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exasperation

@ exasperation @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Posts
3
Comments
454
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • Sea Level

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  • If we live on a habitable planet then it's logical to make the assumption that habitable planets are common.

    That's what I take issue with. I don't think that follows.

    If I have a random deck of cards, I can't assume that the deck order is common. Or, if I flip a coin 20 times I can't assume that the specific heads/tails order that results is commonly encountered, either. Just because it actually happened doesn't mean that the a priori probability of it happening was likely.

    The Copernican Principle is assuming that all decks of cards or all flipped coins follow the same rules. I'm not disagreeing with that premise, but I'm showing that no matter how many decks or coins you use, the probability of any specific result may be infinitesimal even with as many decks as there are planets in the universe.

    Showing me good reason to believe that earth sized planets have a 20% chance of showing up in habitable zones still doesn't answer the other questions I have about plate tectonics, elemental composition, magnetic fields, large moons, etc. Stacking dozens of variables with conditional probabilities can still produce numbers so small that even every star in the universe representing a "try" might not lead to a high probability result.

  • Sea Level

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  • I'm not disagreeing with you on any of the physics of solar system formation, just disagreeing with your interpretation it means that habitable planets are high probability.

    When clouds of dust and gas settle into spherical planets, what makes them rocky? What makes them have magnetic fields, atmospheres, water? What makes it so that the planet in the habitable zone hits those conditions.

    The tendency of certain things to develop isn't a lockstep correlation of 1 between these factors.

    We can believe that stars are common. And so are planets. But what combination of factors is required for life, and does that combination start leveraging the math of combinatorics in a way that even billions of planets in each of trillions of galaxies wouldn't be enough to make it likely that there are other planets that can give rise to life as we know it.

    My point isn't actually about cosmological physics. It's a point I'm making about the math about probabilities being counterintuitive, in a way that "the vastness of the universe" doesn't actually mean that life is inevitable. It might still be, but it doesn't necessarily follow.

  • Sea Level

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  • We know little about solar system formation, but sufficient to say it's not a card deck shuffle,

    Well it's different in several factors competing in different directions, and it's not clear to me what the overall aggregate direction is.

    The fundamental force of gravity is going to drive a lot of disparate starting points to collapse into similar results.

    But in the end, we're still talking about the probabilistic chances that certain lumpiness in the distribution of mass from supernovas or whatever forms the matter of solar systems, and how each solar system's spinning disk coalesces into planets with their own elemental composition and orbits and rotations and moons and internal rotation and energy that might make for magnetic fields, plate tectonics, etc.

    If the probabilities of those may still have some independence from one another, then even if there are lots of stars like ours and maybe even lots of planets that are earth sized, and lots of planets with the oxygen to make water or carbon to make organic chemistry or the iron to make a magnetic field, we might still recognize that the correlations between these not-fully-independent variables still require stacking probabilities on probabilities at a factorial rate.

    While the number of opportunities for those conditions to hit might go up at an exponential rate, if the probabilities are small enough and there are enough necessary factors for life stacking on each other, it's entirely possible that the exponential expansion of more solar systems than we could fathom is still too small to make for an appreciable probability of the conditions of life.

    I don't know what the probabilities actually are. But I can see how the math of the combinatorics can totally dwarf the math of the vastness of the universe, such that the overall probability remains infinitesimal.

  • So apparently full stops in texts are 'passive agressive' now. What other unwritten rules for texting have changed over the last couple of decades?

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  • Punctuation is context dependent, and it's wild just how much of this thread has commenters who are purposely being obtuse about it.

    Punctuation on promotional signs is weird. We expect words like "SALE" and "CLEARANCE" and "25% OFF" not to have periods.

    Punctuation on newspaper headlines is weird. The AP Style Manual has all sorts of rules and conventions about headline language, and it's different from normal written language.

    Punctuation on titles of artistic, literary, or musical works is weird. When Kendrick Lamar released "DAMN." the period in the title was part of an artistic choice.

    And yeah, the idea that people can only text in complete sentences is absurd and differs from the norms of that medium since its beginning. Starting a conversation with "Hey." is different from starting a conversation with "hey" and people pretending they don't get why is kinda puzzling to me.

  • So apparently full stops in texts are 'passive agressive' now. What other unwritten rules for texting have changed over the last couple of decades?

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  • People thought of messages as letters, like emails.

    On IRC and ICQ and AIM? No, lowercase phrases without punctuation was the norm for short messages.

    Text messages are closer to those old short messages (hence the name "short message service") than to email.

  • So apparently full stops in texts are 'passive agressive' now. What other unwritten rules for texting have changed over the last couple of decades?

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  • ACK

  • So apparently full stops in texts are 'passive agressive' now. What other unwritten rules for texting have changed over the last couple of decades?

    Jump

  • What is "proper punctuation"? Isn't it context dependent?

    Not every instance of written language is written in complete sentences.

    A sign that says "SALE" is normal, but a sign that says "Sale." would be unusual, maybe some kind of marketing or design choice.

    Social convention around IMs and chat rooms in the early versions of live chat, in the 90's, capitalization and punctuation were not ordinarily used. Multiple sentences per message were also not the norm.

    Text messages have always been somewhere between 90's style IMs (uncapitalized and unpunctuated phrases, not full sentences) and a full email message (full salutations and signatures). The convention depends on the context, and autocorrect has changed what is or isn't normal.

    So a text message response that says "that's fine" conveys a distinct message from one that says "That's fine."

    That's how human communication works. Trying to start every text message with "Dear Jake," and ending it with "Sincerely, Raymond Holt" would be weird.

  • So apparently full stops in texts are 'passive agressive' now. What other unwritten rules for texting have changed over the last couple of decades?

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  • gammar

    That's bait

  • Sea Level

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  • But in the vastness of space, it was practically guaranteed to happen somewhere.

    Do we know this for sure?

    When we thoroughly shuffle a deck of 52 cards, we're almost certainly creating a new deck order that has never been seen before and will likely never be seen again in a random shuffle.

    The number 52! is 8 x 1067, so large that we can make the equivalent of a billion (1 x 109 ) shuffles per second per person on earth (8 x 109 ), so that in any given millennium (3.15 x 1010 seconds) we've covered a percentage so small it's got 36 leading zeros after the decimal point for the percentage, or 38 leading zeroes for the ratio itself.

    My impression is that factorial expansion for probabilities moves up much faster than the vastness of space itself, but I don't know how to calculate the probabilities of each of these priors.

  • What is the non-technical hill you are willing to die on in your industry?

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  • Ok, sure, if someone doesn't know the basics, then they can't be an expert in that thing. But that hasn't been what we've been talking about in this thread, and your initial comment was that someone can only be said to understand a thing if they can explain how it works.

    And I'm pointing out that:

    • Some people are bad at communication, and understand things they can't explain, because their explanatory ability is hindered by their communication skills.
    • Some specific concepts are not easily reduced to words, so they are inherently difficult to explain. That doesn't mean they can't be understood, or that nobody understands them.

    Dropping back to only talking about the basics kinda ignores huge swaths of human knowledge and understanding.

  • What is the non-technical hill you are willing to die on in your industry?

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  • No, some people are just bad communicators in particular mediums, and some mediums are bad channels for conveying other ideas.

    Fundamentally, not every bit of knowledge is easily translated into words (or images). You see it a lot when teaching others how to cook (or especially bake), where smell, texture, feel, and all those are both important and knowable, while simultaneously difficult to describe. I can show people how to bake a sourdough loaf, but reducing it to text loses a lot, to the point where the typical person won't be able to actually derive the knowledge from that text. And plenty of people I've tried to teach don't have the attention to detail to be able to absorb it. I can be an expert in the actual craft while not quite grasping why other people in my orbit just don't get it. That's the phenomenon of superstar athletes retiring and then struggling to become decent coaches.

    The experts in a lot of fields didn't learn their knowledge in a book. Or even instructional videos. Limiting your definition of "knowledge" or "expertise" to only be the subjects that can be learned in those settings is too small a view.

    No amount of book reading will teach someone how to be a good basketball player, a good guitar player, a good public speaker, a good friend, or even a good writer. That doesn't invalidate their expertise, or even require they be good at explaining their craft to be considered knowledgeable in those fields.

    At the end of the day, plenty of people are bad at communication. But just because someone is bad at communication doesn't mean that they're inherently not knowledgeable. And that's the fundamental error in your view.

  • What is the non-technical hill you are willing to die on in your industry?

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  • If you're dealing with a spatial problem but can't draw what you are trying to explain, that is indicative that you don't know what you're dealing with.

    I really feel like you're digging in your heels on a fundamentally flawed point. Plenty of people are bad at drawing. That doesn't make them bad at visualizing or reasoning spatially, or somehow invalidate the spatial understanding that they do have.

    My ability to explain things in Spanish isn't all that well correlated with my internal knowledge of those things, but is more closely correlated with my Spanish skills in those subjects. At the same time, there are nonverbal people who understand stuff without the ability to meaningfully convey messages to other humans.

    The ability to communicate is its own skill, independent from other areas of knowledge, such that the correlation between ability to explain to others and the actual internal understanding is weak, at best.

  • What is the non-technical hill you are willing to die on in your industry?

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  • I mean, the linguistic mastery necessary to be able to talk around gaps in vocabulary is still itself a skill set completely distinct from knowledge about a different subject.

    Plenty of skills aren't easily reduced to verbal explanations, or even the ability to teach. Plenty of world class athletes become mediocre coaches, frustrated that their players don't seem to get things the way they used to. Same with musicians, actors, public speakers (merely repeating the words of a speech won't necessarily carry the same charisma and gravitas), and all sorts of other experts.

    One can know something without being able to explain it. That doesn't invalidate the knowledge.

  • What is the non-technical hill you are willing to die on in your industry?

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  • Nah, some people are just bad with words. They can know how something works but can't explain it because their vocabulary doesn't capture some of the nuances. I've seen this a lot in self-taught experts, especially.

    Plus there's always the possibility that the vocabulary is limited from the audience perspective. I definitely know how certain things work, but detail is lost when I oversimplify it for my kids or something, because I'm explaining it to them rather than to a more knowledgeable adult with a stronger base.

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    Permanently Deleted

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  • I like to call it lost wages.

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  • Mammals evolve into ant eaters.

  • Removed

    Apparently your hobbies becomes less interesting if you're forced to do them all the time? Who knew?

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  • The real advice is to realize that every job has components that are not fun.

    There are professional athletes who still love to play their sport, and intend to retire into coaching, but hate dealing with marketing and promos and media availability. Lots hate the travel. Some don't like some of their teammates or coaches.

    I know doctors who hate dealing with the paperwork, and programmers who hate dealing with documentation or testing, and lawyers who hate tracking their timesheets. But each of these are part of the job. The question is whether the entire bundled package deal is a pretty good job or not for yourself.

  • Women Should Just Be Honest

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  • Every interaction between a man and a woman that I personally experience involves the same man, me. Therefore no matter what my sample size, the sampling bias will only observe what is true of this one specific man.

    On the flip side, every man-woman interaction that a woman experiences is with the same woman.

    As a result, I'll have a lot of experience interacting with many women, and women will have a lot of experiences interacting with many men. When women protect themselves from certain traits of other men, even when those traits are not true of myself (the only man I've directly observed in these 1-on-1 interactions), they're inherently building on those worst-case scenarios. I'm not too worried about it, like when my neighbors lock their doors (despite me not being a burglar).

  • Women Should Just Be Honest

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  • This community is really interesting to me that these types of comics, by women, about being a woman who interacts with men, are both so popular here and so angrily criticized in the comments. It's a fascinating combination.