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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> In these cynical times, it may be that everything is relative and "post-modern subjective p-hacking", but sufficient data usually ends these discussions.

I don't think that's right. I think having an application is what ends the discussions.

If you have a group of people who think CD players work by using lasers, and a rival group who think they do something entirely different, and only the first group can actually make working CD players, people will accept that lasers do what group #1 says they do.

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On the other hand, nearly everyone believes in black holes, and there's no practical use for that information. The difference is that "we pointed a telescope at the sky and saw something" is easier for a layman to understand and requires somewhat less trust than "we did a bunch of complex statistical work on data from a machine you couldn't possibly hope to understand."

> there's no practical use for that information

The information paradox is closer to us than we think!

Joking aside, another perspective on practical use is all of the technology and research advanced that have spun out of black hole research. Multi-messenger astronomy for example. We can point a telescope at the sky where two black holes merged.

Has that been done?! Iirc there is only one multi messenger observation of LIGO results (of which there have been many) which casts doubt on LIGO

It is still nascent according to this https://rubinobservatory.org/news/multi-messenger-astro

There's a lot of (warranted imo) skepticism there too. Im sorry I can't find the citation but there was a Japanese paper out this year that claimed the ml post processing of the EHT data produces a qualitatively similar image given random data.

I think this is where it's worth differentiating between different types of "believes in" (and why I think modal logics are cool). I can convince myself that a thing seems safe to believe, or I can tangibly believe it, or I can believe it in a way that allows me to confidently manipulate it, or I could even understand it (which you could call a particular flavor of belief). Practical use seems to fit on that spectrum.

I certainly don't believe in black holes in the same manner that I believe in the breakfast I'm eating right now.

> people will accept that lasers do what group #1 says they do

Most people. Some fringe groups will believe it is all a front, and they are only pretending that so-called “lasers” are what make the CD player work when in fact it is alien tech from Area 51 or eldritch magics neither of which the public would be happy about. What else would CDDA stand for, if not Compliant Demon Derived Audio? And “Red Book”. Red. Book. Red is the colour of the fires of hell and book must be referring to the Necronomicon! Wake up sheeple!

Counterpoint: Vaccines work, but far too many people think that COVID vaccines contain Jewish-made GPS tracking devices that act as micro-antennae to allow Bill Gates to sterilise them using 5G.

That's a common misunderstanding. The mind controlling COVID vaccines are being spread by chemtrails. The 5G signal is only used by pilots to decide when to start spraying.

COVID vaccines may "work" but they're pretty lame compared to something like the varicella vaccine where the disease basically disappears of the face of the earth.

We'll see if varicella stays gone. It's tricky in that it can embed itself in the host genome and come back later. That means that until the last person exposed to the virus dies, we can't really consider it gone. Good luck convincing people to continue vaccinating for a disease no one has seen in a couple decades. Of course, if varicella was able to infect germ-line cells it would be even worse...

COVID on the other hand doesn't have such a mechanism, and just relies on being really contagious. So if everyone would stay up to date in their boosters and continue masking in public places, we may be able to get rid of it in a couple of years.

> So if everyone would stay up to date in their boosters and continue masking in public places, we may be able to get rid of it in a couple of years.

By that logic we'd have gotten rid of the flu. Vaccines for rapidly mutating viruses like flu and COVID can't keep up and remain an epidemic. The only disease we've actually been able to eliminate worldwide due to vaccines is smallpox. We'd have gotten rid of measles too if crazies hadn't decided the MMR vaccine causes autism due to criminally fraudulent research.

Didn't one strain of the flu become extinct during the pandemic because we masked up and staying away from each other for a year? One would think that if we just kept that up we'd get rid of all the others.

https://www.npr.org/2024/10/18/nx-s1-5155997/influenza-strai...

It's really hard to draw causal links here. It could be any number of factors or required all of them together. In fact, if that had worked, why didn't COVID or other strains die too? And China had much more severe & prolonged lockdowns but that didn't eliminate anything extra for them.

Don't underestimate the impact of stock viral interference - flu & COVID are both respiratory infections and COVID was much more infectious. Some flu strains probably just couldn't remain competitive with the combined set of other flu and COVID strains.

While masking and social distancing have a beneficial impact on limiting the spread of respiratory diseases, there are practical reasons why it doesn't work to eliminate it altogether and ignores the possibility and likelihood of other resevoirs to reintroduce the disease. For example, if North America remains masked & socially isolated by the virus persists in Europe, then as soon as North America opens up you'll get the virus in North America again. And imaging a simultaneous world wide lock down is a laugh - even during COVID governments were not globally coordinated and even within national governments there was mixed local coordination.

Aside from all that, let's say it was purely a result of masking and social distancing. The consequences of that were quite sever & catastrophic, not to mention that no one actually stayed away vs limited their normal contacts & there were plenty of practical reasons it wasn't possible (e.g. getting groceries). Life involves death & risk and it's pretty clear that even before the vaccines became available many people were not OK with the tradeoff COVID entailed (e.g. Florida).

By that line of reasoning, the moon does not exist.

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