When speaking about it just for fun and to get smarter and learn things it is interesting to discuss all the possible answers to the question When it is a matter of some practical urgency to have a "right" answer, which one it is depends on what is causing the urgency
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Hell, the most basic one of these is one where you can easily defend the "wrong" answer from the uneducated yokel Of course the Earth is flat! Look around you! Put a level on it! Put your car in neutral and see if it rolls!
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Which is to say, the Earth is *almost* flat, very very very close to being flat, from the perspective of a human being Which is to say the Earth is, compared to a human being, very very very large You could walk all day and all night and not make it all the way around
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If you downplay this fact, and underestimate just how very flat the Earth in fact is -- i.e. overestimate the curvature of the Earth, and therefore underestimate its circumference -- you will be wrong Really really wrong, in a very important way
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Maybe, in the grand scheme of things, not as wrong as the person who thinks the curvature is 0 and the Earth is an infinite flat plane But at least that guy wouldn't try to sail all the way to China from Spain in that pathetically tiny boat like that dipshit Columbus
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I mean, do you actually think it's being *more correct* to interrupt someone saying "We need a perfectly level surface to start construction on" in your Neil DeGrasse Tyson voice going "THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE, GRAVITY ENSURES ALL OF EARTH'S SURFACE CURVES"
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You think there's any benefit to being an Actually Guy who interrupts perfectly pleasant discussions of how much flatter it is on the east side of DC than the west side with facts about the shape of the Earth So you can be More Correct in the Big Picture
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I really really love this quote I just pulled from Notes From Underground about the "pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting" I can't believe Dostoyevsky identified DeGrasse Tyson energy almost a century before Tyson was bornpic.twitter.com/bYXaXUff00
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Like, Newton was a genius, and Newtonian mechanics is a great accomplishment From the big picture POV, it's completely wrong, but so what Most of the kink fics on AO3 are also just plain wrong, but they also get you where you need to go
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Replying to @arthur_affect
The lies-to-children discourse has got me thinking on how there’s something about Anglophone STEM education that made me drop out of physics but I don’t know what Like how it’s hard to pin down why I think many of said fic’s suffer greatly for not being written by asexuals
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I can actually say this from direct experience Those departments are filled with a lot of straight up dicks
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Yeahhh that too (it’s good to know it’s a systemic issue, though) But I have trouble even with English-language textbooks, and I know numeracy is more a native-language thing but the /way/ they explain things feels fundamentally different
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Replying to @chrysopoetics @arthur_affect
English it feels like the trend is frontloading with metaphors and/or “real-life applications” (I mean jfc I run into this in comms and linguistics these days too) and explaining second, and I’m enough used to the opposite that structure + culture gap = beep boop white noise time
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