Something deeply silly about this “we don’t know how aerodynamic lift works” article doing the rounds. Mystery is not in the phenomenon but in people’s weird expectations of what “explanations” ought to be able to accomplish. Cc
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New career: for a fee I will write a pop-sci article "Here's why we don't understand X", where X is any generic well-understood phenomenon that you want to clickbait people about.
Will reduce everything to the cosmological constant problem if necessary.
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You're on... come back to ribbonfarm and write a regular column along those lines :D
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That would actually be a really fun column to write.
Like an advice column, except people write in with questions like:
"Dear Brian,
Can you tell me why we don't understand the internal combustion engine?
-Running on fumes"
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yeah, I think it could rise above cynical calling out of the bad explainer culture by using the examples to actually think about the structure of scientific "explanations" what we should actually expect of models etc.
The thing is that lay expectations of "explanations" is some sort of ontologically absolute, finite and closed causality/agency account of *everything* about X. They want religious magic explanations not a sort of moving target partial paradigm with predictive power thing
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