If a horse dies on treadmill, will Dopers ever stop beating it?

The BBQ Pit
1

Background
About two months ago, bouv posted a little thread about planes and treadmills in GQ. His question – at least what he meant to ask – was correctly answered within the first dozen posts (in between a couple snarky comments about Bernoulli), and should have sunk into the depths of SDMB obscurity.

Except that didn’t happen.

See, technically speaking, bouv phrased his OP in such a way that the question effectively changed from “Will a plane on a treadmill take off?” to “How could a plane on a treadmill be kept from moving?” Some answered the straightforward, practical first question, some pondered the more nuanced, more theoretical second. Some argued for nine pages, misinterpreting physics and each other for over a week. Then Cecil wrote a column that sort of did the same thing. Now, there are two threads in “Comments on Cecil’s Columns” where history is repeating itself once again. One is a mere five posts away from surpassing Damn Fool War as the longest thread in that forum.

Complaint
What is it with this community when it comes to answering any question where math or physics is involved? Before the latest trainwrecks, the same thing happened with the Monty Hall door problem. And with airplane lift, vis a vis Bernoulli vs Newton. And with .9999999999… = 1.

It follows the same format each time:
[ul]
[li]Doper A asks a question.[/li][li]Question is more or less answered correctly in half a page. Doper A leaves the thread, satisfied with the responses.[/li][li]Doper B enters thread with a new spin on things.[/li][li]Other dopers argue with Doper B.[/li][li]Doper B’s viewpoint may or may not see acceptance depending on the way the problem is phrased. Regardless, the Teeming Millions come to a consensus…[/li][li]Just in time for a new guest to jump into the fray.[/li][/ul]

Alternatively, new guest could simply be responding to a new column. Regardless, the three or four dopers who really get the subject spend the next three pages arguing with the guest, trying to explain that planes don’t drive like cars, that the odds of finding a prize between two doors really is better than finding it behind one, and so on. Occasionally a miracle happens, the guest gets it, ponies up $14.95, and six months later later spends three pages trying to argue that .9999… really is equal to 3/3. The circle of life is then complete.

Back to the rant. It doesn’t help when expert dopers come out in full force with free body diagrams and half a Physics 201 text to explain their reasoning, no matter how correct, to someone who might not have thought about algebra since age 18. It certainly doesn’t help when “Expert Dopers” – yes, occasionally even Cecil – gloss over salient points, or even appear to contradict what the subject area experts try – and fail – to effectively communicate.

What’s the answer? Hell if I know. But those who post in technical threads better damned know what they are talking about, and be able to explain it.

2

So… are you pitting Bouv? :wink:

3

Yes, lets blame Bouv.

Damn that Bouv!!

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Seriously though, we need to declare a council of learned physicists and bar anyone but those from answering a physics question.

5

God forbid we should ever treat a subject in-depth, or explore other aspects of it. Once a question has been answered, we must be silent.

Question: If the OP gets his question answered, and goes away satisfied, what’s the problem if other people want to continue on the subject for a while?

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Doper YY starts a Pit thread about it.

If people want to keep talking about it, let them keep talking about it. If there’s ignorance to be fought, fight it.

So says I.

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What’s the problem if you enjoy being nibbled to death by ducks?

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Dang. That was in response to Sam Stone.

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Good OP, but you didn’t ask the important question:

Will the horse take off?

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lissener has a problem with people beating dead horses on topics only they care about. I really gotta stop taking my irony meter on the internet.

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If a winged dead horse is beaten by enough dopers, will the treadmill effect cause history to repeat itself? If not repeat itself, mumble?

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The OP asks:* “If a horse dies on treadmill, will Dopers ever stop beating it?”*
:rolleyes: Are you kidding? Are you new here?

13

Can we have dopers tried for heretical physics? :wink:

It’s no bad thing to have people posting incorrect answers, because they tend to go into some detail about their reasoning. Which makes it easier to pin down the errors, misconceptions or misapprehensions, and do a bit of ignorance-fighting, preferably diplomatically.

Even if you fail to convince the original, incorrect poster, you might convince another poster who holds the same misconceptions. The accelerating treadmill exerting a force through the axle even if the wheels have frictionless bearings is counter-intuitive to many people, and if there hadn’t been a bit of back-and-forth argument I simply wouldn’t have got it.

14

Oh, poop.

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Well, I know what you mean, and I know you know I know what you mean. If you know what I mean.

However.

I think there’s just certain subjects that are really unwieldy. There are enough angles and so forth that threads on these subjects quickly grow to multi-page monsters, and it’s unrealistic and unfair to expect a guest with a comment to wade through what’s essentially a thirty-thousand word textbook before posting. So the same comments get posted.

And then people get a little tired of countering the same incorrect argument for the sixth time, and post an answer that isn’t as complete as the two-thousand word treatise that was posted back on page one (and it’s unrealistic and unfair to expect even experts to post exhaustively-researched commentary on every single variation of incorrect logic or physics). And someone else misinterprets, and an argument breaks out, and it’s a vicious circle.

In conclusion: Damn you Cecil, for your crappy, misleading, inconclusive answer.

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Brought a fair harvest of non MPSIMS newbies, though.

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“If a horse dies on treadmill, will Dopers ever stop beating it?”

Only once, for about twenty minutes.

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I get annoyed when I click on the New Posts link and many of the threads listed are the same flogged horses I’ve been seeing all week. Instead of Ignore User, we should have Ignore Thread.

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I…umm…er…crap.

If I had known the trainwreck of a thread(s) it would have caused, I would have never posted the question. Although on the other hand, there are several people who had their ignorance cured (mine among them.) But yes, it is annoying to see now TWO threads going on several pages about a topic, each thread of which, shouldn’t of even needed a full page. Part of the problem I have especialyl seen in the new thread is that a lot of poeple are agreeing with each other about the main pint, but then start to argue back and forth about small details.

Poster A: Oh, but in this scenario blah blah blah
Poster B: But that scenario can’t happen!
Poster A: Oh, but technically neither can the original one, so mine still stands, so in that case, as I said, blah blah blah
**Poster B: ** Well, ok, but if you assume blah blah I assume this that and we still have me better than you.

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Heh. bouv was smart – he ran away. On the other hand, look who didn’t. There’s me, treis, zut, a bunch of guests, Cecil, Boeing, Isaac Newton, and the fucking Wright Brothers. :slight_smile: Really, I’m not sure who’s to blame. I just want to know how the hell a little thought experiment exploded into 700+ posts of banging our collective heads against the wall.

Just for the sake of comparison, bouv’s thread is currently the longest unlocked thread in GQ at 420 posts. The two locked threads longer than it were “Are scalar weapons for real”, a.k.a. the “1920s death ray” thread, and “Uniquely Distinct Americanisms,” which descended into an international flamewar. The next longest thread in that forum, unsurprisingly, is “Why doesn’t .9999~ = 1? .”

Sam, my problem isn’t in the deep exploration of the subject. I liked delving into the accelerating belt thought experiment. I liked the threads on lift, especially when I could internalize what I read there with what I learned in my fluids courses. I even was one of the people who didn’t “get” the Monty Hall problem until seeing it explained here.

What frustrates me are those who march right into the middle of a thread without reading or trying to comprehending the previous 100+ posts of the discussion, and trot out the same tired arguments that were discredited on page 1. The discussion then devolves into the same old awkward explanations that barely make sense to someone with a background in the subject.

It’s not a problem in the legal threads; folks like bricker are very good at explaining the minutae of things like constitutional law. Nor is it a problem in medical threads. That kind of misintepretation is the sole providence of the “geeky” logic threads. We end up repeating ourselves, spelling out half a dozen scenarios, mumbling “friction this” or “angular acceleration that” and confusing the hell out of anyone who wanders in our way. We end up throwing four weeks of dynamics at someone and hoping they get it.

Airplanes and treadmills do not a Great Debate make. Nobody is arguing about George Bush, or abortion, or depictions of Muhammed. It’s physics. A problem that should, for a given set of boundary conditions, have objective solutions that should be understandable by, or at least explainable to, the vast majority of the people who use this message board. That is where we fail. We’re so used to talking shop with fellow engineering and math geeks that we’re incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t have a background in the field.