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This is the sort of idea that can be a) dangerous in the hands of the ignorant b) even more dangerous in the hands of "I fucking love science!" type moron cheerleaders c) incredibly powerful if you've actually done the work to understand how things like absorption spectra work
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For example, how can a telescope measure the composition of the planets orbiting a distant sun? How can we be sure of it? Solipsism and Cartesian skepticism allows us to draw boundaries and conditions on the degree to which we can rely on scientific instruments.
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This particular example is particularly powerful for me. Spent my PhD years working on interferometric space telescopes for exosolar terrestrial planet detection. The stack of assumptions underlying the instrumentation is *incredibly* deep.
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Once you've worked through the math of huygens-fresnel principle, deconvolutions, etc etc. to figure out how you might pick up the incredibly thin signal that says "planet" you realize how fragile knowledge is, and how amazing it is that we can get to *any* confidence
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Solipsism seems indistinguishable from superstition on one side of knowledge, and inseparable from it on the other side. You appreciate knowledge *more* because it is so contingent on fragile leaps of faith about the properties of glass, electrical circuits, weird equations, etc.
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One reason I'm an unrepentant STEM supremacist is that I think it's *necessary* pre-work before you can meaningfully tackle humanities and social sciences with any sort of depth in 2020. The primary value of STEM is not knowledge but establishing a connection with instruments
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You know how they say "you don't know your own country until you've traveled to other countries"? STEM is that for the experience of being human. Until you've experienced being inhuman (telescope, microscope, prime numbers), you don't understand the human experience either
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Imagine galileo first looking through a primitive telescope at jupiter's moons, or saturn's fuzzy "horns" that would take some inspiration and telescope improvements to resolve into rings... it's not a simple matter of "believe your eyes." That's utter bullshit.
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What experience at edge of technologically extended being in the universe does to you is drive a sort of shallow derealization of surface sensory being. Telescopes make you see your eyes as just integrated telescopes in your body that are just as trustworthy or not as telescopes
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This was one of Hannah Arendt's best insights, that the invention of the telescope changed the meaning of what it meant to be *human* the boundaries shifted and shrank, the ego got yet more decentered. Instruments de-anthropocentralize the human condition.
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All those glorious space images you see? False color from other parts of the spectrum. Assertions that mantis shrimps see way more colors? Fragile deductions from eye-optics circuitry that is now in doubt.
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Some of this has belatedly leaked through into humanities and social sciences (see for example the "inverted spectrum" argument in philosophy of mind... which required Newton's prism experiments to even construct... or Searle's Chinese room, which requires computers to imagine)
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I bought my first telescope in 8th grade, in 1988, spent years glued to it. Now I own 2 binoculars (haven't lived in good skywatching areas in decades). Every time you use an instrument to connect to reality differently, you become a better human, with a smaller identity.
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But paradoxically, the more your identity shrinks as a result of this process, the greater your confidence in what's left. It will likely last longer than the last layer that was peeled away. It strengthens your solipsism.
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Solipsism is in one sense a sort epistemic confidence graph as you go radially outwards from the void at the heart of being. At your current boundary, the confidence of knowing falls of a cliff. The smaller the boundary of self, the steeper the cliff.
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So growing solipsism, in the context of a ego being shrunk by an instrumental connection with reality is a sign of a *growing* scientific sensibility. (not a necessary result of "doing STEM"... in fact shallow talent can grow the ego in a narrow prowess/procedural identity sense)
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One of the fun things about playng twitter with a decently large following is that you can get as esoteric as you like and trust that at least a few people will be able to follow the whole line of argument (whether they agree or not) simply by virtue of the law of large numbers.
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That's the most valuable thing about having ~36k followers... not the tweet that gets 500 likes (meh), but the 10 tweet esoteric thread that at least 1-2 people actually read to the end, grok in their own way, and appreciate. Large n twitter is basically rare fish fishing.
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Btw, rare fish in a statistical sense not necessarily "beautiful mind" sense which would just be self-congratulation in disguise. More like the kid in Slumdog Millionaire who just happens to know a bunch of game show answers through law of large numbers random experiences.
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