Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Currently reading Descent of Man by Charles Darwin. What's striking to me is how much of a not-Darwinist Darwin is. I mean, he's a naturalist, yes, but check this out:
That sounds like Lamarckism to me. Bro be out there batting for the other team. And it's not like he wrote this when he was 12, before he had his head screwed on straight. This was toward the end of his life!
The classroom story we were told about the history of evolution, at least in my school, was very misleading. In my school, we were taught Lamarck was basically the Aristotle of evolution, saying a bunch of harebrained nonsense he made up, and Darwin was basically Newton who came along and explained how it akshually worked. But that is not at all how this played out.
Just because he used the word “perfected?” I don’t like it when colloquialisms get verbally captured by their misuses in the history of a discipline. That’s the only thing that leads me to make that comparison. I was taught in a way similar to you from the sound of it, but I’m not really seeing the problem here. I think the passage is going a little more work for you than it otherwise should be.
More options
Context Copy link
Fascinating. I love a good conspiracy theory. Something about DarwinismTM doesn’t sit right with me. I’m not a young earth creationist, but it does seem there are a lot of big outstanding questions. And it’s presented to every Westerner as a fairy tale story in school.
Why is this? Well it’s obvious. Politics.
Try bringing this up in typical PMC company and see their reaction.
The supply curve offers higher quantities at less fidelity. The demand curve is populated by bored high-schoolers. Solve for the equilibrium.
Alternatively: fairy tale stories are a map, the map is not the territory, and ain’t nobody got time for a better map.
More options
Context Copy link
Nah, this is pretty common. Like if you read Maxwell 1865, it looks nothing like the modern presentation of Maxwell’s equations. It’s not because people are lying, it’s because the underlying idea has been substantially cleaned up from the first person to stumble upon it.
Another example: calculus didn’t even have any rigorous foundation until a century after Newton, when Cauchy finally came up with the modern epsilon-delta thing we teach everyone today.
Modern presentation is only wrong in the sense that it’s biased towards presenting the polished ideas in their final state, while attributing this to the original thinkers, when in reality, there’s usually a big story between "guy who originally thought of this" and "what we’re actually presenting to you in class today."
The Gaussian distribution is another example. The distribution itself was proposed by Gauss, yes, but the justification for why this distribution is indeed the peremptory-correct distribution was done by Laplace (who had proposed several prior attempts at his own normal distribution!) The logic of why the normal distribution is the normal distribution—what we now know as the Central Limit Theorem—is the meat of the story, and yet Laplace’s name is merely a footnote to anyone except math nerds.
Yeah, and furthermore for calculus we all still pay the price because limits are honestly only taught as a holdover from that attempt to prove to other math people calculus was legit. You don't actually need an understanding of limits at all for nearly anything you do in calculus, but the big standardized tests include it so everyone is forced to teach it anyways.
Also IIRC neither Laplace nor Gauss were the actual very first dudes to propose the Normal distribution, that was actually de Moivre as a binomial approximation (who ALSO got robbed of Poisson distribution naming rights). Though Laplace was doubly a reputational victim, since he furthermore got robbed of credit somewhat because he was the dude who did most of the work with Bayesian statistics and inference much like he did for calculus. Sir Bayes didn't even publish his stuff himself. And Laplace did most of the cleanup work for Newton's gravitational theories.
But yeah, naming in math and science is a bit of a mess.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link