You smile and say, "I appreciate your input. I value it and consider it a good starting point. I am not certain it alone provides the level of support necessary for me to consider a different path, but I would consider both additional data and reducing the amount of evidence I require with a good reason."
Like everyone else, scientists are so convinced of what they know that they won't listen to other opinions.
The problem is that scientists think their knowledge is truth because it comes from "the scientific method." They fail to internalize that the whole point of that method is that no knowledge is sacred and everything should be doubted to the degree at which evidence exists to the contrary.
A crackpot conspiracy theory with a single anecdotal source of data is sufficient to create doubt in the soundest of theories. Just not much.
I've started telling new grads / interns that ask me "how 2 get jerb" to cut their resume to 1/3 of a page. Because we still need interns and juniors, and we already know they don't know a damn thing, and the only thing that would stand out at this point is _not_ making me read half a page about your capstone.
We have all the titles we need. We have junior for "that guy who can't do a fuckin' thing unless you tell him exactly what to type." We have senior for "that guy who can take a ticket and implement it." We have lead for "that guy who can take a business idea and implement it."
I spent about three months consulting for some crypto company as a distributed systems engineer.
They paid me to design an eventually consistent, self-healing data store with a cache layer / write ahead log, with peers determined by paxos consensus, transfers metered by finops and govered with kademlia, and a storage layer capable of byzantine fault tolerance, which we implemented via signature chains.
See, they had this crazy idea that they'd make a cryptocurrency that they could sell to western digital, who could offer hard drives that "filled themselves up" with other people's data when idle. WD would obv make a buck and maybe sell these drives for much cheaper than the component cost. I'm not exactly sure of the economics. I think the idea was to have half the drives be "receivers" and half be "senders" and actually sell the "senders" for way more than component cost, but provide trivial effort file backup.
I think they're still building it. I dunno if it'll be a scam or not. I had fun though.
Given how much OCD I have about naming variables and writing unit tests, I think if this was in front of my house, I'd take a sledgehammer to it. Fences shall be straight, damnit.
When I want "this will run forever," I write it in Rust.
When I want "this will compile forever," I write it in ANSI C.
When I want "this will live forever," I write it Python 2.7 and make it the backbone of the entire org's infra templating. Bonus points if it's a custom Ansible module.
> And lots of us are still using the basic UNIX tools in their GNU versions like grep, awk, sed, vi/vim, etc., aged 30 (vim, ssh) to 50 years (grep, sed).
Including myself. That's sort of my point. It's always fun reminding the Junior Engineers that, unlike whatever flavor of the month library the blogosphere calls The Next Big Thing, the majority of the stuff that comes preinstalled into their multiarch container image is older than they are.
Programming has changed a lot in 60 years, but not much in 40 years. By the early 80s, at least the workflow was fixed: type code on keyboard, read code on monitor, compile code, make cup of coffee, compile failed, debug code, you used the wrong brace, dummy.
I don't know, man. The last time they tested my IQ, they wanted me to come back and take the test again, because I was "out of bounds" for the test they gave me. My parents refused, because none of us cared enough to spend another $800.
And I took a _lot_ of shrooms.
Unfortunately, I majored in Philosophy. So, I'll never find the right answer to life's great mysteries. I did get fairly good at pointing out the wrong ones, though.
Fair. I misstated my premise. "Find the math that allows zero to be treated like any other number, or, find the math that treats it like it's definitely the wrong answer."
Consistency is the key. What we have now is only locally consistent. You can break it into pieces with set theory, geometry, etc. You're never going to find a unifying equation in a version of mathematics where geometry and algebra don't mesh.
No, those are fine. Well, almost. They're not uniquely broken, at least.
Mathematics would have me believe "the sum of all positive integers" is a negative number. They can provide glorious proofs of that fact. When you insert the result into the physics equations, the equations work.
But the idea is, on its face, stupid. Any child would tell you as much. The equations only "work" on that premise because they're almost right.
But that's not a problem with infinity, it's a problem with something we're assuming when we go to write the proof in the first place. And whatever that problem is... it's almost certainly the thing stopping us from solving the Riemann hypothesis.
You, by definition, cannot. Our best science suggests that `t` ceases to be a linear value at t=0. It's why we define t=0 to be there.
The problem is the absurdity of the idea that `t` could ever cease to be a linear value. Causality is a fundamental truth. To lose the idea of "before" and "after" is to lose causality.
If your fundamental theorem of the universe requires you to forego causality, you should consider looking elsewhere.