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[-] Chakravanti@monero.town 2 points 3 hours ago

Bloodywood well regard that guy in Gaddaar.

Three months after broadcasting that song, WWE bought the UFC.

Co-Cain is the most hilarious joke ever planted around.

[-] Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca 10 points 21 hours ago

Quantum Mechanics has entered the chat

[-] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 hours ago

Isn't that mostly probability as well?

[-] bunchberry@lemmy.world 6 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Surprisingly that is a controversial view. Most physicists insist QM has nothing to do with probability! But then why does it only give you probabilistic predictions? Ye old measurement problem, an entirely fabricated problem because physicists cannot accept that a theory that gives you probabilities is obviously a probabilistic theory.

[-] Amir@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 hours ago

The wavestate is entirely deterministic, and we don't fully understand where the probabilistic measurement happens. The Copenhagen intrpretation makes it probabilistic but is not proven.

(even many worlds doesn't explain why we ourselves only see one macroscopic section of the wavefunction)

[-] Chakravanti@monero.town 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Logic isn't MAEth.

Butt MAEth is logic. Don't misunderstand my meaning.

This language is literally cognitive shit.

[-] Sir_Premiumhengst@lemmy.world 23 points 1 day ago
[-] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 46 points 1 day ago

fucking computer science is going from on par with mathematics to worse than biology

[-] thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world 29 points 1 day ago

"why do you guys do it that way"

"Look because if we don't sacrifice the goat on Thursday the code breaks, idk what to tell you"

[-] erev@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

turns out the thursday goat service brings in Dianne from networking who remembers she needs to reboot a apecific device weekly, but its not documented anywhere. When Dianne doesn't do this everyone freaks out and grabs another goat to sacririce which brings her back because who is she to say no to some good goat, and the cycle is continued and reinforced

[-] Chakravanti@monero.town 1 points 3 hours ago
[-] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 103 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Economics: Our findings are just as rigorous as these other sciences we swear!

[-] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 36 points 1 day ago

I once called economics a pseudoscience in a reddit comment and some libertarian-capitalist type got suuuper butthurt about it.

He said I don't understand the word pseudoscience. I said, "no I understand it just fine. You don't understand economics."

His only response was to call that a "no, you" argument. Dunning-Kruger on full display.

[-] Chakravanti@monero.town 1 points 3 hours ago

He was just a delusional living knot bot.

[-] bunchberry@lemmy.world 3 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

It's amazing how nonsensical the actual foundational axioms of modern day economics are.

Classical economics tried to tie economics to functions of physical things we can measure. Adam Smith for example proposed that because you can recursively decompose every product into the amount of physical units of time it takes to produce it all the way down the supply chain, then any stable economy should, on the average (not the individual case), roughly buy and sell in a way that reflects that time, or else there would necessarily have to be physical time shortages or waste which would lead to economic problems. We thus may be able to use this time parameter to make quantifiable predictions about the economy.

Many people had philosophical objections to this because it violates free will. If you can predict roughly what society will do based on physicals factors, then you are implying that people's decisions are determined by physical parameters. Humans have the "free will" to just choose to buy and sell at whatever price they want, and so the economy cannot be reduced beyond the decisions of the human spirit. There was thus a second school of economics which tried to argue that maybe you could derive prices from measuring how much people subjectively desire things, measured in "utils."

"Utils" are of course such ambiguous nonsense that eventually these economists realized that this cannot work, so they proposed a different idea instead, which is to focus on marginal rates of substitution. Rather than saying there is some quantifiable parameter of "utils," you say that every person would be willing to trade some quantity of object X for some quantity of object Y, and then you try to define the whole economy in terms of these substitutions.

However, there are two obvious problems with this.

The first problem is that to know how people would be willing to substitute things rigorously, you would need an incredibly deep and complex understanding of human psychology, which the founders of neoclassical economics did not have. Without a rigorous definition, you could not fit it to mathematical equations. It would just be vague philosophy.

How did they solve this? They... made it up. I am not kidding you. Look up the axioms for consumer preference theory whenever you have the chance. It is a bunch of made up axioms about human psychology, many of which are quite obviously not even correct (such as, you have to assume that the person has evaluated and rated every product in the entire economy, you have to assume that every person would be more satisfied with having more of any given object, etc), but you have to adopt those axioms in order to derive any of the mathematics at all.

The second problem is one first pointed out, to my knowledge, by the economist Nikolai Bukharin, which is that an economic model based around human psychology cannot possibly even be predictive because there is no logical reason to believe that the behavior of everything in the economy, including all social structures, is purely derivative of human psychology, i.e. that you cannot have a back-reaction whereby preexisting social structures and environmental factors people are born into shape their psychology, and he gives a good proof-by-contradiction that the back-reaction must exist.

The idea that you can derive everything based upon some arbitrary set of immutable mathematical laws made up in someone's armchair one day that supposedly rigorously details human behavior that is irreducible beyond anything else is just nonsense. No one has ever even tested any of these laws that supposedly govern human psychology.

[-] erev@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

it's also interesting how increasingly absurd economics gets the further it dissociates from reality.

people are dying

BUT THE DOW

[-] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 20 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Basic foundational "observations" by Economics aren't based on the Scientific Method.

I wish the Scientific Method didn't have "Method" in the name because while it is a sensible name it also is misleading.

Science is "method agnostic", a new promising method may uncover other methods and theories that totally pull the rug out from under old theories and methods that is a necessary and sometimes brutal aspect to scientific progress.

Economics, because it began and is sustained for the most part as a system of methods searching for justification for their continuation, is largely incapable of undergoing these necessary "method resets" that come periodically in any scientific discipline.

Chemistry can admit that atoms aren't tiny planets with electons orbiting like moons because Chemistry didn't start as the pursuit to find evidence for atoms being like solarsystems and flesh out the theory that atoms are like solarsystems.

Thus no matter if locally good science is being done in economics it is undermined by the uncomfortable need to preserve the survival of the foundatinal contextualizing methods and axioms they invoke implicitly from the truth uncovered, a vice that plagues any human endeavor consciously and subconsciously and not only keeps Economics from being a real science it also largely sucks the oxygen out of the room for actually scientifically rigorous study of these phenomena.

Alchemy is a great analog here to compare Economics too. Alchemists in the pursuit of trying to figure out how to turn things to gold did interact with and in some ways advance chemistry, but alchemy could never divest itself from its own pre-existing beliefs and methods as chemistry discovered more and more of the universe and began to accurately predict more and more of it.

If alchemy was capable discarding old methods to pursue understanding phenomena more lucidly and precisely chemistry would probably be called "alchemy" in english nowadays and alchemy would be called "pseudo-alchemy".

Economics equates to alchemy they express a desire of a system of methods, axioms and explanations to produce a certain end goal and it forms fatal shackles to the follies of the past.

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Engineering: We only care if it works, even if it breaks math/physics/chemistry/biology.

[-] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 hour ago

If pi is not exactly three why hasn't my bridge fallen?

Check mate mathematicians.

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[-] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 62 points 2 days ago

Physics: oh, and if you look close enough, it's actually all probability too.

[-] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 30 minutes ago

or far away enough...

[-] four@lemmy.zip 41 points 1 day ago

Economics: the law is true as long as people believe it's true.

Kind of like fairies, when you think about it

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[-] ranzispa@mander.xyz 21 points 1 day ago

I'm a chemist, I just gave a class to students today. The main topic of the whole lesson was this: we have all these theories and methodologies, we are not going to study how they work and how to use them, let's discuss now all the limitations they have and when they do not work.

Former chemistry student here. In chemistry, every single thing you ever do gets multiplied by a ridiculously big number. A few drops of water has 6.02*10^23 molecules in it. So even the tiniest chemical reactions are massive exercises in parallel processing, and measuring in human-scale units means you might miss by a few hexillion in either direction.

Isn't it amazing internal combustion engines...ever work?

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[-] Ziglin@lemmy.world 26 points 1 day ago

Meanwhile the mathematicians who got a bit too close Philosophy are still arguing about which logic to use and if a proof by contradiction is even a proof at all.

[-] HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

Ehh...

Gödel basically showed we can never know which "mathematics" is the "correct one".

"Proven true assuming my axioms are true" is closer to reality.

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[-] BilSabab@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

read in Vince voice

[-] fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 1 day ago

Math also fails sometimes, we've had to invent new math along the way because math is always correct only in the given constraints of how we currently understand math. If those constraints are challenged math evolves.

Example, imaginary numbers weren't a thing for a good while and some stuff didn't work correctly. All math stands upon 1+1=2, we don't know if that always holds true, for now we asume it.

[-] mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 day ago

There are no correct axioms. You can change the axioms as you wish and make your own math2.0. And you will be able to apply it to things that follow thoose axioms but finding such things that follow them is the only hard part. We define 1+1=2 and that is true because we define it that way. If it does not hold true in any physical or something then it is that you are applying a correct math for a system which doesnt work with that math(i.e, you are the problem for assuming the same axiom is true for the real system)

[-] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 21 minutes ago* (last edited 20 minutes ago)

I might go even further and say there's no "math". There are a wide variety of axiomatic systems. None has the sole claim to being "math".

(On the other hand... I guess any system that contains the natural numbers would be sufficient for the bulk of what's widely considered "math".)

[-] Thalfon@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 day ago

In fact, the entire foundation of math -- its system of axioms -- has had to be fixed due to contradictions existing in previous iterations. The most well known perhaps being Russell's paradox in naive set theory: "Let X be the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. Does X contain itself?"

In fact, there have been many paradoxes that had to be resolved by the set theory we use today.

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this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
601 points (97.2% liked)

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