Comment by jjav | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjav | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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