Conversation

Replying to
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.
5
30
Replying to
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"
1
8
Replying to
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.
2
1
Replying to and
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
1
10
Replying to
Yeah, I think that for this reason it could be fun to write a regular column that specifically looks at extremely well-understood things, and shows how they are not "understood" in that sense. That the very concept of "understand" is relative.
4
9