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Why I gave up electronics club
(feddit.uk)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Electricity is not a real-concept, it is a qualitative aspect and the elec-root is what defines that aspect. There is no such thing as electricity, to cut it short, it's like talking about "Science". There is the scientific method, scientific advances, natural science which is a category of academic research, but science is a broad abuse of language, same thing goes for electricity when people picture "the blue stuff that flows in wires", it's reductive, ignorant and meaningless when you can talk about electrical arcs if you mean the "blue stuff", electrical current, electrical charge, electrons if you refer to the subatomic particle allowing this exchange, electrical energy is the volts per coulombs, etc.
But there is current and in direct current, those particles flow as historically, that was the first convention for current, AC operates through frequency oscillation. Also, electromotive force is what causes the movement of electrons, the magnetic field is just a componenent and does not induce EMR and the energy generated by it is akin to mechanical "work" caused by kinetic forces. It boggles my mind how even modern electrical engineers sometimes get this wrong.
You are wildly misinformed about how language works.
Unless you can refute the below cited sources (which I doubt even I could despite teaching at the graduate and undergraduate level), I will assume you have just replied because of cognitive dissonance or lack of awareness of preconceived dogmas of how the dynamics of knowledge and linguistics work one with the other:
1-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_electricity
2-https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10728-012-0231-2
Fun fact, the disconnect between true academic knowledge discoveries which are bound to a very strict code of ethics, do not apply to the common working man. This creates paradoxes everywhere, especially at the fundamental level and english, being a language not regulated by a linguistic body like French is by the Académie Française. It becomes even more interesting when looking at very old languages that still are able to function like arabic which is 3000 years old and has morphed into common domestic tongues for the most part but is regulated by the Majma' al-Lugha al-'Arabiyya as a theological unified language in Cairo and Chinese which is 1800 years old and regulated by the Guójiā Yǔyán Wénzì Gōngzuò Wěiyuánhuì (National language commission, or 国家语言文字工作委员会 ) and has had a modernist revision which gave us mandarin or "Simplified" chinese, building onto older "Traditional" Chinese.
I'm going to be honest, I don't think I've ever been confused when someone used the word "science" before, and it is usually pretty cut and dry what they mean when they use the word "science".
"The sciences" - Various fields of study using the scientific method. "Doing science" - Using the scientific method to explore some hypothesis or harden a theory. "Scientific advancements" - The furthering of knowledge using the scientific method.
I would think most people feel that "science" is not an abuse of language, but a very clear and useful term, both in and outside of academia. At least with "science" it all revolves around the study of nature, usually through the scientific method. "Electricity" seems more like a vehicle, with parts that have to come together just right or you end up describing an entirely different phenomenon.
"Electricity" as you've defined it, is fucking wacko, and does not parallel "science" in anyway I currently see. I'm not saying that you're statement makes you wacko, but that the culmination of these esoteric concepts makes up what we think of as a broad categorization of "electricity" is wacko.
Your explanation was really enlightening, actually, and while it took me a moment to acclimatize to the information, it was very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you for your reply. I’m new to Lemmy, and while replies like yours are why I’m still falling in love with it (since no platform has felt as representative of the human experience as Reddit before Helen Pao) it is a genuine pleasure to be met with careful intellectual consideration rather than misguided reductionism.
To address your point: yes, it is true that there are alternative ways to describe the practice of human abstraction of the natural realm, or "Science" which is a word that will be met by scrutiny under any ethics review for a university paper but works perfectly well in the common and fun daily discussions of any intellectually curious human.
Karl Popper is the one who perfected this for us, owing to the parallel contributions of two Jinns of knowledge who shook human and natural disciplines to their foundational assumptions: Einstein and Freud . Each published groundbreaking works using profoundly different methodologies. Popper, perhaps unintentionally—and arguably by mistake—brought this tension into sharp focus, setting in motion the philosophical move that ultimately negated Freud’s claim to scientific status and is now an (imo highly slanderous) general point of view that psychoanalysis has no merit and should therefore be discarded. By extension, this helped solidify a framework in which only certain forms of inquiry were deemed truly “scientific.” This, in turn, is why naturalistic physical abstraction and the echoes of scientism are now “painting the walls white” in every reflection of what we understand our world to be.
I was initially drawn into this because I am male and a lover of all scientific knowledge—knowledge acquired through hypothesis synthesis, verification via empirically and statistically supported evidence, and peer review. I also practice and teach at a Canadian university, though I’d prefer not to leave identifying details online. My husband (a brilliant art historian and big advocate member of the LGBTQ+ community and reform of logically outdated concepts such as race, gender, work and others), had the insight to engage me in a careful, sustained dialogue debating and reflecting on every facet of my materialist worldview. Through this, it became easier to understand why societal mental health is in its current state, and why humans seem (at least to my eyes) less self-aware than in prior eras. It had also a profound effect in allowing me to understand so much of myself and only got better as I became more and more nuanced in how I abstracted upon thoughts. But it also kept being a friction point on linguistics and academic nomenclature and yes, I do still believe that the abuse of language often made by calling academic disciplines "Science" is why "common sense" and popular points of views have done such a disservice to "human sciences" (despite them not using the scientific method).
This dialogue brought me to realize that the natural sciences are merely the tip of the iceberg, and that humanistic discourse plunges into far deeper waters. The journey has been mentally taxing, if I may share my lived experience, and I now feel a certain intellectual jealousy toward my husband's discipline. I’ve come to believe that the humanities, scientism, and, by extension, the common abuse of language (such as treating “Science” as a monolithic entity) do a profound disservice to the second half of what it means to see the world as a human. Human and Natural sciences operate in a dichotomy after all and this is why the world can be interpreted as; There is everything outside of you, and then there is everything inside of you. The interior world remains a profound puzzle, one that still demands enormous focus. In my view, significant reforms in scientific methodology are urgently needed, especially as the dominant model has been a systemic impediment to disciplines like psychology and anthropology. And if I can pique your curiosity; below is a good paper on the issue if you happen to be tied to academic practice and if you are looking for a good challenge, natural sciences (in my eyes as I now get older and wiser) are total child's play compared to how more robust and taxing humanities can be from a logical standpoint.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368879558_Hoskins_1_Emerson_in_the_Digital_Age_The_Transcendent_Potential_of_Human_Nature