The theories are incompatible at all energy levels, it's simply that those are two examples where we can't use them to accurately predict outcomes. Another not-extreme-at-all example where quantum physics completely breaks down is empty space. However, this discussion is deliberately missing the point, which is that it's not making predictions in everyday scenarios where physics fails. It's in describing the basic nature of our universe, which are two completely different things all together.
You're right that there are examples of scientists who highlight these gaps in our knowledge, there are more who simply pay some lip service to them, and then there's a much larger group of people, like dbasedweeb, who irrationally suppress all criticisms of scientific theories as if they were literally religious beliefs.
1. forming an essential foundation or starting point; fundamental.
Your answers to those questions are either deliberately over-simplifying to avoid the question, or you don’t understand QED yourself. Your definition of a particle describes a possible outcome of a measurement, and ignores the existence of a wave function. Your description of gravity cannot be created in QED. You have provided no explanation of space whatsoever, which is so woefully unexplained by quantum mechanics, that it is referred to as the ‘vacuum catastrophe’.
Anybody who investigates these concepts can see that our understanding of them is woefully incomplete. However scientists tend to have a very hard time acknowledging these limits of our understanding, and will often respond to such acknowledgements with thinly veiled contempt. Just as you have done by trying to undermine my opinion on them, rather than responding to what I have said. I think that by failing to acknowledge the limits of scientific understanding, maybe you are confusing science with religion?
An argument between ‘basic’ and ‘fundamental’ is a semantic one, and bordering on pointless.
QED works quite well in most cases, but only if you don’t look too closely, and only if you ignore one of the fundamental forces. QED offers no explaination for gravity, which even non-physicists know exists.
What is gravity? What is a particle? What is space? These are all quite basic questions that were not even close to having complete answers for. QED provides a “good enough” explaination for how particles and space work, just as relativity gives a “good enough” explaination of gravity. But any physicist who’s being intellectually honest knows that we only have a rudimentary understanding of these concepts. The wave function is just an excellent tool we use to smooth out our lack of understanding. Your comment is a perfect example of the arrogance that pervades the scientific community, and the inability to acknowledge the limits of our own understanding. Which I think only inhibits the wider community’s ability to communicate effectively with the general public.
You might argue that what kept Elizabeth Holmes out of trouble was her public persona as well. Neither case has the aroma of justice as far as I'm concerned.
>relentlessly adjusted and overfitted and still appears very inadequate to fit all the evidence
Welcome to physics. The Copenhagen Interpretation is the most concise and robustly tested theory in all of physics. Yet it was dreamt up by a literal absurdist who thought that the universe itself has no objective state of existence. For all we know about the universe, we can still not answer many of the most basic questions about it. The lesson to be learnt from this is that our greatest theories are at best woefully incomplete, and that even our greatest scientists don't have the ability to talk about many things with any level of objective certainty.
In order to benefit from agile, your codebase and pipelines absolutely NEED to be built in such a way that they can easily accept and ship lots of small changes, and ideally should maximise the efficiency of your code. You should spend most of your time writing business logic, rather than code to facilitate the code that contains your business logic.
That’s grade school arithmetic. We’re not talking about people who aren’t intelligent enough to do arithmetic, we’re talking about people who don’t have the correct mindset and motivation to make small, incremental investments in their future.
People aren’t property any more, we all have equal protection under the law, we have mostly reliable social welfare programs, and private charitable programs are bigger than they’ve ever been. Your analogy doesn’t hold any water at all.
The correct effort is simply whatever a person can do to make incremental improvements to their lives. It’s going to be different for everybody. Psychologically, part of the reason that poverty traps are so easy to fall into is because people in poverty don’t have the luxury of indulging in much long term decision making. However some opportunity always exists, and finding an exploiting those opportunities is the only way out.
The reason there is any focus on the individual is because you can’t simply subsidize out of poverty. If you want people to get out of poverty and to stay out of poverty, then those people need to take responsibility for their own destiny. Arguably society could do a better job of giving people the tools to do that, but that doesn’t change the dynamics of the problem. The truth is that if I was in that persons shoes, I’d be living a better life than they are. Because I was, and I managed to, and those skills eventually got me completely out of poverty all together.
I don’t disagree with most of that. The loan shark maths is just one (rather contrived) example of how a person can break out of a particular poverty trap.
It’s harder to break out of a poverty trap than it is to live with one, but it’s much easier to stay out of one than it is to live with it. My point is that with the correct effort, people can generally break free of most of the poverty traps they find themselves in.
To speak to your last point, there generally are non-profits around who help with these sort of things, and I used some of them myself in the past. The thing that non-profits can provide so simply is the motivation and discipline required to maintain a well planned budget. Each small thing that you improve, like buying diapers in bulk, is a step towards escaping poverty, and everybody has the capacity to do those things.
At 200% you still come out ahead after your first packet of diapers.
As somebody who grew up in abject poverty, and who lived in poverty for the first portion of their adult life, better planning will absolutely make situations like this instantaneouly better. When I was poor as hell I put a huge amount of effort into buying in bulk and doing various other things to avoid all of the blindingly obvious poverty traps that exist. It took some hardship to get everything established properly, but my whole life was hardship, so big deal...
Most people in the west could get away with living a sustainable (although shitty) lifestyle in poverty. It’s only proper planning and effort that will pull them out of it.
I don't know if the numbers in the comment you're referring to are correct, but let's assume they're close enough and do the math.
If I pay $5 every other day for 10 diapers, then I'm paying ~$75/month for 150 diapers. $0.50/diaper, $2.50/day.
If I take a pay day loan of $30 for a 200 pack of diapers, then I've just brought a 40 day supply of diapers. $0.15/diaper, $0.75/day.
After 16 days I've recouped my original investment of a $30 loan + $10 fee. By the time day 40 rolls around and I run out of diapers, I've saved $60. I can now afford to buy bulk diapers in perpetuity. For every subsequent month, I'll be spending $52.5 less on diapers.
No I don’t, because that never happened. I do remember millions of soviet citizens dying from famine though, and millions more dying from state sponsored killing. I don’t remember any famines taking place in developed free markets during that period. However, I have a pretty clear memory of the two class system that developed in all of the socialist nations that existed in the 20th century. One of the starving poor, and another of the rich oligarchs.
Absolutely, nothing has brought a greater level of prosperity and equality to the world than free market capitalism. This is simply an empirical fact. Just like it is an empirical fact that every socialist nation in history has created huge levels of poverty and inequality.
But why is propaganda your preferred option over traditional content moderation? I doubt many people would considering it controversial to censor calls to violence. However when you start to focus on "hate speech" (which is where this line of reasoning will take you) and add propaganda to your moderation toolkit, then you start to cross the line into full blown dystopia territory.
Again, this may be a more compelling example of how you might define "hate speech". But if you think facebook has a responsibility to start moderating speech based on its perceived "hatefulness", then you're still going to end up at the same destination, where genuine public discourse is gradually replaced with corporate approved discourse.
I don't support any of the propaganda that Facebook pushes. This also doesn't have anything to do with ads. The issues is that when these mega-platforms decide that they are going to promote one side of a political issue, and suppress another (as they have been doing more and more), this comes at the cost of freedom of expression, and all you're left with is corporate approved discourse.
Of course this is much easier to rationalize in this situation. However that's how you end up giving away liberty. You give it up in little pieces in response to extreme situations, then when you go back about your life you don't get it back.
The real issue here is that this gets the whole problem backwards. We shouldn't be looking at a state-sponsored genocide and then claiming that "if only Facebook had more control over public discourse then we'd be able to solve this problem". The "problem" in that statement can be anything from this genocide taking place, to your preferred candidate losing an election. "We need more propaganda" isn't going to solve any of that, and in reality it's just a veiled power grab by companies that wish to control public discourse more effectively.
>How trivial would it be to make sure this leader in the article who 'never met a Muslim', was forced to scroll through a feed with positive messages about Muslims and religious tolerance?
So when the users don't conform to the world view of the platform operators, the answer is platform sponsored propaganda? That is incredibly dystopian.
They're not really comparable when you look at the numbers. Facebook had 500 million active users, a steadily growing user base (1 billion was projected within a year at the time of the IPO), and a clear monetisation strategy.
Snap had 150 million active users, most importantly it's growth was seriously stunted, and it's monetisation strategy was rather 2 dimensional.
Facebook IPO'd at around $100 billion, Snap IPO'd at $20 billion, and it got very close to $30 billion in the trading immediately after. However nothing about it's numbers should justify that. Investors get seduced by the promise of a SaaS revenue hockey stick, and I hope people learn the lessons of Snap before they buy into future hype IPOs so easily.
You're right that there are examples of scientists who highlight these gaps in our knowledge, there are more who simply pay some lip service to them, and then there's a much larger group of people, like dbasedweeb, who irrationally suppress all criticisms of scientific theories as if they were literally religious beliefs.