brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Mon Apr 08, 2019 4:55 am
teo123 wrote: ↑Mon Apr 08, 2019 12:55 am
I used to have a bit of desire to learn more about physics. However, by showing just how arrogant people who have studied physics can become because of that, you've killed that desire in me.
I didn't realize a whole year had gone by, that was so quick!
I thought you could manage the honor system.
You're forum-wide banned for three days teo. Don't post in this thread again when your ban is over for
one year. Particularly something so petulant and provocative. You're clearly trying to start a fight in a conversation thread you've been banned from. If you are against learning a hard science then you'll never really be able to understand the difference, and I don't think there's anything less intellectually honest than that. If you choose to remain ignorant so you can retain your delusions then that is you prerogative, but it disqualifies you from engaging in honest discussion on the subject, and as such if you don't change your tune about being anti-physics by next year I think you'd better stay off this topic for good.
OK, I worded it wrongly. I didn't mean to say people shouldn't study physics if it interests them. I meant to say that many people, who know some physics (and my guess is not actually much of it), become arrogant because of that, and think that they are qualified to talk about topics not really related to physics, yet alone that part of physics which they know about (physics is a really broad term). I don't think I need to give you examples. And I suppose you might be slightly affected by that. If you suggest the reason linguists agree that Finnish and Samoyed languages are remotely related is because of genetic evidence, that shows you don't really understand how historical linguistics works, and are making uninformed guesses based on your knowledge of natural sciences. Genetic evidence plays little to no role in linguistics, and that's for a very good reason.
The same goes for philosophy, people who have studied a bit of philosophy often think studying philosophy somehow gives them qualifications to talk about how science works, and even contradict what actual scientists say about matters of science. Particularly, I am thinking of my father, who studied philosophy and history, and who thinks that the idea that people in the early 20th century often got TBC because they didn't eat enough meat so they lacked vitamin D, who thinks that that idea is scientifically valid. And who has, although he claims he has studied philosophy of science, never heard of the term p-value. And who doesn't understand probability theory at all, he doesn't even know what "factorial" means.
Anyway, I still haven't managed to publish my paper about applying computational linguistics to the names of places in Croatia. I don't know what to comment, it seems to me that there is indeed some publication bias in the field of Croatian toponyms. I mean, the paper I am trying to publish is certainly of higher quality than the papers I've already published. But, the ones I've already published generally agree with the mainstream science of the field. Now that I have written a paper that shows a lot more knowledge of the field, and that openly disagrees with a lot of that "knowledge", now I have trouble publishing my paper. I mean, I am not even sure if that's a towards-mainstream bias. It was easy for me to publish a paper in which I claimed that "surduk" (a regional Croatian word for "stream") comes from an unattested Late Latin word for "bridge", meaning literally "that which leads over", which is obviously wrong and which disagrees with the mainstream science (mainstream science claims it comes from a Turkic language, though, as far as I can see, that also isn't based on evidence). In fact, it seems to me it's a bias against trying to use computational linguistics in the field of Croatian placenames. Which is rather odd, because phonetics and syntax use computer models extensively. But, when you try to publish a paper in which you apply the basics of computational linguistics to the names of places in Croatia, instead of using biased naked human pattern-recognition, your paper will again and again be rejected as "unclear". I mean, I am studying computer science, and I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to editing that paper. And, put it bluntly, I see no reason to think it would actually be unclear to somebody who knows what they are talking about. I still hope it will eventually get published. I don't know if that happens in other sciences. I mean, in every science, including in mathematics, there are journals that publish whatever gibberish people write for it, but this is not the same thing. I can only hope Nina Teicholz isn't right when she suggests that's what's going on in the field of nutritional science, that there is a strong bias against controlled experiments and towards old-fashioned observational studies.
Anyway, I've recently written a
seminar about implementing QuickSort in my own programming language, about measuring how good my compiler is at optimizing compared to free C compilers (not very good), and, most importantly, about trying to predict how many comparisons QuickSort will do based on the known number of elements in the array and the known sortedness of the array. Would you then call that hard science? I was doing controlled experiments and measurements, and I plotted those measurements onto graphs, however, I wasn't actually calculating p-values, I used informal methods (as is seen on the graph...). The most advanced mathematics I appealed to was basic calculus (determining the signs of the derivatives from the graph).