06 MAY 2025 by ideonexus
How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking
PRINCIPLE 1
The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
PRINCIPLE 2
Show respect for the other person's opinions. Never say, "You're wrong."
PRINCIPLE 3
If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
PRINCIPLE 4
Begin in a friendly way.
PRINCIPLE 5
Get the other person saying “yes, yes” immediately.
PRINCIPLE 6
Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
PRINCIPLE 7
Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.
PRINCIPLE 8
Try honestly to see thing...01 DEC 2014 by ideonexus
Schrodinger's Cat as a Lock for a Box
Quantum mechanics claims that there is no definite cat in the box, only a ghost, a superposition of a live cat and a dead cat. That is, until we open it and look. A measurement will collapse the system into one state or the other. So goes Schrödinger’s thought experiment.
It is completely wrong, of course. A cat is a macroscopic system, and there is no mysterious intervention by a magical observer needed to make it live or die: just its interaction with the rest of the Universe, a phenome...Folksonomies: quantum physics
Folksonomies: quantum physics
22 APR 2014 by ideonexus
Knowledge VS Understanding
Knowledge
understanding
The facts
The meaning of the facts
A body of coherent facts
The “theory” that provides coherence and meaning to those facts
Verifiable claims
Fallible, in-process theories
Rightor wrong
A matter of degree or sophistication
I know something to be true
I understand why it is, what makes it knowledge
I respond on cue with what I know
I judge when to and when not to use what I know
24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Gedankenexperiment
However, the subject need not be an esoteric one for a gedankenexperiment to be fruitful. My own favorite is Galileo’s proof that, contrary to Aristotle’s view, objects of different mass fall in a vacuum with the same acceleration. One might think that a real experiment needs to be conducted to test that hypothesis, but Galileo simply asked us to consider a large and a small stone tied together by a very light string. If Aristotle was right, the large stone should speed up the smaller one...Folksonomies: thought experiment testability
Folksonomies: thought experiment testability
Gino Segre on the importance and validity of "thought-experiments," using Galileo's disproof of objects falling at different rates as an example.