superborb

As part of my ~continuing education~, I've been working through some of the physics that I never took. And I wonder if the reason that some people love physics/math (at the undergrad level) and some never understand it, is if they can fall in love with the feeling of the rightness of a solution, when they reach the point where they can look at a problem and the gravity of the correct path is apparent. Professors would call it building intuition; I always felt it was more the sense of how, in this framework, the universe operates. Oh, yes, this is right, any other path is inconsistent. A deep satisfaction.

Really, I should study pure math instead of physics, but I never reached the level of math where that feeling can guide me to correctness beyond the trivial. So math has always remained a tool in the hand, not intuition in the heart. But I see glimpses of it too, only for it to slip through my fingers. (I've taken around five higher level statistics courses, but I've never felt it beyond the mechanical. Sometimes though, algebra sings tantalizingly, like I might know her.)

Of course, the further from pure math, the less well this feeling serves. The social sciences can easily get seduced by this feeling, and it leaves them in bad places. Biology too-- and during this time, all the people hitting Dunning–Kruger level knowledge of immunology have learned a sharp lesson in that indeed!

cortue prompted: Do you have any feelings about sci-fi as a person working in STEM? Do you want things to make actual sense or prefer they don't even try? Is there any way you'd like STEM stuff to be depicted differently in fiction?

I think my main feeling about sci-fi is that it ought to be internally consistent. So, I can roll with soft sci-fi or hard sci-fi as long as it doesn't ret-con how technology works in universe. (If your explody improv weapon could not explode earlier, it is not nice to have it be so when plot convenient.) I have higher standards for hard sci-fi though, I want it to follow through and be correct. Otherwise, what was the point? For soft sci-fi, I prefer no gibberish, just take the fantasy 'this is how it works' matter of fact approach.

Of course, the works that really try to imagine the world within the bounds of science, either of the future or of the 'one thing is different' version, deserve extra praise for the attention to detail and research, but I guess it's not really what I'm reading fiction for, you know? I'm here for the story.

It does annoy me when basic things are wrong and it's clearly the author / producer / whoever not paying enough attention. Most commonly physics because it's the one most likely to be violated in this way-- when the ship loses propulsion or stops spinning or whatever and then it abruptly comes to a complete stop and slams people into walls, that sort of thing. But I guess this does tend to be more common in movies, probably because books have different sets of fact checking norms?

The 'internally consistent' preference also extends to other forms of fiction; it doesn't bother me that much when they're like, doing the enhance on four pixels or getting results from forensics ridiculously fast because it's blatantly for the plot. It does pose a problem when people think that science works that way IRL, but I think most people understand that it's fiction, and the science is just as much fiction as the characters. Though I do think it's funny when e.g. in ReGenesis, which had pretty good fact checking, a work is so focused on being accurate for that time period that it becomes obsolete as technology improves.

I guess I don't really have that many broader thoughts on this! I mostly get annoyed at one-off inaccuracies hahaha.

Back to masterlist

After recent complaints about the HUMANITIES OF IT ALL by someone under f-lock, I am wondering about the balance within fandom. As a teen in fandom, I did feel like a substantial fraction of fandom were also science-y people. Biased, of course, by the fact that I would have sought out those people.

Back then, I was very good at critical reading (of the sort that standardized testing rewards), but because I understood myself to be bad at essay writing, I thought myself definitely not a hums person at all. (Though I loved my AP English teacher so much, I thought I might want to major in English in college. One class disabused me of the notion.) Anyway it was enough that when Erin mentioned that I was good at hums stuff it cued a mini existential crisis...

Of course, this all plays into the false dichotomy of STEM vs hums that I've come to dislike, but at the same time, I dooo think it's worth discussing? Like no, they're not at all orthogonal the way it gets presented sometimes, but there are worldview differences if you're strongly one or the other that are kind of interesting.

Namely, I think my STEM background inclines me strongly to prefer quantitative evidence and distrust anecdata, to argue strongly and dispassionately with friends -- but to divorce the idea from the person. (I'm not saying these are exclusively STEM-y things, just that that is where those parts of me were nurtured.)

Also, poll here for the next 24 h:

Would you consider yourself a STEM or humanities person?
— &helena; (@superborb) March 12, 2021

I was wondering if Other People who have not had some silly amount of training in math/science perceive figuring out a recipe this way. Because I cannot help but think about this every time I cook and of course my bf has the same training so instead of like, discussing if this is normal we just fall into discussions of why he thinks cooking is more like active learning (iterative supervised learning, aka machine learning nonsense) than steepest descent, which is what /I/ think of it as.

OK so: steepest descent. Imagine salt is an axis on which you can move (by adjusting the amount used). The curve created by how tasty the food is at each level of salt is the energy landscape. Let's call it the tasty landscape. The steepest descent algorithm would say, at this point on the tasty landscape, which direction (more or less salt) would be tastier (the gradient). Therefore the next time we make the recipe we will update in that direction (the direction of steepest descent). Now extrapolate to all the various ingredients / methods of preparation as the axes, and you get a full tasty landscape upon which you can use the steepest descent algorithm.

(It's a descent bc usually the lower energy / more stable form is desired. I guess if you think of higher numbers as tastier, it would be a steepest ascent.)

For example, in my chili recipe, there's lots of spices etc, so I'm varying the quantities and ... existence of spices and enacting the steepest descent algorithm when I go: oh, the direction to make this tastier is more bay leaf and less star anise. But this tasty landscape is multidimensional, so it's a difficult problem for me to assess the gradient of!

Anyway, I'm a nerd, is anyone the same kind of nerd as me?

tl;dr STEM papers SHOULD be readable by someone outside the field, and I wish to correct this misconception. (level of navel gazing: high, and probably of little interest to most people sdfjsl)

A week or so ago, there was a thing going around twitter about how it was presumptuous to expect humanities papers to be understandable by the non-expert in the field, because you'd never expect that for a STEM paper. Of course, I do agree with the underlying complaint here, which is the devaluation of humanities knowledge and specialties.

However, I was a bit shocked to read it, because I basically expect to be able to pick up a paper in any field and get the gist of it. While I'd miss plenty of subtlety and might not be able to meaningfully judge it against the other work in the field, and the more theoretical the field, the more that is true, I don't think this is an unusual expectation. A good paper positions itself in the field and is written in plain enough language that any jargon is frankly, googleable.

I fully admit that I am in a privileged place to say this: I have... a PhD in a STEM field, which uh, definitely teaches you how to read papers. But my first year courses in biology (which I subsequently dropped as a major, so it's not like I was particularly good at biology) were entirely paper reading based. We'd read a few papers and discuss them each class, and yes, obviously the professor chose them for their clarity and general readability, but it's not like those /weren't/ research papers.

Of course there are people like the professor who'd take the papers his students wrote, which were perfectly clear and well written, and add obfuscating language to them. But the resulting papers are still understandable to the outsider, just not fun to read.

I most admired my advisor for her clear communication skills, both in presentations and in papers. Her ability to be convincing and provide the base knowledge for her arguments is what drew me to her lab. That was, and still is, my idea of what a good science paper should be.

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Entries tagged with science

that feeling of rightness in physics

TTFeb: STEM depictions in fiction

Would you consider yourself a STEM or humanities person?

Let me expose my truly absurd level of nerdery in daily life

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