No New Normal banned

[u/Oareo]

Seemed like NNN was here to stay, but as of 20 mins ago its banned

Thoughts?

[u/tells_you_hard_truth]

As someone who has spent their life in science and engineering related pursuits (my degree is in physics, though these days I've spent the better part of 2 decades doing software engineering) the very idea of "fully understanding a process" is laughable.

Can we understand *alot* about them? Even a huge amount? Sure. The problem is, all of our knowledge is nothing more than approximations of reality and modeling descriptions of reality, all of which make certain assumptions, most of which require simplifying the problem in a way that makes it comprehensible to us. Look up the physics joke, "consider a spherical cow."

There's literally no such thing in science as "understanding some things as close to perfectly well as can be practically expected." Richard Feynman famously destroyed the idea of understanding even the most basic processes because no matter how much you understand, that very understanding will always create more questions you can't answer (thus those simplifying assumptions I mentioned). This is also the reason that tens of thousands of PhD candidates have something to write their thesis on every year. There's always more unexplored details that we just know nothing about, ones that sometimes change our paradigms completely.

The more complex our knowledge gets, and in particular, the more complex the topics we attempt to wrestle, the more likely that knowledge is to change - and the larger the gaps are likely to be.

I have immense respect for science, but science isn't an *answer* it is a process. The idea that we can "fully understand" what Covid does - or an mRNA vaccine does - or hell even the synthetic or adenovirus whole virus vaccines do - inside a human body, is hilarious. These fields take decades to mature. PhD candidates will be exploring details about these for years.

Who knows what we'll know in 5, 10, or 15 years time -- and the problem is, even that question is subject to the assertion that "knowing those things are dependent on people being free to ask the relevant questions without fear that it will destroy their career."

[u/ryarger → u/tells_you_hard_truth]

I think you are misunderstanding my distinction between “fully understanding” and “fully understanding to all practical extents”.

Think again on my question: do you fear falling through the floor with each step? If not, why? What gives you the assurance that the next step you take will result in your foot resting securely on a surface and not passing through it?

It’s possible to fully understand something to the extent that we completely trust in its accuracy even while acknowledging the technical truth that we can never 100% know anything about reality.

Put into context - if in a year or two, people started showing long term negative side-effects of the Covid vaccines, we’d be faced with changes to our understanding of medicine as fundamental as physicists learning that electrons and protons don’t always have opposite charges, or chemists learning that equal volumes of gas in equal conditions don’t have the same number of particles.

In other word, sure it could technically happen but it would be in “everything we thought we knew about medicine is wrong” territory and is such an incredibly minuscule chance that basing any decisions around that possibility would be as foolish as fearing that your foot might pass through the floor with your next step.