Unsupported Science Beliefs You Hold

[echoreply]

@Stranger_On_A_Train

that we have an adequate grasp upon ‘intelligence’ such that we can actually make fundamental measurements and develop well-defined statistical variability across a population

This is a belief that people have which is unsupported by science. Intelligence is a thoroughly tested and measured trait, and it can be measured with accuracy and reliability.

I think this misconception is primarily due to the biased and racist history to intelligence testing; error involved with any sort of testing; and general glacial pace at which knowledge moves from cognitive science to education, public policy, and classroom usage. There can also be distortion from what cognitive science and intelligence research supports and how that information is used to create policy.

@Stranger_On_A_Train

I believe (despite a lack of direct evidence) that extraterrestrial life is extremely common

This part, I do agree with. It seems pretty clear that the components necessary for life as we know it exist in lots of places. What is unknown is the likelihood of those things combining to create life. Is earth the 1 in 10^XXXXX chance it happened, or is it nearly inevitable?

@Stranger_On_A_Train

not because life outside of Earth is uncommon but because we tend to overestimate our expectation of what we can see with our current tools

I think people also don’t understand the time and distance scales that need to be overcome to detect anything. Even with the most sensitive telescopes we can imagine, would an alien 1000 light years away be able to conclude earth has intelligent life? They could certainly see an oxygen atmosphere, and maybe based on the sun’s spectrum and green reflections on earth make some conclusions about photosynthesis, but that’s an incredibly long way from detecting the Sung dynasty or whoever.

[Pardel-Lux]

@wolfpup

ETA: My unsupported science belief is that centuries should be named after the goddam numbers that they start with, not their goddam ordinal position.

It might help to learn Italian, where the XVI-hundreds are the cinquecento and the XX Century the novecento. Otherwise leave me my nitpicks, please. I do enjoy them.
ETA: The roman numerals are the usual Spanish notation for centuries, just to confuse things.

[DrDeth]

Here’s the thing- Life? Yes. Lots of it, in most suitable solar systems.

Intelligent life, capable of interstellar travel? Extremely rare.

So, no, we have not been visited by aliens.

[SuntanLotion]

If you watch a pot of water, it knows, and purposely takes longer to boil.
The Committee is somehow involved.

[Beckdawrek]

I accept full moons do cause craziness in a lot of ways.

[Railer13]

@Beckdawrek

I accept full moons do cause craziness in a lot of ways

My sister used to be a nurse on the maternity ward. She swore more babies were born when the moon was full than any other time of the month. That, of course, has never been proven.

[wolfpup]

@SuntanLotion

f you watch a pot of water, it knows, and purposely takes longer to boil.

This is true. When I wait for a pot of water to boil, it takes so long that I begin to suspect that my stove is bust. But when I just put it on, and then venture over to the “powder room” for a minute (no powder is involved), by the time I get back the pot is boiling furiously.

It’s extremely important to not watch pots of water that you’re trying to boil. They know it, and they consistently do nothing while you watch. But as soon as you’re out of range, they boil like Vesuvius.

[Sam_Stone]

This must be an unsupported belief because so many scientists and economists seem to believe the opposite, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that no matter how smart you are and how many models you build, the future is fundamentally unpredictable.

Or rather, that predictions that have a good chance of being true are trivial (the sun will rise tomorrow, GDP will only be slightly different next month), but to the extent that a prediction is complex and novel, it’s chance of being right is completely random.

Actually, this isn’t that unsupported, because we have a long track record of failures to predict or control the future amd almost no succesful ones. That doesn’t stop us from spending billions on analysts, stock pickers, and fortune tellers.

Also, to borrow from Jack Handey, even though I have no evidence for this I think we should declare Jupiter an enemy planet.

[Baker]

This is how I feel about it too. Of course, my unsupported opinion is that God set the universe(s) in motion, and why would God stop at just one set of life. It will surprise me in Heaven if we were the only ones.

Also, I do believe that life, or the soul, begins at conception. But a woman’s body is her own, and what she does with it is her business, so I support a woman’s right to choose how to handle a pregnancy, or not.

[Buck_Godot]

@chappachula

I believe that quantum mechanics don’t make no sense.

Adding to this, I believe that quantum mechanics is caused by lazy variable evaluation in the programming of the Matrix. Well no not really but it makes as much sense as any of the other explanations.

I also believe in the unscientific 5 second rule.

[Chronos]

@chappachula

I believe that quantum mechanics don’t make no sense.

Most prominent physicists would agree with you. But fundamentally, that’s not a statement about quantum mechanics; it’s a statement about how our own brains work. Why should our brains have developed to be able to understand quantum mechanics?

To add to what others have already said about life, I think that life on Earth has already passed through not one, but two, Great Filters, and that both of them were the Great Oxygenation Event. On most planets, it never happened, but on most of them where it did, it caused 100% extinction, not 95%. And neither case would lead to a world with people: For that, you need to both have the oxygenation, and to survive and adapt to it.

@Slithy_Tove

I believe that at a certain point enough black holes will develop that the universe will implode, resulting in a big bang creating the next universe. Basically an internal combustion engine

The gravity of a black hole isn’t any different from the gravity of the star it formed from.

@RivkahChaya

1. I believe autism is not one thing, anymore that “cancer” is, and speaking about an “autism spectrum” is misguided. I think we were on the right track, albeit, very far back on it, when we described different types of autism as different syndromes: Asperger’s, Kanner’s autism, PDD-NOS, Early Infantile Autism, atypical autism, Post-rubella syndrome with autism, and other things that didn’t fit by their major (usually three) symptoms.

Some day, when we can finally start putting research dollars into actual causes and syndromes, instead of proving for the nth time that vaccines don’t cause it, this will bear out.

Agree 100% on this. Heck, there used to be some cases diagnosed as autism that turned out, on further study, to just be super-sensitive hearing (which is very easily treated). And even if all of the various forms of autism were related, it still wouldn’t make any sense to say that someone is “on the spectrum”, because if the spectrum exists, then everyone is on it, in the same way that gamma rays are part of the same spectrum as radio waves.

@xtenkfarpl

It is, of course evident that the moon emits ‘cold rays’.

The evidence is obvious: clear sky, moon visible: gets bloody cold.

Related to this, “everyone knows” that cold isn’t actually a thing, it’s just the absence of heat. But that’s clearly not true: Carry a bucket of ice into a room, and you’ve added cold to the room, and also increased the thermal energy content of the room.

@John_DiFool

I base this on the immense number of hurdles that must be successfully navigated for such a species to even have a chance of existing in the first place (f. just one Great Filter, there are inevitably uncountable G.F.'s).

I don’t know about many Great Filters. What candidates do you have in mind? To be plausible, it has to be something that life on Earth has passed, but that it’s passed only once. For instance, achieving multicellularity can’t be rare, because Earth life has done it independently multiple times.

[Dr.Strangelove]

I think quantum mechanics is a coarse-scale approximation of a (more or less) classical underlying reality. Not too different, in principle, from how classical thermodynamics is a coarse-scale version of statistical mechanics.

The real-world implication of this is that I think “hard” quantum computers will never solve useful problems. By “hard” I mean, basically, one that’s capable of running Shor’s algorithm on large numbers of qubits. It requires a few thousand completely reliable qubits. It’s possible that we’ll have useful “soft” QCs with unreliable qubits, perhaps used to simulate other quantum systems, but they won’t be useful for things like breaking encryption.

If this is the case, error correction won’t help, because there just isn’t enough “underlying” computation to provide the exponential multiplier. Small systems look to be exponential, but past a certain threshold it becomes linear with the size of the machine. Whatever the underlying mechanics are, you need enough “particles” (I use the term loosely) so that their classical behavior can look quantum in aggregate.

If anyone manages to solve the RSA-2048 challenge using Shor’s algorithm on a QC, I’ll take it all back. I think it’s physically impossible and we’ll be lucky to see even 64 reliable qubits.

[John_DiFool]

@Chronos

@John_DiFool

I base this on the immense number of hurdles that must be successfully navigated for such a species to even have a chance of existing in the first place (f. just one Great Filter, there are inevitably uncountable G.F.'s).

I don’t know about many Great Filters. What candidates do you have in mind? To be plausible, it has to be something that life on Earth has passed, but that it’s passed only once. For instance, achieving multicellularity can’t be rare, because Earth life has done it independently multiple times.

You can get nitpicky about whether something is a G.F. or not, sure. What counts is the chance of favorable event X happening, vs. unfavorable event Y. So multicellularity is a pretty solid cinch then, given eukaryotes of course…

But yeah I could be here all day-note I am focusing again on intelligent beings who have crafted a civilization. Just off the top of my head as I think of them:

Suitable location in the galaxy
Suitable home star, long-lived and stable
Suitable and sufficiently large habitable zone (dilemma on this one, stars with wide h.z.'s tend to be short-lived)
Planet can’t be too massive, nor too light
Avoiding dire astronomical events for X billion years:
Asteroid/comet impacts thru close encounters with planets or rogue stars if not a black hole
Gamma ray bursts/supernovas
Wandering into a dust cloud or area of high radiation
Making sure you acquire and don’t lose a sufficiently sizable moon to keep your spin axis stable
Avoiding dire terrestrial events:
Volcanoes
Iceball Earth
Waterball Earth (almost all heavy metals too deep to reach)
Runaway global warming
Running the biological gauntlet:
Genesis of life itself
Eukaryotes evolving or something similar
Evolution of sexual reproduction
Free appendages allowing tool making and use
Evolution of intelligence
Discovery of the scientific method

Thing is, you often have to keep successfully rolling against a lot of these catastrophic events, without fail, for many millions if not billions of years.

The real kicker is that more advanced species exist in a more fragile state than primitive ones. There have been a number of close calls throughout Earth’s lifetime, but certain organisms managed to make it, those whose potential future descendants had technological potential. But as the key organism at any given point [representing the “best bet” to go technological] becomes more advanced they also become more vulnerable. A strong solar flare event or a supervolcano eruption might kill off a few species here and there, but soon niches will be refilled, candidates will likely still be hanging around, not to worry. But such an event may be the death knell for a technological species, esp. once (yes like us) which hasn’t taken precautions yet against all civ-ending phenomena, and it is no given at all that any future species will get the same chances. Hell a powerful solar flare wouldn’t be much of a big deal to people in the 14th century say, but would to us.

[kitap]

I believe that luck is an actual thing. Some people have it. Some don’t. I believe I used up 99% of my luck when chemo decimated my endometrial cancer and shrank my lymph nodes in my lungs while causing minimal side effects. Having a low luck factor means I will never win the lottery, a contest or a raffle.

[Tarataratara]

Truth

[Tarataratara]

I believe we would be shocked if we discovered everything there was to know about the deepest depths of the ocean. We know that there are the strangest creatures; I think there is more. What, I don’t know. Sentient plants, Abyss style aliens, dinosaurs.

[Chronos]

@kitap

I believe that luck is an actual thing. Some people have it. Some don’t.

So if it is an actual thing, what determines how much of it everyone gets? If I’m a very lucky person, was I just lucky to get all that luck? But then we have to assume that I was lucky before I was lucky.

[kitap]

I dunno. It’s like charisma. Some have it. Some don’t.

[Railer13]

@kitap

I believe that luck is an actual thing.

I totally agree with you, but I also think it comes and goes with the individual. As an example, I’ve played a lot of small-stakes poker in my life, and I’ve seen guys (including me) go on hot streaks when they can’t lose, and then can’t win for the next hour.

[Ulfreida]

I believe that everything on our planet is talking to everything else. Except us.