A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Yes, Physics majors are a bit too hierachical with science like there were not doing non-rigorous math themselves but let's be honest: on the other spectrum of real/fake science it is very very hard to find actual people seriously studying the field, like you have to go up to doctorant to find the kind of serious study you find in physic undergrad.
To be fair, political scientists probably don't know where 95% of the politics is hidden either.
Trick question, all politics is local.
Physics majors have every right to dunk on polisci. Too many majors throw around the word "science" to try to give their made-up voodoo legitimacy.
Yeah, polisci has gotten as far as the "observation" part of science and kinda has to stop there for moral reasons.
Same with Astronomy.
Political Science is the study of political systems and behaviours employing the scientific method. It's a sub field of social science and a very new one, at less than 150 years old. Political philosophy is of course much older.
employing the scientific method
Really? They have control groups? Blind and A/B testing? Hypothesis that they set out to reject?
I'm sure they have methods but are they scientific?
Hey genius, if you need experimentation in order for a field to be a real science, then explain how astronomy is a science.
Isn't one of the point of all those telescopes we built in space and on earth to prove or disprove our hypothesis regarding astronomy? Is that not experimentation?
The answer to all your questions are
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes - Whatever goes against my political allegiances.
Yes - They all just have an n < 50.
Yea computer "science"? Bitch you mean programming?
That's why informatics is by far the superior term. Computer science is such a boring terms anyways, you don't call maths "number science", biology "living beings science " or chemistry "atoms science" either.
Depends. A proper computer science course is basically math with machines. At the highest level, it may have zero programming at all, and the machines in question are entirely abstract.
Software Engineering is, well, engineering (setting aside the whole debate on what makes a "real" engineer).
It used to be that universities crammed both under "computer science", and you had to look at the curriculum to figure out which one they were actually teaching. They tend to separate the two more clearly these days. Neither is really "science" in the strictest sense, but the term stuck now.
math with machines
so computer engineering?
No, computer engineering tends to focus more on hardware. When I was doing that kind of thing in college, computer engineering did things like chip design and logic boards and so on. I had courses on DSP and VLSI, multiple assembly languages, RISC vs CISC systems, and so on. In my university, it was considered a subspecializqtion of electrical engineering, with the first two years of undergraduate study being identical.
When I switched over to CS, I was doing things like numerical analysis and software systems architecture.
Both majors used math, but CE (as an EE major) required students to go through (iirc) calculus 5, and I think that CS majors could stop at calc 3 but would end up having to do different kinds of math after that.
Think of it more like programming without electricity.
No, the machines tend to be abstract. Such as an infinite paper tape that can manipulate symbols.
No, that's machines with math
My geophysicist friend laughed at me for a little long when I said "I'm a computer scientist".
I never took that degree/job position or whatever seriously anyway. I've always giggled at software engineering too. I just call myself a programmer.
One is your education and one is your job. It'd be like me chirping someone with a geophysics degree who's working at Starbucks.
lol, okay that made me chuckle ... I liked that.
Although, we both eventually got into the jobs for what we studied for. We've made that jokes both in university and when we got into respective fields.
What's voodoo about political science?
All the zombies
“Real” scientists try to put a spin on it akin to “You can’t properly hypothesise, reason or make predictions about anything based on a sample size of ~200 countries that are totally outside of your control and are very different from each other”. Few more arguments get thrown into a pot.
Doesn’t stop political scientists from mostly accurately describing things, so no harm is done here. The harm lies within pushing that opinion on general public, highlighting the that “proper” scientists don’t see any value in social “sciences”, hence contributing to public ignorance about societal problems.
And with how lousy political views of “rational”, “logical”, “critically thinking” people in STEM sometimes are, it’s awfully ironic.
Speaking as a disgruntled Russian STEM scientist who is horrified how willingly some of his collages ate Putin’s reasons for actions both against Ukraine and within Russia, including against fellow scientists (WTF, where’s professional solidarity?!).
That's pretty much where I was going. What are soft sciences supposed to do when experimental methods are either impractical or unethical? Give up?
If anything, fields like physics are in a privileged position where they can do the scientific method to the letter. Acting snooty about it is simply insulting and unhelpful.
What are soft sciences supposed to do when experimental methods are either impractical or unethical?
Same thing astronomy did.
Astronomy has roughly a 400 year head start on most of these. Thousands of years if you're counting astrology (which was good observations mixed together with nonsense).
That's irrelevant. Astronomy and polsci can both only test their hypotheses through observation.
And Astronomy has had much, much longer to make those observations. They can also gather potentially millions of data points instead of five.
Sure, physicists can just keep track of about 5% of the universe's mass. That's their whole job, and they just got 5%!? Are they stupid??
Who are you to complain Brenda?! The only thing you keep track of is the amount of Oreos you have in the pantry
5% of the universe is still several trillions of tons of mass! Although I suppose a good part of that is your fat ass!
Several trillion tons of mass? I think you're off by many orders of magnitude.
You're right.
Earth itself weighs about 7 sextillion tons.
Sextillion in the short scale being to the 24th power while trillions being only 12th power.
Science politics.
But it's the physicists' job to find this stuff.
More astrophysicists
Yeah, it's not like the mathematics lost any of the numbers. Get your shit together physicists.
it's not like the mathematics lost any of the numbers
show me Pi then
I know exactly how to find it, and unless you're a mathematician I'm not sure you're authorized to know.
🥧
Well they did demonstrate that in a non trivial system of axioms, there will always be true statements that are unprovable. Do they kinda accepted that they will never be able to find everything. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems
I mean mathematicians are still missing over 99.999% of prime numbers, so...
, or ℙ for short.
I think that should be all of them, but if you want to check, there are references on the website where we keep all the numbers detailing how to check any number, or to list all of them if you want an arbitrarily large pile or have infinite time on your hands. :)
The technical term you're looking for is "almost all" prime numbers. Not joking btw.
They haven't even found more than two factors, one of which is one, for any prime number, either.
Get it together, Mathematicians.