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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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