A Stochastic World

Dear Lord:

I am going to have to defer to Michael on this one for some background and clarification, but one of the things that really winds his watch is how the doors of perception are muddied and tainted by things like the “platonic ideals” and other such claptrap.

But one of the things that I want to point out is that the scions of Pythagoras that haunt the world of physics these days (I will not dignify what they do as science as all they do is masturbate to numbers) and complain when people ask them to come up with an experiment to prove that their intellectual masturbations are the “proven law” that they claim them to be.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/math-proof-draws-new-boundaries-around-black-hole-formation-20230816/

Here is my beef, the cult of scientist and the mathematician is getting fucking out of hand.  

Look, all that the mathmasturbation can prove is internal to math only.  I think that the climate model (all math, all the time) does pretty well, but it certainly is not “proven” it is just a pretty damn good model that gives us an edge to deal with potential problems.  Very, very useful, but it is NOT proven, it is just the best we can do and we should act on it.

Black holes are even dicier.  We can go outside and feel the rain and plug the fact that it is raining into a model and see where that goes.  It is a defined system.  Black holes are a belief system that a really good applied mathematician (physicist) who back in 1916 came up with an idea of “frozen stars” due to the popularity of different applied mathematician’s 1905 article.  But, by definition, black holes cannot be observed.  So this tertiary extrapolation of an unproven phenomenon is about as useful as a garden gnome in the land of proven facts.  Well, again, that kind of depends on useful, making nuclear weapons and gouging people for subsidies is considered useful by some.

I really wish people would get over the need to “prove” things.  That word is an Inego Montoya word if any ever existed.  But people keep using it anyway.  

I think that a better word would be “explain”.  There aren’t many things in the world that can be proven.  

Look, I think that the world needs to look long and hard at the obsession of trying to tie everything to a “proven” mathematical model and then stating that the “proof” gives the “prover” entrée to the pantheon of prophets.  Even worse is the frequent occurrence of a person giving a long winded and detailed explanation of something and then announcing that they have proven it.

I am pretty certain that there has always been a desperate desire for certainty.  Science has provided a great deal of certainty around specific technical subjects that are amenable to isolation of variables and control of conditions.  But those limited successes have emboldened the scientists into the idea that they have the thing nailed down because they can pull off some tricks that make people money.

Look, we have to get over the idea that scientists are some kind of priesthood.  I think that a lot of the problems that we are facing now is because the scientific priesthood is overstepping their own “rules” and totting out proofs that are actually crappy explanations that primarily serve their own agendas and egos.

I think that the time that I spent as a director of QA/QC in the 90’s and 00’s jaded me badly.  Proof for me is always and forever limited now.  Everything has an AQL (acceptable quality limit) and nothing is absolute.  You can come up with stuff that meets the quality criteria and say that it is good, but that “good” is qualified by how you define the problem in the first place.

I always tell my sons that every truth is a half-truth.  This isn’t because of people being dishonest, it is simply because no explanation of any subject takes place without isolating the subject being discussed and ignoring context.  

Religions, faiths, cults, belief systems, political systems, and languages always need to operate in a constrained space.  Proofs and final truth are limited to that space alone and the initial definitions used.

But the nature of the physical world is such that those user-defined and constrained spaces have input from phenomena outside of those spaces.  Despite protestations from any current priest class, there is no such thing as absolute proof.

Postulates.  Lots of good postulates out there.  

I think that science and technology today need to develop some humility.  They have been raised up on a pedestal by a society smitten by the whiz-bang physical largess that technology (applied science) has delivered.