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Did anyone see Terrence Howard on Joe Rogan? Would love to see what the motte thinks.
Personally I'm withholding judgment until he goes up against someone credible.
What are you withholding judgment on? He seems like a pretty garden variety hotep logician, the kind of guy that believes a lot of incredibly dumb shit and says it smugly because it makes him feel like he's actually very smart.
I believe that your confidence in believing something should be proportional to how close you are to that something.
For example I (I believe) I should not be more confident about string theory than an actual physicists that deals with the frontier of string theory on a day to day basis. Which means if the most knowledgeable string theorist is 95% sure that string theory is true/viable/useful, then me who gets all my information second hand (through YouTube videos, podcasts, articles, lectures, papers) should not be more than 95% sure about string theory.
Watching the Terrence Howard podcast I realised that I cannot defend against anything he is saying. I'm not saying he is correct. I'm not saying he is incorrect. I've simply deemed myself too far away from where the actual science happens to say anything intelligent on the matter at all.
Everything I know about physics comes from people who (supposedly) know more than most people on physics. I just took their word for it. I've never seen a proton, neutron or electron. I've never looked through a telescope and observed different galaxies. I've never sat down and really tried to understand the math that supports quantum physics. Yet I believe all these things. I just understand that I am trusting these high status people (Physicists) and their findings. But these people that I trust can be wrong. They could have missed something.
In my experience the best way to learn as a layperson is to watch experts (or people who have spent a longer than average time on a subject) debate each other and google/chatgpt/research all the points of disagreement that come up.
Other than entertainment, what value does one's confidence in something like the laws of physics or string theory have to the average layperson?
It honestly doesn't matter if it's correct or not unless you're working on something where that knowledge has a direct impact on something you're engaged with. For most people, your ability to function in the world is no better or worse whether you choose to believe in or not believe in string theory.
Usually, the "value" in this kind of sophistry in trying to recontextualize the lens to view the world is to open up people's mind to the possibility that maybe our fundamental assumptions about the world are incorrect and in doing so you might be able to unlock a new way of viewing the world or thinking that can yield positive results.
Okay, I can agree with this that, so why not use an actual useful example that can show that instead of arguing that if you change the axioms of mathematics 1x1=2. This feels just like that 2+2=5 controversy that just happened a few years ago. All the conversation gets lost in the absurdity of the example because frankly speaking, nobody goes around changing the axioms of mathematics in their day-to-day lives. It's only useful to mathematicians and philosophers.
Since you're deferring to the experts for subjects you don't understand, why are you listening to Terrence Howard, who is an actor and not a mathematician or logician or philosopher or scientist?
If you want to listen to a counterpoint of Howard's ideas, here's a video by YouTuber Professor Dave Explains: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lWAyfr3gxMA
This is a guy who typically makes videos debunking pseudoscience ideas like flat earth theory. He's probably just as qualified as Terrence Howard to talk about the subject.
I watched the first twenty minutes, and the utter contempt is expected, but this part bothered me. He mocks an interview where Howard says he can rebuild Saturn without gravity, and claims that any simulation would need gravity, yet that's not true at all! You can build a model to any specifications you want, including not having any gravity. He explains this in the podcast that Dave clearly didn't care to watch, that it's based on electrostatic forces and vortexes that meet at deliberate angle of incidence.
If you can create a model of the universe without including gravity, and can run that model a recreate known and observable phenomena, then congratulations, you can in fact rebuild Saturn without gravity.
I still don't believe 1x1 = 2, but when you choose not to understand I'm not going to give you much credence. He just completely repeats that everything is meaningless and counters with the established science as an appeal to authority.
If you can't prove this shit from first principles, or explain how it was first proven from first principles, then you don't know anything. This video in forty five minutes long, it can't be an issue with time length.
Not reading all this shit or watching some smug deboonker, but at a certain point, nonsense is too nonsensical to deboonk or deconstruct. You can't deboonk Timecube, for example.
Proving that 1*1=1 from first principles is very easy - natural-number mathematics defines 1 axiomatically as the multiplicative identity!
In what axiom set? Peano arithmetic just defines 1 as the successor of 0, and showing it's the multiplicative identity then requires a proof by induction.
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You don't prove axioms, you take them as a given. That's what makes them axioms.
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