roseweird posted:

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

that's because there's always been plenty of dead and alive bodies for doctors to take a look at and examine, most of them being conveniently about the same size and complexity as the doctor. Predictive reasoning is pretty straight forward (eat lots and you will get fat, smoke lots and you will get cancer) and the number of variables (diet, exercise, routine) is low.



actually my point was that medicine is in many ways a crapshoot, diagnoses are frequently wrong and sometimes the treatments are useless or even harmful to the patient. there are ecological analogues to the extremely simple predictive things you mention (dump poison in a river and lots of the animals will die and the rest will become unhealthy to eat). but the analogue here is more to diagnosing an aggressive cancer or making sense of a confusing neurological disorder. you cannot seriously believe that medicine only deals with a low number of variables. each human body is as complex in its entirety as the entire planet in its entirety, and scientists understand each about as well as the other.

No.

For starters, each human being is controlled by one conscious central nervous system which can govern what it consumes (water and food in our mouth, sunlight on our skin) and how to respond to it's environment with the overarching aim of survival

the earth's climate is not conscious or autonomous and the inputs and ouputs are unquantifiable and unconstrained.

If medicine was like climatology then they would have observed a dude taking home burgers to eat constantly for 15 years, convinced that he was getting fatter. Then when someone asks why he doesn't look fatter they suddenly declare that the burgers were hiding in the basement.

roseweird posted:

thorium seems cool but perhaps i'm just buying into the hype. an aviation engineer friend of mine said he used to work w a thorium reactor at his old job and thought it was the coolest thing ever. the designs have been around since the 60s but were not selected for development by the u.s. government because they did not produce byproducts that would be useful for explosives. or anyway that's what he told me.

hmm, so what other things does you engineer friend think are cool? *breaks out Future Energy Independence for America 2014 notepad*

roseweird posted:

mostly guns jeeps and video games i think

this checks out

its funny bc every single bit of nuclear advocacy ive ever come across has been easily and immediately traced back to some random chemical/computer engineer working his dick up in a lather over thorium reactors because he recognized the word from a video game lol

roseweird posted:

Superabound posted:

this checks out

its funny bc every single bit of nuclear advocacy ive ever come across has been easily and immediately traced back to some random chemical/computer engineer working his dick up in a lather over thorium reactors because he recognized the word from a video game lol

i guess. he did electrical engineering on airplanes and had at least some direct experience with such a reactor. his credentials could be better and i don't trust his politics but i don't know any nuclear physicists and it seems a lot of states around the world are attempting thorium reactor projects, so ... i find it interesting. like i said i am not pro-nuclear per se. i am not pro fossil fuel either, but i'm not saying we must immediately stop burning them all this very second, obviously there needs to be a transitional strategy. what are humans going to do when there are 11 or 14 billion of us and no hydrocarbons left? if i had my way we'd all live in tiny superefficient solar powered hives , but in absence of that ... ?

Fusion and fuel alcohols.

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

Have there been documented negative effects from the process in America? The most comprehensive case i've heard against it is that people watched the Gasland trailer on youtube and there was one bit where a flame came out the tap.

Its extremely well documented by now, to the point where people are actually winning lawsuits against the companies involved which would never happen in a billion years if there wasn't a very dire problem. You very obviously have put zero effort into looking for such things

Superabound posted:

nuclear...coal

Coal produces much more radiation than nuclear power and there's so many more problems with burning coal than just CO2. Maybe its not intentional but your post reads like a defensive statement by a coal exec.

c_man posted:

roseweird is 100% right about medicine and lol at iwc claiming that everything can be quantified in medicine/biology. the human body is unquantifiable and unconstrained in similar ways to the climate but to a lesser extent because its a smaller system. if you've ever heard the term "data scientist" one of the main places where people like that are employed is by laboratories who have so much random biological data that they need to hire teams of people to figure out how to even sensibly analyze the data in a way that a person could understand and we are still nowhere close to having a "full" mechanistic understanding of the human body. you can have dozens of people across the world whose sole interest is in one protein from some simple animal like a bacterium or a worm because the analogous human system is far too complicated to tackle directly without first having some understanding about how it could potentially work from a much much simpler animal. for some context on how big a difference in complexity we're talking about, the main worm that is studied (c. elegans, a little less than a mm long) has a totally mapped brain. you can go into a book an see which of its neurons connect to other neurons, and they are the same in every c elegans. this is something that happened over the course of 40 years. there is still a lot about it that is totally mysterious (e.g. how exactly all of the neurons end up in the same orientation every time). so the point is that medicine on its own doesnt have an unimpeachable foundation but it makes the progress that it has (substantial) by taking intuitive ideas from biology and using those to develop hypotheses about what will happen, and if it works you have a new drug. now since there is a huge industry for drugs this is where fraud happens, and it doesn't help that tools like p-testing are not really the most reliable methods (but the problems in climate science arent generally the kind that significance testing is used for). so yeah biology is hard and people are only starting to come up with quantitative predictive models for nontrivial biological systems very recently and they are nowhere near perfect especially because of all of the openness and lack of access to everything that happens in biology (it is generally very difficult to observe even one subsection of a biological interaction and it is generally not possible to observe a biological interaction in all of the relevant detail).

climate science has additional issues. on one hand, the basic physics of thermodynamics and fluid dynamics is very well understood for extremely simple systems, and there are first principles models for simple fluids (navier stokes) and equilibrium thermodynamics that are quantitatively accurate. the problem is that the resulting equations are extremely inefficient to solve accurately due to turbulence (specifically, in the navier stokes equations there is sensitive dependence on arbitrarily small spatial scales). in addition, the climate is a non-equilibrium system which is much harder to analyze theoretically than equilibrium systems (duh). there are approximations that can be made that somewhat alleviate this problem but the ways in which this can be done are enormous and there are a large number of different parameters that are difficult to measure, which is why a common tactic is to run an ensemble of models that are all slightly different and see which types of effects are robust under these variations (for example, an average increase in temperature). so when someone says "the science is settled" what they mean is that the existing data are very clear (the average trend has been an average increase in temperature) and that the models make robust predictions (an average increase in temperature). because we do not have infinite computational capacity the models that have been run are necessarily imperfect. on the other hand the models used by climate scientists to predict short term weather are actually extremely accurate given the computational complexity of the problem and the national weather service averages out to be fairly accurate (statistically, when it says there is a 10% chance of rain, about 10% of the time it does) so there is reason to believe that the models themselves have something to them.

also, re:thorium, you definitely cant use it for nuclear weapon models that are anything like what we know how to make because the potential fissile material from the thorium decay chain (i forget what it is) is so radioactive it would severely interfere with any nearby electronics that could be used to trigger an explosion. but the best thing about the thorium design is that its a molten salt process which means that in the event of a power outage or something like fukushima all that would happen is that the fluid drains into a storage tank and solidifies until you heat it up and pump it back out. the second best thing is that you can use it to dispose of waste from conventional reactors. the main reason thorium isnt generally seen as feasible is that unless you have a government hell bent on funding all of the infrastructure getting funding to design/build a totally new type of reactor is pretty prohibitive but iirc there was some talk about india doing it?

If you're going to troll, try not to be so boring.

c_man posted:

roseweird is 100% right about medicine and lol at iwc claiming that everything can be quantified in medicine/biology. the human body is unquantifiable and unconstrained in similar ways to the climate but to a lesser extent because its a smaller system. if you've ever heard the term "data scientist" one of the main places where people like that are employed is by laboratories who have so much random biological data that they need to hire teams of people to figure out how to even sensibly analyze the data in a way that a person could understand and we are still nowhere close to having a "full" mechanistic understanding of the human body. you can have dozens of people across the world whose sole interest is in one protein from some simple animal like a bacterium or a worm because the analogous human system is far too complicated to tackle directly without first having some understanding about how it could potentially work from a much much simpler animal. for some context on how big a difference in complexity we're talking about, the main worm that is studied (c. elegans, a little less than a mm long) has a totally mapped brain. you can go into a book an see which of its neurons connect to other neurons, and they are the same in every c elegans. this is something that happened over the course of 40 years. there is still a lot about it that is totally mysterious (e.g. how exactly all of the neurons end up in the same orientation every time). so the point is that medicine on its own doesnt have an unimpeachable foundation but it makes the progress that it has (substantial) by taking intuitive ideas from biology and using those to develop hypotheses about what will happen, and if it works you have a new drug. now since there is a huge industry for drugs this is where fraud happens, and it doesn't help that tools like p-testing are not really the most reliable methods (but the problems in climate science arent generally the kind that significance testing is used for). so yeah biology is hard and people are only starting to come up with quantitative predictive models for nontrivial biological systems very recently and they are nowhere near perfect especially because of all of the openness and lack of access to everything that happens in biology (it is generally very difficult to observe even one subsection of a biological interaction and it is generally not possible to observe a biological interaction in all of the relevant detail).

climate science has additional issues. on one hand, the basic physics of thermodynamics and fluid dynamics is very well understood for extremely simple systems, and there are first principles models for simple fluids (navier stokes) and equilibrium thermodynamics that are quantitatively accurate. the problem is that the resulting equations are extremely inefficient to solve accurately due to turbulence (specifically, in the navier stokes equations there is sensitive dependence on arbitrarily small spatial scales). in addition, the climate is a non-equilibrium system which is much harder to analyze theoretically than equilibrium systems (duh). there are approximations that can be made that somewhat alleviate this problem but the ways in which this can be done are enormous and there are a large number of different parameters that are difficult to measure, which is why a common tactic is to run an ensemble of models that are all slightly different and see which types of effects are robust under these variations (for example, an average increase in temperature). so when someone says "the science is settled" what they mean is that the existing data are very clear (the average trend has been an average increase in temperature) and that the models make robust predictions (an average increase in temperature). because we do not have infinite computational capacity the models that have been run are necessarily imperfect. on the other hand the models used by climate scientists to predict short term weather are actually extremely accurate given the computational complexity of the problem and the national weather service averages out to be fairly accurate (statistically, when it says there is a 10% chance of rain, about 10% of the time it does) so there is reason to believe that the models themselves have something to them.

also, re:thorium, you definitely cant use it for nuclear weapon models that are anything like what we know how to make because the potential fissile material from the thorium decay chain (i forget what it is) is so radioactive it would severely interfere with any nearby electronics that could be used to trigger an explosion. but the best thing about the thorium design is that its a molten salt process which means that in the event of a power outage or something like fukushima all that would happen is that the fluid drains into a storage tank and solidifies until you heat it up and pump it back out. the second best thing is that you can use it to dispose of waste from conventional reactors. the main reason thorium isnt generally seen as feasible is that unless you have a government hell bent on funding all of the infrastructure getting funding to design/build a totally new type of reactor is pretty prohibitive but iirc there was some talk about india doing it?

damn i guess the vaccines do cause autism

postposting posted:

what are your guys favorite sciences? for me top five:

5) chemistry
4) phrenology
3) astronomy botany
2) marxism-leninism-maoism
1) geology

ed^^(forgot botany)

chickeon posted:

Coal produces much more radiation than nuclear power and there's so many more problems with burning coal than just CO2. Maybe its not intentional but your post reads like a defensive statement by a coal exec.

and whyyyy does burning coal produce so much radiation? because it contains thorium and uranium lol