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Discussion (27 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
So many people these days spend hours watching short-form videos spray endlessly from a screen while they stare dumbly at it. They aren't even picking which videos to watch, just letting the algorithm do it.
Every time I see someone doing that, I just absolutely cannot relate to what's going on in their head at all. I'm certainly not above watching some YouTube, but the complete mindlessness of it, they watch it goes on forever, and the utter stupidity of the videos. I feel like I'm watching zombies in an opium den.
But billions of people are doing that shit every day, so what do I know?
The lack of patience from adults for learning the byzantine interfaces companies were making in the last quarter of the 20th century got generalized to a ridiculous degree.
Or he may have been wrong. I think it was Paul Feyerabend who showed that most paradigms (yes, including that one) of how science works are falsified by counterexamples in scientific history and practice.
We love to make a discovery seem like a triumph against evil, and obstruction, and sometimes it happens, but sometimes it's just a discovery.
Disclosure: Old scientist.
Also the claim "toward the tail end of Einstein’s life, he argued strenuously against the concepts undergirding the emerging field of quantum mechanics" downplays that Einstein was pivotal in emerging the field in the first place.
Indeed, its a pretty easy case to make the Einstein has more to do with QM as it currently exists than Bohr does. The major interesting work on QM after the 1960s or so is entirely dependent upon Einstein's work on QM and locality. The entire narrative in fact comes from Bohr's hissy fit after Einstein pointed out that QM is non-local and that seems very wrong.
Like we have formulas describing how gravity works. We can test these formulas by observing the motion of the planets and galaxies. Is this theory true? There's lots of evidence for it so it feels like it's gotta be pretty close to "the truth"
We also have formulas describing how elementary particles behave. These formulas have been tested to a very high degree of precision so it seems they've got to be close to the truth as well. But if you use both our formulas for gravitation and formulas for elementary particles you can derive a contradiction. So these two theories cannot simultaneously be true. There's got to be something wrong with them.
I suppose there's the possibility that at a certain point nature simply doesn't follow any laws and you can't possibly make sense of it.
So yes there is a solution, but do we, as humans, have the ability to come up with it, who knows. I would say it's unlikely.
Older people have influence, power, control to direct where resources are allocated.
No 25yo scientists has the werewithal or experience to challenge that until later in life.
It’s kind of like asking why old people have all the assets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...
And of course if you haven't read that book, it's insightful and easy
It’s like being a billionaire; you stop getting “no, that’s stupid” feedback and it rots your brain.