Hacker News Reader

Comment by tgma | Hacker News Reader

The irony is that the example you cite, i.e. F = G * m1 * m2 / r^2 is demonstrably not the correct formula for gravity.

Science, the process of science, does not prove something as fact. It can only eliminate non-facts, and even then, the experiments may be flawed in their recognition.

> If you can't measure it or repeatably demonstrate it then it's probably not a fact. If it can, then it is a fact and no amount of emotionally wanting to believe something else can make it not a fact.

This is demonstrably false. If you witness an event once, you cannot necessarily repeat it, but you know for a fact that it happened. Unless you redefine the term "fact" narrowly, what you suggested is an ideology.

See how even the definition of "fact" is up for debate.

View on HN

> Science, the process of science, does not prove something as fact.

I intentionally picked a wrong value for Earth gravity instead of the correct one to avoid nitpickery on precision, location, yada yada.

If someone has a feeling that Earth's gravity accelerates at 1m/s^2, they're just flat out wrong full stop. This is the problem with the anti-intellectual crowd who believes everyone's opinion has equal weight. No, it doesn't. If someone wants to believe Earth's gravity accelerates at 1m/s^2, then their opinion (on that topic) is worthless because it is known to be false and they don't deserve any recognition for the nonsense. Facts are facts, beliefs don't make them go away.

> This is demonstrably false. If you witness an event once, you cannot necessarily repeat it, but you know for a fact that it happened.

Not at all. Human memory is fallible so if you are the only one who saw that event and swear it is true that does not make it a fact no matter how hard you believe it.

That's why scientific process requires repeatable results that anyone can (re)validate over and over, not one-off recollections.

XKCD has a fun comic about a guy who recalculates the world records of pole vaulters based on the gravity of the locations of various events. Earth's surface gravity is by no means constant -- it varies, presumably due to the density and altitude of any particular location.

Indeed, "sea level" is defined as the level that the sea would be at, if the area of question didn't have the land mass, but still had the same gravity. Of the various possibilities, this particular definition is useful, in that it you can expect the air pressure at a particular altitude to be the same, regardless of where you are, after factoring in things like temperature and humidity -- which is kindof important if you're a pilot of some sort!

> Earth's gravity accelerates at 1m/s^2, they're just flat out wrong full stop

You do realize it depends on the distance of the object to Earth? So perhaps you are wrong not them depending on the context.

Now someone comes up and says I am nitpicking blah blah... well, the author should have been clear and not stating falsehood as fact! This is just your belief which does not change the incompleteness/incorrectness of the statement (as per the original post).

And this is the whole goddamn point. What's "fact" to someone can be incorrect, half-correct, wrong with completely good faith, or wrong with intent to mislead, etc. Who gets to decide all this is not as simple as "I am ScienceTM" Dr Fauci style.

You missed a basic element of what they said: "can't measure it or repeatably demonstrate it"; seeing a non-reproducible event with your eyes is a form of measurement, and that measurement could in principle be done by an objective machine (recorded by a camera). The potential for objective evidence is what distinguishes a matter of fact from a matter of opinion.

As to the "correct formula for gravity" - that's just bad faith nitpicking. "Newtonian gravitation is a fact" is both a strawman and completely irrelevant when it comes to social media fact checkers.

> You missed a basic element of what they said: "can't measure it or repeatably demonstrate it"; seeing a non-reproducible event with your eyes is a form of measurement, and that measurement could in principle be done by an objective machine (recorded by a camera). The potential for objective evidence is what distinguishes a matter of fact from a matter of opinion.

No. Recording an experiment does not constitute scientific repeatability of an experiment. (Not to mention Quantum Mechanics explicitly rejects your claim as a universal principle at the micro level.)

> As to the "correct formula for gravity" - that's just bad faith nitpicking. "Newtonian gravitation is a fact" is both a strawman and completely irrelevant when it comes to social media fact checkers.

No, it is not a strawman at all. It clearly illustrates via an example of something we have known to be false for about a century, yet not only we do not censor it on social media, we teach it to kids, and almost no one would object to it.

So, where do you draw the line?

I posit there exists facts that are unknowable by the scientific method. The GP claimed science as the end-all-be-all method to fact-check. My statement is that it's not sound, nor complete, in its ability to fact-check.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com