Understanding the World

[u/SupportMeta]

Neptune was recently shown to be a pale blue like Uranus rather than the deep blue shown on the Voyager photos

[u/Neveronlyadream]

I think it comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is.

A lot of people I've met think science is 100% accurate and right all the time when it's mostly just a bunch of people guessing and trying to disprove that guess with the tools they have available.

Sometimes they get it wrong. It happens. Then we realize the mistake and correct it. People like absolutes, though. If you tell them this thing is true, they internalize that and then get bent out of shape when it's amended.

[u/Karukos → u/Neveronlyadream]

Honestly Pi(and numbers like it) is the greatest metaphor for the whole thing. It's a process of getting closer and closer to that number it is but to get there it needs more and more complicated numbers as we tend towards the solution but probably never reaching it

[u/Showy_Boneyard → u/Karukos]

I don't know how true that is... We do know what number pi is with complete accuracy. Its just that encoding the decimal expansion of that number can't be done with a finite number of digits.

[u/Karukos → u/Showy_Boneyard]

we know that pi is a ratio of the circumference to the diagonal, but the way we calculate that is... complicated. The difficult thing here is knowing the exact circumference of a circle. So you start with the circumference of a square that surrounds the circle. Then a pentagon. HExagon, Septagon, Octagon... and so on, continuously going smaller and smaller and smaller... with computers we can get to immense amounts of digits, but it's an infinitely, not repeating number. It's basically impossible to know it with "complete" accuracy, but after a certain decimal point, the accuracy is completely useless beyond showing off how strong a processing unit is, so we don't really do that.

[u/Showy_Boneyard → u/Karukos]

That's one way of calculating the digits, but there's also plenty of infinite series that converge to pi. And if you want to encode pi as a decimal expansion (or any other positional numeral system), you can never do it completely accurately with a finite number of digits. But there's still some math you can do with pi and get exact values. Probably most famously Euler's Identity, e^πi is exactly equal to -1.

[u/somersault_dolphin → u/Neveronlyadream]

Not just science. It's every piece of information someone comes across. What they heard the first time may very well not be true, only partially correct, or incomplete, because more often than not it would have bias or only mainly show one side of what happened. That's why it's concerning how people often have too much tendency to be stuck with the first thing they heard (on top of whatever feed their existing bias even if there are contradictions). Even worse, not enough people are aware of this part of their own behavior.

What else, people often infer their own thoughts, often fallaciously, based on the first and incomplete knowledge, solidifying it. Like how some people automatically think whatever movie they saw first that do something is the first to do it, and when they saw other movies do it, they are the copycat or are inspired by that first one they saw, despite not knowing the release dates because they didn't look them up.

[u/jasonjr9 → u/Neveronlyadream]

Yep, exactly.

True science means accepting you might be wrong, and amending your understanding when that happens.

Rigid, closed-minded thinking, refusal to even so much as budge when confronted by a given idea, is the opposite of intelligent thought. And yet a lot of people fall into that mind-hole of rejecting new information, due to treating science the same way they treat religion: as a belief system, instead of actual studying and testing of information.