[nicoburns]

Some key things for me would be the ideas that:

1. There is no such thing as objectivity in inquiry. There is always a scientist interpreting things, and they are always looking at things through the lens of their own biases and cultural norms. The best you can hope to do is to be aware of your limitations.

1. Statistical evidence on its own is not always a good basis for believing something to be true. Typically you also want a good theoretical model, and an understanding of the mechanism that underlies the observed phenomena (physics is good at this, psychology not so much).

3. That there is more knowledge than is detectable through statistical methods (currently at least). And that lack of evidence from statistical studies does not necessarily constitute good evidence that a theory is false.

[LudwigNagasena]

1. This is pretty trivial. Why do you think most scientists aren’t aware of their limitations?

2. This is studied in statistics classes. It is impossible to analyze data without a statistical model, so of course your conclusions rely on it. So this is also quite trivial.

3. Again, are scientists oblivious to this simple notion? I doubt it.

[twhb]

Why is it that mirrors flip your image left to right, but not top to bottom?

That’s a question that Richard Feynman supposedly asked his grad students. Once you answer it, I think you’ll realize that #1 is anything but trivial.

Answer below, stop reading this comment if you want to figure it out on your own.

It’s because you’re comparing the mirror image to what you’d look like if you walked around the mirror, instead of to what you’d look like if you floated over the top. This assumption of horizontal travel is incredibly deeply engrained in humans, to the point that the English language doesn’t even have up/down equivalents to the words “left” and “right”, i.e. a word that means the direction closer to your head than to your feet regardless of your orientation.

[Ao7bei3s]

A mirror doesn't swap left and right, it swaps front and back.

The realizations that people expect yaw rotation because that's what they are used to, or that normal day language isn't always precise (my left? your left?), seem extremely trivial to me and doesn't require any deep philosophical "insights".

In the hard sciences, you often don't even need the handwavey "swap a and b" explanation when it is much more useful to just model its behavior (ingress ray/plane intersection, normalize ingress ray, subtract twice normal vector of plane from ray to get egress ray direction).

I'm sure Feynman was a great physicist and teacher, but he's also great at just wowing people by using lots of words without saying much. Like in his famous why-is-ice-slippery video where he goes onto a completely unnecessary discourse on the nature of questions instead of just answering the dang question.

I always felt that is the perfect way to showcase the difference between education and edutainment, and I assume his lectures were a bit more substantial.

[twhb]

I think you’re certainly correct, but remember that the question wasn’t just about understanding mirrors, but using mirrors to make a point about bias. “A mirror image is swapped left to right” doesn’t appear to be biased at all, and yet it is.

Also, just for fun: what makes calling it swapped front to back more valid than left to right? One could recover the (translated, rotated) original image through any of a front to back swap, left to right swap, or top to bottom swap. They’re all lenses, and equally valid.

[Kim_Bruning]

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

I guess technically correct, because they're mostly latin loan words.

[twhb]

I didn’t know that terminology, thank you.

But reading the article, are those not applicable only to body parts? Would an astronaut ever say to another astronaut, while floating in different orientations, “Hit the button to your superior”?

Either way, I think it’s at least correct to say that there are no layman words for it.

[LudwigNagasena]

I fail to see how it in any way relates to #1.

[sprafa]

A lot of this stuff applies more to bad scientists, of which there are many.

[dennis_jeeves]

LudwigNagasena, to you it may be obvious ( as it was to me). However I discovered ( much to my disappointment) that it is not obvious to career 'scientists'. A fool with a phd is still a fool. What used to the domain of primarily religions (rituals, superstitions etc.) is now the domain of several offshoots, one of which is mainstream science.

[austhrow743]

Is this coming from judging peoples actions or discussion with acquaintances and colleagues, or in discussion with trusted friends who are career scientists?

My understanding is that a lot of problems in science are incentive based, and that would look very similar to someone just not knowing things from the outside.

[dennis_jeeves]

Mostly based on the 'science' out there. I probably know about 3 career scientists, I think, which is probably not a good sample.

>My understanding is that a lot of problems in science are incentive based, and that would look very similar to someone just not knowing things from the outside.

I can agree that a lot of it may be probably incentive based vs 'scientists' just not being smart enough. But is is hard to glean what the proportions are. I still suspect ( based on a general assessment of people both known and on the internet) that it is the latter.