It’s so refreshing to hear this. Even when I was less educated, his smugness annoyed me SO MUCH that it made me feel like “If actual cosmologists are like this, I couldn’t stand them anyway.” It made science and the community feel very unattractive, since his marketing puts him all over the place where the tag “science” appears.
He talks like a fedora-sporting moderator from a ~2006 atheist-reason-rational-skeptics-or-else forum. As if he personally has already unlocked all the secrets of the universe and if your sci-fi movie isn’t perfectly adhering to known science you’re an absolute buffoon.
Sadly Bill Nye seems kinda similar, and I even got to meet him in person. He was rather irked that people wanted to get pictures and autographs with him long before the symposium even started. (Despite being lauded as a hero by countless inquisitive children and all)
TL;DR: Despite the unrelenting tide of anti-intellect, I’m glad there’s a lot of serious scientists who aren’t just in it to lord it over everybody else.
That’s the glorious thing about the rainbow. It contains all (visible) colors. (Obviously the pride flag is limited to stripes of distinct colors, but it’s supposed to be representative of everything.)
Third option: they’ve fallen into a pattern recognition fallacy and think it’s a number when it’s a completely different symbol. This happens a lot more often than most realize and even knowing about it, it can be difficult to go against the human instinct to find patterns that may or may not exist and then fit the data to it.
It has 23,328 distinct mating types. Individuals of any mating type are compatible for mating with most other mating types. There are two genetic loci determining the mating type, locus A with 288 alleles and locus B with 81 alleles. A pair of fungi will only be fertile if they have different A and different B alleles; that is, each mating type can enter fertile pairings with 22,960 others.
Ironically, doing research is the best way to be right. What people want is to feel right without having to think very hard. Feelings don’t really require energy in the same way that thinking does.
More than just research is needed and that’s what many miss. One must be able to reliably evaluate the quality of evidence to sort fact from baloney. Doing so requires critical thinking, the ability to be able to poke holes in theories regardless of whether you like them or not, and the willingness to be wrong and, above all else, the mental flexibility to update your knowledge when proven so. Not everyone is able to do that.
I am used to being wrong a lot so it comes naturally lol.
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