Dina, fed-up with having made herself grumpy, being betrayed, AND now this, promptly rips through two more hats— revealing more underneath—and throws them to the ground in a huff
If you throw yourself at the ground and miss, you can fly.
TParadox
It blew my mind when I realized that that’s not just a silly description for flying in the Hitchhiker’s Guide, it also pretty much sums up how orbits work. You’re falling, but you move forward so fast you’re constantly missing the ground.
Thanatos
You have my upvote because, while I knew how orbiting works, I have never before considered it as HG flying!
All-Purpose Guru
That was the genius of Douglas Adams.
It also is how I described orbits to little kids.
Demoted Oblivious
To be fair, that is technically not flying, but only in the same way that neither does he, ” fly through the air with the greatest of ease, A daring young man on the flying Trapeze.”
What arguments are there to “debunk” that our earth is billions of years old when we got all the stuff to prove it like radioactive elements in stones showing us how long those stones have existed?
Planted to lead you astray.
Who are you going to believe, your faith or all of this perfectly faked evidence?
Deanatay
It makes you understand why the far right is so into paranoid conspiracy theories. It’s the way they’re taught to think.
StClair
Gaslighting all the way down (or up).
Some Ed
That’s *part* of it.
The other part is that the members of the far right are aware conspiracies exist, because they *are* part of one (at least.) As such, they *know* they exist. And they know they *fail*.
What is inconceivable to many people brought up in a conspiracy is that a conspiracy can be brought down without people actually conspiring against it.
But the truth is, all of the things that we’ve been taught to do to protect the conspiracy? All it takes is for one person to not do one of them right. Conspiracies are incredibly fragile, because they’re generally used to do things that the vast majority of people are opposed to.
There are innumerable conspiracies that work, generally because they’re small, and many of the ones that work are comprised entirely of people who’ve been brought up in conspiracies, so they know “all” the things that they need to do to protect them.
There are still a lot of small conspiracies that fail, either because the world changed such that they didn’t recognize how to apply the list, or because they included someone who disagreed with the goal or the means. But the big ones are pretty much all doomed.
It’s impressive how far the big ones can get sometimes, but the people inside them who disagree with their goals frequently don’t move to expose the conspiracy until they have enough proof, and the amount of proof they feel they need tends to be directly related to the distance the group is to completing their goals – so if they’re not on the brink, the amount of proof is challenging.
But most of the conspiracies that little kids are brought up into are a special kind of doomed, because there’s no chance that the kids will do all the things. They tend to be designed to accommodate this by being either ridiculous or harmless (frequently both). As a class of examples, every surprise birthday party ever.
And suddenly just about everyone who’s read this far realizes that they’ve been included in a conspiracy at least once in their lives.
I recently watched a 3-hour debate between Bill Nye and young-earth creationist Ken Ham who is apparently also a scientist (geneticist i think? which vaguely boggles the mind but ok) just to get a flavour of their arguments.
It turns out they’re not very good, at least if you’re not a faithful christian fundie. It’s a lot of cherry-picking and flinging “how can you know for sure?” back at everything science says and consistently ignoring Ockham’s-razor-type arguments from (overwhelming) plausibility, all that without producing any convincing evidence other than that one book.
Anyway, one thing I didn’t know about their rhetorics and thought was interesting, was the distinction they make between “observational science” and “historical science”. They argue that only the former is “proper science” while the latter is every bit as unprovable as Genesis literalism; they say that you can’t prove that the laws of physics as we observe them today worked the same in the past. So, like, maybe the half-life of radioactive elements has increased astronomically over the last 6000 years for *reasons*?? HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT’S NOT THE CASE?
It’s a smart argument, I mean as smart as it gets when evidence is just so massively stacked against you. It makes a passable impression of skepticism (if you just squint a bit, ok), and as such claims to belong to the same playing field as actual science. But philosophically it’s a very different beast of course, because unlike science it provides no mechanism for falsifying its claims.
At some point an audience member asks both of them “what would it take for you to become convinced of the other side’s view?” And while Ham writhes a bit before admitting that that’s not gonna happen because “faith”, Bill Nye simply responds “one piece of evidence”.
Another thing i thought was swell about that debate is how the creationist is constantly saying things like “we know because God” and “the Bible tells us everything we need to know” and so on, Nye makes no attempt to paper over the gaps in scientific knowledge. It’s like the fundie dude thinks not knowing something is bad, that getting a scientist to admit they don’t have a neat explanation for everything is a point for their side. But Nye does a great job of making ignorance sound exciting, he’s like “oh, good question: we don’t know! we have so much more to learn!” And he just sounds like a giddy child as he says it 🙂
Clif
String theory has no method of falsifying its claims. Read some of the criticism of string theory by the quantum loop gravity guys. Maybe if we get much better at math and technology, we might be able to confirm string theory; we might give it up as a time sink that leads nowhere, but disprove it? Not so much.
thejeff
So string theory makes no predictions? If it predicts things, it’s falsifiable. Such predictions might be hard to test, but that’s a different question.
The creationist argument here is qualitatively different – it exists only to counter evidence for evolution. It’s just a counter of “you could be wrong because things could have worked differently in the past”.
Bridgebrain
The problem with most quantum stuff is that it’s math predicting math. We’ve finally hit the point where that math gets translated into physical form with quantum computing and teleportation of information, but most of it is “this math suggests this about this math that suggests this about math”.
I’m sorry, could you expand on that? I don’t really get what you mean
Demoted Oblivious
And the creationist argument (time/decay changed speeds) also fundamentally (hehe) relies on the same fallacy of thinking that something is a particular way, without providing a single piece of evidence to support that hypothesis or a mechanism to falisfy the hypothesis. Again extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
milu
Oh yeah, human/earth/solar system exceptionalism is absolutely axiomatic in their view and doesn’t seem to warrant any special explaining. Again, the book says so, and ultimately blind faith in the literal reading of the bible is the only leg they care to stand on.
drs
So? String theory is on the fringe of science, theorizing beyond current experimental data. It doesn’t disprove the rest of science.
Some Ed
It’s my impression that the issue with string theory’s “lack of falsifiability” is basically that the predictions that string theory makes are all things that happen at such a small scale that we can’t test them.
If that’s right, it’s basically only useful to the people who can’t be comfortable without feeling they know what is below the smallest subatomic particles we can detect.
We may get to the point where it’s useful for something, But all scientific hypotheses are formed before they’re proven.
My issue with “string theory” is that it’s really “string hypothesis”, as the science I was taught in school said that “theory” was for things that had passed the minimum bar of having survived at least one test. According to that definition, if we can’t falsify string theory yet, it can’t be a scientific theory yet.
I do realize it’s confusing, because most people use “theory” to mean “this idea I have that I haven’t proven yet”, but if scientists call those “hypotheses”, then they should be consistent in this regard.
Roborat
Now that you have been exposed to Ken Ham the professional liar, you should be ready to experience the creationist majesty that was Duane Gish, the one who the term “the Gish gallop” was coined. He passed away in 2013, but there are plenty of recordings of him doing his spiel.
Can you imagine a chemistry teacher giving a lesson about the periodic table “because that’s what you have to write on the exams, but between you and me, we all know everything’s made from various combinations of air, fire, earth, water, and æther.”
“In conclusion, newtonian mechanics says that masses are constantly attracted to each other by a force named gravity. Off the record, we all know that stones just love sinking while helium-filled balloons enjoy floating upwards, but hey, they won’t let me teach common sense to you kids anymore.”
Oh yeah, like in hindsight, his “arguments” for young earth creationism were just as flimsy as our local chapter of our cult–I mean, church–‘s arguments. I was just deep in the “thought blocking techniques” tactic that cults will ingrain in you, where I just refused to think about how evolution would make way more sense because contradictions to my parents’ teachings were Scary, lol
At some point, I had the realization that it was a lot scarier if my parents were right.
I mean, the possibility that an all-powerful being feels an eternity of torment could possibly be considered the right way to handle one of its creations not obeying its unstated whims. Because, not only is that on its face ludicrous, it’s almost certainly the case that such a being would not be a fan of one who realized that was ludicrous on its face. And anyone who thought about that would go there.
Do I now *have* to imagine the next scene is Joyce pulling Dina to the side whispering, “~pst, it’s ok, I’m on the same side as you, now”, and winking, only for Dina to respond in confusion, “Joyce, you are now also interested in women…?”
263 thoughts on “Debunking”
Ana Chronistic
Dina getting ready in the morning, apparently
Bicycle Bill
It’s dino hats, all the way down.
Cholma
The 500 Dino Hats of Dina Sarazu! (Sorry, Bartholomew Cubbins, you’ve been replaced)
Lieutenant Dan
Came looking for the Bartholomew Cubbins reference. Was not disappointed.
MacareuxMoine
It’s Dina Saruyama (in this Universe)
Spriteless Girl
Dinasaurs all the way down.
Boh No
Dina takes off her snow cap to reveal her normal hat underneath, 2021 Colorized
TrueVCU
Am I the only one confused by what’s happening in the last panel visually?
Doc Harleen
Not at all, I’m not sure what I’m looking at either.
Yumi
Dina removes her outside dinosaur hat to reveal her inside dinosaur hat.
Proto_Eevee
Dina takes off her beanie to reveal another dino hat beneath.
TParadox
She was wearing a wooly warm dino beanie over her normal inside dino cap.
Amias
She took off her warm dino beanie to reveal her normal, non-ear-covering dino hat. It’s cold. Gotta layer.
StClair
She’s molting.
a/snow/mous/e
+1
Geneseepaws
++1
brionl
+2
Casi
+= 1
Needfuldoer
++
Yet_One_More_Idiot
±1
I’ve had a long day, I’m feeling ambivalent. xP
Demoted Oblivious
+i
for those feeling creative
Autoskip
That’s unreal!
foducool
ahahahaha best explanation
Boh No
Dina, fed-up with having made herself grumpy, being betrayed, AND now this, promptly rips through two more hats— revealing more underneath—and throws them to the ground in a huff
Stephen Bierce
“Ever get so mad that you throw your hat at the ground–and MISS?”–The Balladeer on The Dukes of Hazzard
Chris
If you throw yourself at the ground and miss, you can fly.
TParadox
It blew my mind when I realized that that’s not just a silly description for flying in the Hitchhiker’s Guide, it also pretty much sums up how orbits work. You’re falling, but you move forward so fast you’re constantly missing the ground.
Thanatos
You have my upvote because, while I knew how orbiting works, I have never before considered it as HG flying!
All-Purpose Guru
That was the genius of Douglas Adams.
It also is how I described orbits to little kids.
Demoted Oblivious
To be fair, that is technically not flying, but only in the same way that neither does he, ” fly through the air with the greatest of ease, A daring young man on the flying Trapeze.”
Delicious Taffy
Come on oooouuut, Bongo~
Spriteless Girl
Oh man Becky must be blushing redder than her hair at that.
Proto_Eevee
Fight fight fight!
ian livs
I had a biology teacher in a public high school do exactly what Joyce is talking about. Gotta LOVE that Bible belt… -_-‘
Jon Rich
That should absolutely be illegal.
BarerMender
It absolutely is illegal.
DrunkenNordmann
Yes, but that only matters if somebody actually enforces that.
DudeMyDadOwnsaDealership
Exactly.
Needfuldoer
It’s the chin-diapering of education. “FINE, I’ll [wear your stupid mAsK] [teach your stupid ScIeNcE]”.
Ray Radlein
tbf, that’s true of everything that’s illegal
James Rye
What arguments are there to “debunk” that our earth is billions of years old when we got all the stuff to prove it like radioactive elements in stones showing us how long those stones have existed?
StClair
Planted to lead you astray.
Who are you going to believe, your faith or all of this perfectly faked evidence?
Deanatay
It makes you understand why the far right is so into paranoid conspiracy theories. It’s the way they’re taught to think.
StClair
Gaslighting all the way down (or up).
Some Ed
That’s *part* of it.
The other part is that the members of the far right are aware conspiracies exist, because they *are* part of one (at least.) As such, they *know* they exist. And they know they *fail*.
What is inconceivable to many people brought up in a conspiracy is that a conspiracy can be brought down without people actually conspiring against it.
But the truth is, all of the things that we’ve been taught to do to protect the conspiracy? All it takes is for one person to not do one of them right. Conspiracies are incredibly fragile, because they’re generally used to do things that the vast majority of people are opposed to.
There are innumerable conspiracies that work, generally because they’re small, and many of the ones that work are comprised entirely of people who’ve been brought up in conspiracies, so they know “all” the things that they need to do to protect them.
There are still a lot of small conspiracies that fail, either because the world changed such that they didn’t recognize how to apply the list, or because they included someone who disagreed with the goal or the means. But the big ones are pretty much all doomed.
It’s impressive how far the big ones can get sometimes, but the people inside them who disagree with their goals frequently don’t move to expose the conspiracy until they have enough proof, and the amount of proof they feel they need tends to be directly related to the distance the group is to completing their goals – so if they’re not on the brink, the amount of proof is challenging.
But most of the conspiracies that little kids are brought up into are a special kind of doomed, because there’s no chance that the kids will do all the things. They tend to be designed to accommodate this by being either ridiculous or harmless (frequently both). As a class of examples, every surprise birthday party ever.
And suddenly just about everyone who’s read this far realizes that they’ve been included in a conspiracy at least once in their lives.
milu
I recently watched a 3-hour debate between Bill Nye and young-earth creationist Ken Ham who is apparently also a scientist (geneticist i think? which vaguely boggles the mind but ok) just to get a flavour of their arguments.
It turns out they’re not very good, at least if you’re not a faithful christian fundie. It’s a lot of cherry-picking and flinging “how can you know for sure?” back at everything science says and consistently ignoring Ockham’s-razor-type arguments from (overwhelming) plausibility, all that without producing any convincing evidence other than that one book.
Anyway, one thing I didn’t know about their rhetorics and thought was interesting, was the distinction they make between “observational science” and “historical science”. They argue that only the former is “proper science” while the latter is every bit as unprovable as Genesis literalism; they say that you can’t prove that the laws of physics as we observe them today worked the same in the past. So, like, maybe the half-life of radioactive elements has increased astronomically over the last 6000 years for *reasons*?? HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT’S NOT THE CASE?
It’s a smart argument, I mean as smart as it gets when evidence is just so massively stacked against you. It makes a passable impression of skepticism (if you just squint a bit, ok), and as such claims to belong to the same playing field as actual science. But philosophically it’s a very different beast of course, because unlike science it provides no mechanism for falsifying its claims.
At some point an audience member asks both of them “what would it take for you to become convinced of the other side’s view?” And while Ham writhes a bit before admitting that that’s not gonna happen because “faith”, Bill Nye simply responds “one piece of evidence”.
Another thing i thought was swell about that debate is how the creationist is constantly saying things like “we know because God” and “the Bible tells us everything we need to know” and so on, Nye makes no attempt to paper over the gaps in scientific knowledge. It’s like the fundie dude thinks not knowing something is bad, that getting a scientist to admit they don’t have a neat explanation for everything is a point for their side. But Nye does a great job of making ignorance sound exciting, he’s like “oh, good question: we don’t know! we have so much more to learn!” And he just sounds like a giddy child as he says it 🙂
Clif
String theory has no method of falsifying its claims. Read some of the criticism of string theory by the quantum loop gravity guys. Maybe if we get much better at math and technology, we might be able to confirm string theory; we might give it up as a time sink that leads nowhere, but disprove it? Not so much.
thejeff
So string theory makes no predictions? If it predicts things, it’s falsifiable. Such predictions might be hard to test, but that’s a different question.
The creationist argument here is qualitatively different – it exists only to counter evidence for evolution. It’s just a counter of “you could be wrong because things could have worked differently in the past”.
Bridgebrain
The problem with most quantum stuff is that it’s math predicting math. We’ve finally hit the point where that math gets translated into physical form with quantum computing and teleportation of information, but most of it is “this math suggests this about this math that suggests this about math”.
Ste
I’m sorry, could you expand on that? I don’t really get what you mean
Demoted Oblivious
And the creationist argument (time/decay changed speeds) also fundamentally (hehe) relies on the same fallacy of thinking that something is a particular way, without providing a single piece of evidence to support that hypothesis or a mechanism to falisfy the hypothesis. Again extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
milu
Oh yeah, human/earth/solar system exceptionalism is absolutely axiomatic in their view and doesn’t seem to warrant any special explaining. Again, the book says so, and ultimately blind faith in the literal reading of the bible is the only leg they care to stand on.
drs
So? String theory is on the fringe of science, theorizing beyond current experimental data. It doesn’t disprove the rest of science.
Some Ed
It’s my impression that the issue with string theory’s “lack of falsifiability” is basically that the predictions that string theory makes are all things that happen at such a small scale that we can’t test them.
If that’s right, it’s basically only useful to the people who can’t be comfortable without feeling they know what is below the smallest subatomic particles we can detect.
We may get to the point where it’s useful for something, But all scientific hypotheses are formed before they’re proven.
My issue with “string theory” is that it’s really “string hypothesis”, as the science I was taught in school said that “theory” was for things that had passed the minimum bar of having survived at least one test. According to that definition, if we can’t falsify string theory yet, it can’t be a scientific theory yet.
I do realize it’s confusing, because most people use “theory” to mean “this idea I have that I haven’t proven yet”, but if scientists call those “hypotheses”, then they should be consistent in this regard.
Roborat
Now that you have been exposed to Ken Ham the professional liar, you should be ready to experience the creationist majesty that was Duane Gish, the one who the term “the Gish gallop” was coined. He passed away in 2013, but there are plenty of recordings of him doing his spiel.
Jungle Dwayne
Can you imagine a chemistry teacher giving a lesson about the periodic table “because that’s what you have to write on the exams, but between you and me, we all know everything’s made from various combinations of air, fire, earth, water, and æther.”
milu
“In conclusion, newtonian mechanics says that masses are constantly attracted to each other by a force named gravity. Off the record, we all know that stones just love sinking while helium-filled balloons enjoy floating upwards, but hey, they won’t let me teach common sense to you kids anymore.”
ian livs
Oh yeah, like in hindsight, his “arguments” for young earth creationism were just as flimsy as our local chapter of our cult–I mean, church–‘s arguments. I was just deep in the “thought blocking techniques” tactic that cults will ingrain in you, where I just refused to think about how evolution would make way more sense because contradictions to my parents’ teachings were Scary, lol
Demoted Oblivious
How did you circumvent the thought blocking techniques? I’m curious to see if they’d be useful in combatting the negative innerlogue of my depression.
Some Ed
At some point, I had the realization that it was a lot scarier if my parents were right.
I mean, the possibility that an all-powerful being feels an eternity of torment could possibly be considered the right way to handle one of its creations not obeying its unstated whims. Because, not only is that on its face ludicrous, it’s almost certainly the case that such a being would not be a fan of one who realized that was ludicrous on its face. And anyone who thought about that would go there.
TheKelliestKelly
Everyone thinking this will be hard for Joyce didn’t consider Dina having to deal with Joyce
TheKelliestKelly
Haha, I forgot I was Sarah. Appropriate
Boh No
Do I now *have* to imagine the next scene is Joyce pulling Dina to the side whispering, “~pst, it’s ok, I’m on the same side as you, now”, and winking, only for Dina to respond in confusion, “Joyce, you are now also interested in women…?”
Thanatos
And then Becky overhears Dina’s question and had a mental breakdown ruining her first day in her new favorite class.
BBCC
She’s not on Dina’s side on evolution though. No longer believing in God does not equal having all the bad science knocked out of her head.
Demoted Oblivious
To be fair the bad data in Joyce’s head isn’t science.
AbacusWizard
Does she now believe that the universe and everything in it was created 6000 years ago by… nobody?
Kravis
Holy shit, Sarah just had an orgasm!
Yotomoe
Damnit, and think, me without my omnipotent 4th wall camera.
Jane
Don’t worry, there will be a Slipshine about it.
Probably.
(There won’t be.)
Needfuldoer
Yoto doesn’t need Slipshine. Amber is to fan fiction as Yoto is to fan art.
Yotomoe
I haven’t drawn any in a WHILE though. I have so much I wanna draw but I’m just waaaaay too lazy. Lots of DOAs left unlewded..for shame.
Hazel