this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
1497 points (98.9% liked)

tumblr

3769 readers
60 users here now

Welcome to /c/tumblr, a place for all your tumblr screenshots and news.

Our Rules:

  1. Keep it civil. We're all people here. Be respectful to one another.

  2. No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry. I should not need to explain this one.

  3. Must be tumblr related. This one is kind of a given.

  4. Try not to repost anything posted within the past month. Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.

  5. No unnecessary negativity. Just because you don't like a thing doesn't mean that you need to spend the entire comment section complaining about said thing. Just downvote and move on.


Sister Communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] ShaunaTheDead@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

"Holy shit, we were wrong! Oh my god! This is great! We were so wrong!"

This is the essence of science. Being wrong is exciting because it means that you're on to something. The way scientific theories are made is by challenging what you believe -- trying to prove your idea wrong. If you repeatedly can't prove it wrong then you're probably approaching something that is true which continually adds to the certainty that you're onto something. That's what the sigma certainty means in scientific discoveries. It refers to the possible margin of error in a discovery.

The sigma certainty is essentially, 1 sigma is about 85% certain - or a 1 in 7 chance you're wrong, 2 sigma is about 97.75% certainty - or a 1 in 45 chance you're wrong, 3 sigma is about 99.98% certain - or about 1 in 5000 chance of being wrong, etc. It depends on which scientific field you're in as to which level of sigma is considered enough for something to officially become an accepted theory, in Astronomy a 6 sigma is where the line is drawn which is about 1 in 500 million chance of being wrong (~99.9999998% certain).

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

In real science, a null result is a disaster because you probably can't get the results published. And, even if you could, you might not want to publish because spending a lot of time and not being able to prove what you set out to prove looks bad.

But, on Mythbusters, they were the very best episodes. The team had a lot of common sense, so most of the time they could predict the outcomes. They still verified their assumptions, but it wasn't that exciting. But, when the result went against expectations, they got so excited, and they worked really hard to verify they were wrong.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] quams69@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Didn't they stop because they ran out of myths that wouldn't give people explicitly dangerous information like their bomb recipe

[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

a bull moves very gingerly

I imagined a bull in a red wig with purse in hand holding up plates and wondering where he'd store those in the kitchen if he bought a set

[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I'd like Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars or Monster Garage back. I liked the "just get it running" attitude over the muscle car and motorcycle shows.

[–] yokonzo@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This kind of is the opposite and explains how that bill nye show didn't last, it was a killjoy show, that wasn't open to changing its mind and hated the idea of learning anything new

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›