Pop-science writing is metaphysical self-help?

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Published on: June 28, 2020

Interesting article about popular science books. Are they becoming more like religious texts? here is an excerpt from the article..

“…….By writing about concepts like quantum entanglement and cosmic background radiation, physicists are trying to help us acclimate to a modern metaphysical reality that remains permanently new and challenging, even though its essence has been clear for centuries. That’s because we are all born with an instinct to find human meanings in the universe. The scientific revolution isn’t a historical event that happened a few centuries ago, but a process that takes place in the life of every person who learns scientific truth.

The final irony, however, is that this piety toward the truth is itself a legacy of the old, religious metaphysics that science rejects…..”

More of this here: [The Ontology of Pop Physics]

 

 

Few collection of videos on basics of music theory

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Published on: June 21, 2020

Music is a fascinating. Below are some are excellent videos that breakdown the concepts of (western) music into its barebones – notes, intervals, keys scales, chords, …etc. Gives you a vocabulary to talk about them.

 

Another site with some interactive learning: https://www.musictheory.net/lessons

Difference between cost and value

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Published on: June 14, 2020

A lot has been written about differences in cost and value.

Cost of an item is how much effort & resources has gone into creating it.

Value of an item is how much it is worth to a person buying it or owning it.

E.g. “Your customers don’t care what it took for you to make something. They care about what it does for them” [Seth’s blog- Cost & Value]

 

 

Some interesting sources for documentaries

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Published on: June 9, 2020

Documentaries are a good visual articulation of a written article. Here are some links to documentaries that I have seen in the recent times.

 

What makes theories fail?

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Published on: June 1, 2020

An interesting review of work from Imre Lakatos on the idea of  how theories/science fail? A crucial aspect for science to be progressive. Also check works from Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and others.

Here is an interesting excerpt from the article …

“…  Lakatos judged a programme to be ‘progressive’ if it is both theoretically progressive – the hard core plus auxiliary hypotheses predict novel empirical facts – and experimentally progressive: at least some of these novel facts can be tested. In contrast, a programme is ‘degenerating’ if it is theoretically degenerating – it doesn’t predict any novel facts – or it is theoretically progressive but experimentally degenerating: none of the novel facts can be tested.”

 

“….Lakatos merged the distinction between science and non-science, and between good and bad science. If a programme predicts nothing new or its predictions can’t be tested, then it is bad science, and might be degenerating to the point of pseudoscience. Empirical tests serve to refine the auxiliary hypotheses and a programme continues to be progressive for as long as new facts are predicted and new tests are possible. A scientific revolution occurs when a dominant programme has completely degenerated and is unable to respond to accumulating anomalies – creating precisely the crisis of confidence that Kuhn anticipated – until it can be replaced by an alternative, progressive programme. But, according to Lakatos, when the time comes, a revolution is driven by logic and method, not irrational mob psychology: ‘the Kuhnian “Gestalt-switch” can be performed without removing one’s Popperian spectacles’.”

 

More of this here: [The Link]1

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