much fear then, too, and we just don't remember it that way?)
Is it basically economic? We had this amazing economic ride from 1945 through the early 1970s, and that gave a view of what life could be like that permeated society and gave hope, and the hope continued long past the growth. Now people are realizing that the hope is not likely to happen to them. Is the fear caused by realizing that the hope is in danger? (That hope is in danger in another way, too. People are realizing that, even if they get better economic circumstances, past a certain point prosperity is still kind of empty.)
Or is the fear manufactured? Is it part of the propaganda? Are we being made to feel afraid, so that we can have a crisis of democracy? So that more non-democratic leaders can take over?
Emergent phenomenon, from the intrinsic dynamics of cable news. The medium is the message, and this medium requires around the clock 24/7 attention getting, which changes the way stories are reported, regardless of what the stories are. Internet news inherited much of this, and newspapers too then adapted for constant rather than daily/weekly updates.
I'm not claiming why people or afraid today, whether its manufactured, or by whom. Honestly those are interesting details to the story but not fundamentally important in the middle of the fear crisis.
If it can specifically help to reverse course on the level of collective fear, yeah that may help. Though there is the risk there that high levels of fear may lead people to lash out at anyone singled out as the cause of panic or fear.
I'd argue that dealing with the fear itself is more important, and safer, in the moment. Knowing and understanding the cause is more useful, and safer to deal with, after the panic or fear has subsided.
How are you going to get it to subside, without dealing with the cause? If the fear is being manufactured, you aren't going to get out of the crisis until whoever is causing it relents and stops, or until you block it.
I mean, you could say "we're going to deal with this by teaching people not to be afraid of this stuff", but why not do interrupt the source as well?
Interrupting the source can work, I'm not saying that wouldn't help. I'd liken it to trauma care, sometimes you do need to just stop the bleeding first.
My point there was only that its risky. I see the risk on two fronts, in the moment its hard to recognize the root cause and there are some people who will take advantage of the fear to point "the mob", as it were, at the wrong cause for their own gain.
i wonder if a resurgence in social clubs like the Elks club/Moose lodge would ever catch on.
i don't know how big they ever were in the past, but it seemed like it was commonly represented in media in the 50s/60s (e.g., the flintstones had a parody of the lodge which would suggest that they were common enough that people were familiar)
Because voluntary association isn't really allowed in the United States. You are forced to associate with people you don't want to, for a variety of reasons.
Well, first, props to you because you're actually doing something to initiate contact. That's a really big deal; more people need to do that. (Maybe even some that don't wrestle with loneliness.)
But what's you're next step? Someone comes up and marks that they feel really lonely. Do you get contact information? Invite them to something? (Invite them to what? You may have to create something - a board game night at your house, or a "lonely people shopping together" time at a grocery store, or something. You probably have to create that "something", because you're the one who's able to at least reach out, and the ones who are responding probably aren't there yet.)
You're finding people that need something. The next step is to find a way to connect them - with you, or with each other, or with someone.
For any activity you come up with, some people won't be able to, due to time or temperament or personality or something. So maybe what you need is more than one. (Eventually. Look, don't get overwhelmed by that. Just one is the next step, in my view. And maybe some helpers.)
So your proposal is to start an ad hoc friend group with people who come up to me, and try to become friends with them personally?
I'm not sure I'm the right person for that. I live in a suburb, not the city that I do the surveys in. And I'm extraordinarily boring, and too old.
It seems that I should try to think bigger. Try to find a way to help these people connect with each other. Something in person, not an app like Hinge. Maybe, hold a sign that says ad hoc meet and greet at such and such time and place, after collecting a list of common interests and putting those interests on the same sign that says the time and date. That could work.
In my city, an older guy organized an “urban hiking group” where he would plan walking routes through the city, usually stopping at a restaurant for brunch. It was very popular, but probably a lot of work. He was semi-retired, so he had the time to do it. He did research to have talking points on the history of some spots we passed, like a tour guide.
It was a great low key meet up. You didn’t have to make friends with the organizer. If you were walking with someone you didn’t really like in the group, it was easy to drift to talk to someone else.
Lets just say that Russia or China does some surprise attack and lands a bunch of troops in Greenland.
OK, great, they've got troops in Greenland. Now they have to keep them supplied. How are they going to do that? Well, either through the air or by sea.
Does either have a navy that can do that? No. Does either have an air force that can do that against US opposition? No.
So it's really unlikely. Even if China or Russia were stupid enough to do that, they could never hold it.
Now, perhaps the more interesting question: How likely does Trump think it is? Does he think it's real, despite the absurd impossibility of it? Or is he just saying fact-free stuff that he hopes some people will believe?
OK, but if there are no predictions that we can test for several generations, how do you tell the difference between science and science-sounding nonsense?
> If, then, it is true that the axiomatic basis of theoretical physics cannot be extracted from experience but must be freely invented, can we ever hope to find the right way? Nay, more, has this right way any existence outside our illusions? Can we hope to be guided safely by experience at all when there exist theories (such as classical mechanics) which to a large extent do justice to experience, without getting to the root of the matter? I answer without hesitation that there is, in my opinion, a right way, and that we are capable of finding it. Our experience hitherto justifies us in believing that nature is the realisation of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas. I am convinced that we can discover by means of purely mathematical constructions the concepts and the laws connecting them with each other, which furnish the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Experience may suggest the appropriate mathematical concepts, but they most certainly cannot be deduced from it. Experience remains, of course, the sole criterion of the physical utility of a mathematical construction. But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.
This is his argument that mental experiments are a good basis to construct a theory. If relativity had 0 experimental evidence to this day it would be held in considerably lower regard.
There is no a priori reason why a bunch of meatbags would have the ability to test all laws of physics of this universe. I think we may have gotten lucky for a while there. String theory is so far out there that a new methodology has been developed, namely using beauty or symmetry or Occam's Razor to choose between competing theories. None of these have the pedigree of empiricism, but they may also not be wrong. I hope some aesthetic could be applied to the laws of the universe, but that is also not at all guaranteed.
Occam's razor is perfectly empirical: "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity". It's what people repeatedly accuse string theory of violating in low-rent popsci criticism.
The other things you refer to are still Occam's razor: symmetry is handy because it eliminates symmetry-breaking entities even though we know they can happen in the standard model (Higgs) and "beauty" is really just another way of saying Occam's razor - you'd prefer your theory to not be full of dozens of free parameters because it starts to fit any possible outputs and be less predictive.
At all points the issue is that unless you've fully explored a simpler space with less entities, don't start adding them because you can always keep adding them to solve any problem but predict nothing (ala epicycles keeping geocentric solar models alive. You could probably run a space program assuming the Earth is the center of the universe, but it would be fiendishly difficult to model).
You seem to be intuiting some kind of chi squared minimization. It is true that fewer free parameters constrain models, but there is nothing in nature that prefers simplicity. That is probably the most annoying thing to us physicists. Even thermodynamics is always shoving us toward disorder. Just look at plasma physics some time for deterministically intractable problems stemming from four little equations (one if you like tensors).
I think it's better to think of most real world models as being low dimensional-ish, where there is a decaying power law of eigenvalues, and most are quite small, though not zero. You can get quite far by looking at the largest modes and ignoring small ones, but you're not exact, so you're not seeing The Truth, or whatever. Forcing your self to use fewer parameters is a way of denoising, however, that is quite effective.
Mathematics often does apply to the real world, but that isn't the goal. Physics is about the study of the real universe. If you want to call string theory a branch of mathematics I'd be fine with it, but they keep trying to claim they are physicists and that puts a higher bar on what we expect from them.
Of course physicists sometimes do make wrong predictions and it can take some time to figure out the hypothesis is wrong. However the goal is always to make something they can test to prove the hypothesis holds, which string theory has so far failed to do.
Good question, I touch on this on the same comment, in the paragraph starting with "I keep repeating these things on HNs".
The TLDR is that you can never expect the same level of certainty when you don't have direct experiments, but you can still rule out _some_ hypothesis, and see how far other hypothesis take you. This is called theoretical physics. Just because you can't make an experiment doesn't mean you can't do anything.
No, there is a deep state. It's people who are in the government, who hold to the constitution and the rule of law, rather than implementing whatever wild idea Trump currently proposes that is illegal and/or unconstitutional, and who therefore work internally to block a bunch of Trump's plans.
Or at least they must feel like the deep state to Trump. It's just that, for those who like the rule of law, those people are the good guys.
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