What is and isn’t stupid to believe depends on the general state of knowledge.
Given what Newton’s society knew at the time, alchemy wasn’t stupid—not enough was known about the nature of matter to know that alchemy was hopeless.
150 years ago nobody had researched smoking—it had some obvious positive effects and no obvious bad effects. Nothing stupid about smoking, then. Almost the same can be said for seatbelts and asbestos (they had obvious pros and cons, of which the magnitudes were not understood).
Environmental destruction is not bad at small scales, nor is burning fossil fuels. It’s scale that make them bad.
On the other hand, today we know enough about the way the universe works to say that pyramid power, crystal healing, and runes on A4 paper are stupid. As is your landlord.
That’s an interesting comment about environmental destruction. I think that I disagree. I would say that almost environmental damage is bad. For example, I hate seeing people discard plastic wrapping or throw things out of their car window. Every action like that spoils a part of nature that has evolved over millenia. Increased scale certainly makes environmental destruction worse.
Most people probably don’t look into alchemy. The obvious reason would be ‘Alchemists didn’t do that, chemists did that.’ which suggests alchemists were doing something wrong. Perhaps their approaches were very different.
Particle accelerators are in the domain of physics and outside of chemistry. With present knowlegde producing gold from a compound that doesn’t already contain gold via chemical reactions is impossible but with nuclear reactions possible.
If we at some point produce AGI but the science that produces it is no longer called computer science does that mean that computer science was hopeless?
Ah, what is the point of computer science? ‘To produce AGI’? I don’t think so. (Also, what is computer science? And how could AGI be produced ‘without it’?)
I think the name change relates to a shift in at least a few factors. Some googling suggests the difference is a less supernatural epistemology. I’d guess it was a tradition change (although said googling turned up the perspective that chemistry descended from alchemy).
Particle accelerators are in the domain of physics and outside of chemistry.
I’d say it’s still nuclear chemistry, and there isn’t always a hard line between physics and chemistry.
It seems that historically chemistry as a separate field was about to be born/distinguish itself from the other aactivities. Fanboying over stuff like “experimentally verify the amount of elements instead of assuming 4” seems to be “sciency chemist” stuff. If you inject good epistemics to a bad field is that raising the sanity water level or succumbing to taintd fields? It could be that “chemistry” was not concievable topic of interest and people that were interested in mixing stuff were directed alchemy sources.
We also didn’t come up witha new science to support helioscentrism and let a geocentrism kill out a deadend field. Rather within fields there are paradigm shifts.
What is and isn’t stupid to believe depends on the general state of knowledge.
Given what Newton’s society knew at the time, alchemy wasn’t stupid—not enough was known about the nature of matter to know that alchemy was hopeless.
150 years ago nobody had researched smoking—it had some obvious positive effects and no obvious bad effects. Nothing stupid about smoking, then. Almost the same can be said for seatbelts and asbestos (they had obvious pros and cons, of which the magnitudes were not understood).
Environmental destruction is not bad at small scales, nor is burning fossil fuels. It’s scale that make them bad.
On the other hand, today we know enough about the way the universe works to say that pyramid power, crystal healing, and runes on A4 paper are stupid. As is your landlord.
That’s an interesting comment about environmental destruction. I think that I disagree. I would say that almost environmental damage is bad. For example, I hate seeing people discard plastic wrapping or throw things out of their car window. Every action like that spoils a part of nature that has evolved over millenia. Increased scale certainly makes environmental destruction worse.
Given that plastic doesn’t biodegrade, that is a problem, even at small scales.
What you mean that alchemy was hopeless? We now know how to make gold from non-gold today so there is/was a hope of producing gold.
Most people probably don’t look into alchemy. The obvious reason would be ‘Alchemists didn’t do that, chemists did that.’ which suggests alchemists were doing something wrong. Perhaps their approaches were very different.
Particle accelerators are in the domain of physics and outside of chemistry. With present knowlegde producing gold from a compound that doesn’t already contain gold via chemical reactions is impossible but with nuclear reactions possible.
If we at some point produce AGI but the science that produces it is no longer called computer science does that mean that computer science was hopeless?
Ah, what is the point of computer science? ‘To produce AGI’? I don’t think so. (Also, what is computer science? And how could AGI be produced ‘without it’?)
I think the name change relates to a shift in at least a few factors. Some googling suggests the difference is a less supernatural epistemology. I’d guess it was a tradition change (although said googling turned up the perspective that chemistry descended from alchemy).
I’d say it’s still nuclear chemistry, and there isn’t always a hard line between physics and chemistry.
It seems that historically chemistry as a separate field was about to be born/distinguish itself from the other aactivities. Fanboying over stuff like “experimentally verify the amount of elements instead of assuming 4” seems to be “sciency chemist” stuff. If you inject good epistemics to a bad field is that raising the sanity water level or succumbing to taintd fields? It could be that “chemistry” was not concievable topic of interest and people that were interested in mixing stuff were directed alchemy sources.
We also didn’t come up witha new science to support helioscentrism and let a geocentrism kill out a deadend field. Rather within fields there are paradigm shifts.