nerd_stuff's comments

Then come up with a better mnemonic or trick that captures the essence of the general case.

Like Fanana: First times all of them, next times all of them, next times all of them... it's not 100% clear but it took 10 seconds to come up with and it works with trinomials and beyond.

Or FettuchENE: First times each of them, plus next times each of them.... Ok, that's kind of bad, but you get the point. FOIL sticks around not becuase it's the best but because it's the most memorable, it's a meme. We should introduce better memes to compete with it.

For the opposing view see Street Fighting Mathematics which encourages not only using tricks but using them well and often.

The problem is if you only learn the trick without the reasoning behind it. The solution isn't to not learn the trick, it's to learn why it works.

I think it's a disservice to kids who will go into science and engineering if they've never been allowed to use heuristics before. Too often you learn a long-form solution method and then the "trick" to solve it quickly and you need to be able to do both.

https://www.edx.org/course/street-fighting-math-mitx-6-sfmx

He lived in Arizona which is hot and a school full of space-heaters (humans) will probably run AC more often than heat.

What grandparent commenter showed was the school district's numbers are plausible. I doubt the district entered into a legal battle without first consulting an engineer or two about the electric costs.

I think "Digital Taylorism" is more accurate and informative than calling it "scientific management". The quotes let you know The Economist is intentionally using a famous misnomer but I'm not sure that comes across in a HN title where the main title isn't seen first.

I would suggest "Digital Taylorism threatens...." or "Modern Taylorism threatens..." as a title.

If it's a calm, rational discussion about evidence then science usually wins. In fact science wins that one so often it isn't very exciting.

If it's a heated debate about who can call who which names then everybody loses. Which is why I chose to present them with the evidence they asked for while giving them the benefit of the doubt. When somebody with views like this gives the invitation to discuss evidence I say take it in good faith and encourage them to continue down that path.

> One huge problem with scientism is that it invites, as an almost allergic reaction, the total rejection of science. As we know to our cost, we witness this every day with climate change deniers...

Just a few paragraphs later he celebrates how irritating philosophy is while sidestepping how much its pompous pedanticism encourages anti-intellectualism. If it's a "huge problem with scientism" then it should also be a huge problem with philosophism.

It's also unclear how exactly "scientism" is responsible for climate change deniers. Somebody says "I believe someday science will explain everything!" and so somebody else says "Oh yeah? Climate change is a hoax by the government to get money!" Perhaps the author uses the word to describe being arrogant about science but you can be plenty arrogant about it without adopting a view of "scientism".

A quick Google search gives these top links for starters:

NASA: Climate Change Evidence - http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/indicators/

Union of Concerned Scientists: http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/global-warming/science-and-im...

Weather Underground: Evidence of Climate Change: http://www.wunderground.com/climate/evidence.asp

My intention isn't to be argumentative but to point out that the field of science described by Kuhn doesn't match the field of science that I've seen in reality. Let me be more specific.

> "When we read a science textbook, all of the information is placed within the structure of the current paradigm, as if none other came before it."

Newtonian physics isn't taught from within the frameworks of quantum mechanics or relativity. The opposite is true, it's taught as if we live in a constant-time, deterministic universe. That's an exact wrong prediction for the most central and fundamental field of science. To make it worse it's something that's easy to check. That's frustrating.

When was the last time you actually read a science textbook? When you learn a big idea you're usually also taught when it was figured out, who did it and what it replaced. If you think back to chemistry when you were taught about the Bohr model of the atom you were probably also taught about the plum pudding model, that "atom" means indivisible and so on all the way back to the Greek system of four elements.

A quick visit to wikipedia shows modern geology dates itself back to the 17th century. You can view the field since then as successive additions and modifications to what was started by Nicholas Sterno in 1669 when he stated the law of superposition, the principle of original horizontality and the principle of lateral continuity. Those are 3 of the 7 principles of modern stratigraphy that wikipedia lists, but according to you and Kuhn the "modern paradigm" of geology starts in 1965 and everything before that's been erased?

Here's the part of the lecture mentioned in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaUlqXRPMmY

Feynman was an excellent communicator, it's rare that having an intermediary "explain" what he was saying adds more than it takes away.

Perhaps you should learn something from Kuhn and consider that attachment to your pet paradigm is holding you back.

When a scientist wants to build up the self-image of science they do the exact opposite of what you're suggesting. They use Newton as an example to prove that science is superior to the other disciplines he also practiced but bore no fruit.

> Relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics in the same way that Copernican cosmology overturned Ptotomeic cosomology.......So are these revolutions somehow categorically different?

They're so different that I'm surprised it's even a question. If anything the illusion of mind is bending them to fit a narrative.

When Relativity explained the precession of Mercury's perihelion the existing physics was off by 1/12,000,000th of Mercury's orbit (per orbit.) Not only was the Ptolemic system off by entire degrees (as opposed to arcseconds which are 1/3,600th of a degree) it was highly dependent on the position of the observer, if you stood on Jupiter I imagine the Ptolemic system would give you complete nonsense as to where the planets would be.

More importantly Newton's work has never been thrown out and you can derive classical mechanics as a special case of Relativity. You can also derive it from quantum mechanics. I don't believe you can show that the geocentric model of the solar system is a special case of the heliocentric model.

I've given you a corrective upvote.

I agree you need physics Newton never dreamt of for photocells. Explaining Mercury's precession was a big deal for Relativity as well. Out of curiosity, what's non-Newtonian in a rocket launch?

The General Sholium[0] was an addendum, not a set of corrections to The Principia. And what book doesn't have some corrections between the first and second edition?

> There are sociological reasons why students of science are not encouraged to read Newton for themselves.

Like what? Do you think physics teachers are afraid their students will find out Newton believed in God and then they won't be atheists? Do you think they're pushing materialism or "scientism" and rewriting history to that end? This is close to a conspiracy theory. I think you're ascribing malice or ill intent to what are almost purely pragmatic choices.

Here's the text of The Principia[1], read a few pages and imagine a physics student trying to make sense of it. When I finally opened it I found exactly what I had always been told I would find: something interesting but hard to read and not the best place to learn physics. I don't think there are any physics books today that prove the fundamentals of calculus in the middle of their discussion of physics. That's a pedagogical nightmare. Today you learn calculus and then you do physics with it, but Newton developed calculus to do physics so there were no calculus books he could assume his audience was already familiar with.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Scholium [1] - http://www.archive.org/stream/newtonspmathema00newtrich/newt...

Newton's scientific ideas, which are what matter here, remain largely untouched since they were published in the late 1600's. The fact that you'd resort to bringing up how little science focuses on his beliefs in things like numerology and alchemy doesn't bode well for the strength of Kuhn's work.

There's his scientific work which is widely available, and then there's his personal beliefs. I could really care less if we don't talk about his theology, but if you're accusing science of being dishonest about his mathematical and scientific contributions that's a claim which requires better evidence than you've provided.

You have a point but I forgot we were going back to Alchemy and before.

Phlogiston theory was overturned but the idea of oxygen is still standing strong despite the major advances in chemistry since 1773. Other puzzle pieces have been placed around it but they're additions to it. Even if the universe turns out to be a hologram the idea of oxygen will survive.

Once the big puzzle pieces are found they're rarely removed. Since the big shift towards empiricism most "revolutions" and paradigm shifts are happening in new areas or at different scales than the old ones. Much of what are being called revolutions I would call explorations of the unknown.

Am I the only one who read the article and thought the Whig interpretation was more accurate? The "revolution" of quantum mechanics didn't overthrow Newtonian mechanics, Relativity didn't either. They added to Newton's view and corrected it in a few places but to this day the first thing you learn in physics is Newton.

There was no revolution. Newton was right with the caveat that if things are very large, very small, or very fast things may look different. To this day if something disagrees with the core of what Newton said it's almost certainly wrong. The fact that the "paradigm shift" from deterministic to probabilistic left most of science untouched should show how paradigms aren't all that important. Quantum mechanics has multiple "paradigms" describing the exact same things and they're doing close to nothing in terms of pushing science forward, some think they're holding it back because so much time is spent arguing about them.

I don't think what Feynman said was any more belligerent than kicking an unwanted guest out of one's house.

Not to nitpick but because this is really cool: petrified wood is actually stone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrified_wood

It's been a while but I'm pretty sure the spinning arrows are Phasors. Ironically the spinning arrows might make more sense than the math that describes them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phasors