Salon thread 1: how do we know things?

[jenett]

Welcome to our first ever salon discussion thread. Wander in, invite a friend along, and chat! Tangents, side conversations, and new topics totally allowed. (Not sure what's going on? Here, have a brief FAQ.)

Feel free to talk about anything: my topic of the day is just to get us started.

Topic of the day
I am currently part way into a book called My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs by Brian Switek (Amazon link for additional data).

Now, I liked dinosaurs a great deal as a kid (as many people do) and I am still fond of them (though maybe a tad more fascinated by prehistoric megafauna these days), but this book is only partly about dinosaurs. It's also hugely about "How do we know stuff?" and "How does the process of science work?" and "How do we deal with the fact that what we know changes all the time, and it contradicts stuff we used to know?"

(Hence the title: there is no such thing as a Brontosaurus, it turns out, even though - as Switek points out, if you do word frequency searches, it still appears just as frequently as Apatosaurus, the correct name. That's because - as he did, and I just did here - everyone ends up saying "Apatosaurus, you know, that dinosaur everyone thought was Brontosaurus" a whole lot. Which points out a whole lot of things about language and humans and communication, not just dinosaurs.)

Anyway. I do not have tons of examples from the book yet (see also 'part way in'), but here's my question; how do you deal with the ambiguity of knowledge? What stuff makes you want to go and learn more, and what feels overwhelming? Do you have any awesome stories about sharing stuff? And do you have any Ten Thousand moment stories? (The last is a reference to an XKCD cartoon.)

Music in the background: I've been listening to a bunch of Adiemus recently: I love how it plays with known (and mostly classical) musical forms, while experimenting with melody, instrumentation, vocal sounds, and harmony). If you have other stuff along this line, feel free to rec in comments!

In my mug: I adore a particular blend of herbal tisane from a place in St. Paul, MN, Tea Source. Specifically their Red Berries blend, which has apple, elderberries, currants, rosehip peels, blackberries, raspberries, flavoring, hibiscus, and sour cherry. It is very good iced, which means I make a large batch of it and stick it in the fridge regularly this time of year.

A few final notes
As noted, the basic thing here is 'leave the conversation better than you found it, or at least not worse'. The FAQ has more help if you need it (help with commenting, help with what I mean by that, etc.) We'll figure stuff out as we go!

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

You've got a misplaced quotation mark in your XKCD link: it should be http://xkcd.com/1053/.

After years of teaching physics, I finally learned what polarization was a couple months ago. That had been bugging me since high school, but I was never in a class that really focused on it. New information really excites me when it plugs into what I already know, so it's graspable, or brings up contradictions in what I already know and then resolves them. The last thing I got really excited about explaining was the strong nuclear force.

I get overwhelmed by large amounts of symbolic or technical jargon that I can't attach mental images to — this was a problem for me in higher math, and also honestly in higher physics, because the mental models stopped being emphasized so much. And it's a problem when I try to communicate with friends who are philosophers and very picky about word usage. Biology's whole focus on definitions and nomenclature makes it opaque to me, but when I can see the physics behind everything and actually take the time to wrap my brain around things, it makes a lot more sense.

"How do we deal with the fact that what we know changes all the time, and it contradicts stuff we used to know?"
WITH SCIENCE! AND IT'S AWESOME. But yes, there's this whole trick of not getting too attached to anything you think you know, because there's always uncertainty in it.

[jenett]

I have fixed the link, thanks!

I am with you on the symbolic or technical jargon piece. I do not in general find vast amounts of information or regularly changing information overwhelming, but I find I do need something to hang it on. Having an understanding of where the terms come from, or how they developed, or why we're calling it Griselda instead of Bob usually leads me to feel a lot more comfortable.

(It's also one of the most common reasons I use Wikipedia, actually: as a librarian who gets asked about subjects I don't know tons about all the time, it's a really quick way to get a sense for the terminology of the field and which bits can be used as helpful search terms for me.)

Do you feel differently about the stuff that doesn't respond to pure science as well? (For example, thinking here about, say, social history, in which there's certainly methods for coping with change in what we know, but it's not "Oh, we could go reproduce this experiment now." either.)

[cheyinka]

Whereas for me, I'm more likely to be intrigued by a subject about which I don't already know very much if there's new words in it - "New ways of talking about things? New words for concepts I didn't know existed, much less needed words? Yes please!" - but then that makes it hard for me to talk about what I'm learning, especially when I'm still at the stage where I say things like, "And then the electrons have this thingy, and that thingy makes them be a certain way they wouldn't be without the thingy," because I want to talk about it (new things!) but don't understand either the concepts or the jargon yet. And I know I irritate people later by saying "No, seriously, the terms matter, there's a huge difference between 'consubstantial' and 'one in being'!!" (to use an example from my favorite subject, religion).

(I'm also the sort of person who would sit down and read through The Jargon File (ostensibly a dictionary of hacker terminology) just because, though.)

[aedifica]

"How do we deal with the fact that what we know changes all the time, and it contradicts stuff we used to know?"
WITH SCIENCE! AND IT'S AWESOME. But yes, there's this whole trick of not getting too attached to anything you think you know, because there's always uncertainty in it.

And there's also the question of how one reacts when what changes isn't our knowledge, but a definition. I'm thinking of Pluto here--on the one hand, when I was growing up it was a planet, and I'm reluctant to accept that that status was revoked; but on the other hand, when I was reading more about it recently I learned that the asteroid Ceres was also once considered a planet, and that pokes holes in my argument that Pluto ought to retain its planet status as a courtesy.

[mrissa]

Red Berries is the best iced herbal tisane I have found. For hot herbal, I prefer the Tea Source's Basket of Berries--similar but not quite the same. But cold? Give me Red Berries every time.

I have been trying to think how to put my other comment in a way that won't sound like I'm trying to be snotty and superior, because honestly I am not easily overwhelmed by ambiguity of knowledge. I am often frustrated by other people's stubborn refusal to write the books I want for research, but that's different.

[jenett]

As I said in my FAQ about this thread: I know many very very smart and interesting people, so the "not easily overwhelmed by the ambiguity of knowledge" part is not a problem here. Or at least, I hope not!

I am not often overwhelmed by the ambiguity of knowledge, but I'm almost always fascinated by it: tracing what bits people figured out when, and why some kinds of things (this comes up in the current book) are nearly as dependent on personality and choices of "let me take my life this way instead of that" as science itself. (People exploring a particular topic, or finding a particular thing that lead them to other things, etc.)

[redbird]

This is a question to either you or Jenett: is this a house blend, or is it available elsewhere? (If it's their own invention, I may ask if someone can mail me a sample before I get in touch with the company, since I have no idea when I will next be in the Twin Cities, but it's very unlikely to be this summer.)

[oursin]

What stuff makes you want to go and learn more

Usually when I come across something I know a little bit about, and something either strikes me as probably wrong, but needs delving around, or potentially opening up a whole bigger story. This is possibly all to do with knowing enough about a particular subject to be ruffled by something that does not fit known patterns.

Though it's thwarting, in a job as an information professional (archivist) when one realises that it is probably not an appropriate use of one's time to chase after some hare started in a reader enquiry. Sometimes the economies of time mean that I have to say, this far, this is enough.

But I would still like to find out (this came up in connection with a query about something else in the family history) how common it was for single Victorian males to adopt children. This struck me as possibly more interesting a question than the one that was being pursued.

[jenett]

I certainly find the question of how common it was for single Victorian males to adopt children very interesting! (And not one I would have thought of particularly without some other trigger...)

You're right about that sense of "this thing doesn't quite fit". It's one of the skills I wish I knew how to teach better, when I'm doing library instruction, that on one hand you want to move away from the stuff that says the same things as the sources you've already found (once you have enough support for those things, naturally) and look at the things that don't fit, or add something new, or go somewhere different.

[drinking Golden Assam with milk and sugar]

[redbird]

If you do that research, even a bit, I would like to know the answer. (I don't think I would like it enough to do the research myself.)

[untonuggan]

I am also interested in the Victorian male adoption question. ^_^

[redbird]

One of the tangents that leads to is Who controls naming? There is such a thing as a brontosaurus in the same way as there is such a thing as a cow, whose formal taxonomic name is going to be Bos taurus or Bos indicus. Apatosaurus is the proper Linnaean name of that group, but after a century, brontosaurus is an English word, and people who grew up with it aren't going to shift easily. Maybe if they take their kids to the museum and the nine-year-old says "Don't you know anything? That's an Apatosaurus."

Hmm. I wonder if people are equally conservative about names in different contexts: is someone who cheerfully switches to Apatosaurus more likely to say Mumbai or Chennai instead of Bombay or Madras, and accept that their relative isn't "Tommy" anymore but "Thomas" (or "Mike" or "Tamara") than someone who keeps saying "brontosaur." They're different concepts of authority: a person about her/his own name, or specialists on their area of specialty, or locals now versus foreigners a century or two ago.

[jenett]

Ooh, yes. And the issue of different names in different settings, to riff on several things that have come across my screen in the last week or two.

(I mean, if you're speaking about places historically, there are times when the historical name makes a lot more sense. There's a fascinating bit in another book I just read - The Snake Charmer: A Life and Death in Pursuit of Knowledge by Jamie James that is nominally a biography of Joe Slowinski, a herpetologist who died of snakebite in Myanmar, but is really also all about the pursuit of knowledge and choices about how we do that - where the author talks about the political choices of calling something (or in this case, the species) Burma or Myanmar, since the latter was seen (this is in the early 2000s) by a number of people as a political support of the then-new regime there.)

(Could that paragraph have had more parentheses and asides? This is me, so probably, but I hope it's coherent enough.)

Anyway. Names have power and all that, in lots of dimensions, and ability to flex about that seems a very particular sort of skill.

[aedifica]

I am not equally conservative about names in the contexts you mention: if a brontosaurus informed me that it would really prefer to be called an apatosaurus, I'd do my best to switch, but for someone else telling me that they'd really prefer I called brontosauri apatosauri, I don't see much reason to change. And for country names, I use whatever name I think the citizens prefer English speakers use (though I admit I don't do much research to decide that).

[I note, by the way, that Firefox's built-in spellchecker knows "brontosaurus" but does not recognize "apatosaurus."]

an enormous earth-shaker

[cheyinka]

As far as Brontosaurus goes, I'm pretty sure that's why Alphasaurus (Amazon link) uses "Eobrontosaurus" for E - there are plenty of E dinosaurs (unlike W, where both one-dinosaur-per-letter lists I've seen use Wannanosaurus), but Brontosaurus is so familiar to people that parents potentially overwhelmed by twenty-six dinosaur names might appreciate one that seemed familiar. (A is Allosaurus, though.)

Re: an enormous earth-shaker

[jenett]

Oh, that makes a lot of sense.

I'm also contemplating here how some names fall more trippingly from the tongue than others. Or the fingers. (I misspelled Apatosaurus several times in my original post until I fixed it.) And whether that has anything to do with how they stick with us, or make sense to us.

(Which, logically, it must, but how much or which bits matter most? I have no clue.)

Re: an enormous earth-shaker

[kyrielle]

...I like dinosaurs, but I am really enjoying the chance to learn more about them and find more resources. My four-year-old likes them too, so more material is good!

Meta-knowledge

[batrachian]

I hadn't really thought a whole lot about the process of learning before, so this isn't organized at all. You've been warned. ;)

I like to learn new things. I'm realizing, though, that I have a definite preference for things that have already had most of the internal inconsistencies worked out; bleeding-edge hard science and 'humanities' give me the same uneasy feelings. I think it boils down to... on the well-trod familiar paths, there is An Agrred Upon Answer. It may be wrong, or only applicable in a certain context (I'm mostly remembering here how my physics classes started with Newtonian mechanics and then promptly went 'okay, that's a good place to start from as long as velocity is kept relatively low (under .1c is the guidepost that I'm remembering).

You don't have that certainty in the new stuff. Not knowing things, I'm mostly okay with, especially if there is the promise that Someone Somewhere does know, and they've written a book, and I can (at least theoretically) learn from them.

I don't think it's a coincidence that I ended up as an engineer; math and physical systems can be bewildering if you're not used to looking at them, but there is a well-defined toolbox, and the systems themselves are, relatively speaking, understandable by breaking down into component bits. The same is...not necessarily true for biology, or headology, or any of the thousand fields of human interaction where there's fractal levels of complexity and it all matters.

Re: Meta-knowledge

[jenett]

Did you have the reaction to high school chemistry and physics that I did?

Where they taught us the Bohr model of the atom in Chemistry, and we used it all year, and I sort of vaguely knew that it was More Complicated Than That (but class didn't discuss it much at all: I had a very "we will do the Chemistry" sort of teacher, not one who digressed about larger theory stuff)

And then I got to Physics, and got told "Yeah, all that stuff you spent last year with, actually Totally Not The Way The World Is?"

I still can't get over - twenty+ years later - that sense of betrayal. It wasn't that I really wanted all the details the year before. But I wanted more sense that I should not have made the Bohr model the foundation of everything I was sorting things into in my head.

(And I don't *think* I was missing something: I was a fairly good abstract thinker earlier than most of my peers, so I think if it'd noticeably come up in class, I'd have responded differently.)

Anyway. Yeah. I also keep thinking back to something that came up in the ebook summit I was at 2 weeks ago, where one of the speakers pointed out that a lot of the push in *academic* ebook options and research publications is coming from the sciences, and only (much later) trickling down to the humanities, precisely because of some of those issues.

How I'm learning about new music

[untonuggan]

Well you did mention music in the background, and recently I've been fascinated by how much Pandora knows my brain or rather how much the hivemind of Pandora (and really let's be honest other site such as Pandora) know my musical tastes.

It's gotten to the point where if I want to do something creative with music in the background and I don't have access to Pandora/Last.fm/etc, I get kinda crankety. Which is odd. Because when I was growing up I would listen to the same. CD. or song. on repeat. for hours.

I still do that, but mostly it's a song that I've heard by an artist I found that I liked on Pandora/etc. Artists that I have found and enjoyed through Pandora (note my decidedly folk taste right now): Kate Rusby, The Wailin' Jennys, rediscovering Allison Krauss.

One music video/song that I discovered (gasp!) from an actual person lately, that is my partner, is actually pretty awesome. It is called Q.U.E.E.N. with Janelle Monae and Erykah Badu (there are special characters I think but my keyboard dnw). Note that this is decidedly not folk.

Re: How I'm learning about new music

[batrachian]

Pandora is amazing like that; I tend to use it in much the same way, only I've not gotten over the hump of 'actually going and acquiring the music in non-Pandora format'. So, you're ahead of me there.

Also I am struck by how many of the artists which you namedropped are on the station I'm listening to right now. (Other highlights include: Sarah McLachlan, The Weepies, Indigo Girls (my, um, favorite band in the history of ever), Sara Bareilles and Vienna Teng.)

Not really much of a point, other than that I had this conception that my musical taste was Weird And Eclectic, and it's...good to hear that there's other folks in at least the same ballpark.

On things that match and things that don't, and whether one wants them to

[aedifica]

I am contemplating getting some new sheets (I haven't convinced myself that I should spend the money, but I'm tempted). However, the sheets I have in mind would match one of my duvet covers, which would be just too much matching for me! So I half convinced myself I'd need to get another duvet cover as well, so I'd have more flexibility in which duvet cover I could use with which sheets. And then it occurred to me that there are other people who would want the whole bed to match, while I want the things on the bed to look good together but not be identical.

(Dishes, on the other hand, I don't mind them all matching but I also don't mind them being different as long as they look good together. My ex-husband is firmly in the "dishes should all match" camp, so I have the white dishes I already owned and the deep blue dishes that used to be his (and I really like the white and blue together), and he has the dish set that we bought together. We each have enough dishes and we're each happy with how our own dishes look.)

Re: On things that match and things that don't, and whether one wants them to

[jenett]

Oooooh. I am with you on this.

I want things to fit together, but not match. (Well, you've seen my living spaces, so this will not surprise you.) My bed has a navy flannel fitted sheet, and a mid-blue duvet cover and pillow case. (I believe it's called "flag blue" in the catalog which makes no sense to me but there you are.)

(And I really wish either Land's End or LL Bean would do a color run of flannel sheets that are dark forest green, for a change, but that's an entirely other ramble. (I have bedding colour issues, which is also a whole different topic.))

Anyway, one of the things I really need to do is start acquiring interesting pottery bowls and plates that fit together but are also interesting unique pieces. (I already have mugs, but I need to decide on what shapes I really want for the other things, which has been the sticking point. But I'm down to one plate, and one actual bowl, and two squarish things because I dropped a plate and a bowl in the last six months, y'know, should figure out that solution sometime.)

[silveradept]

I feel like my knowledge has increased just by reading all of the comments to this pint, so that is definitely a sign of success for the salons. There are probably a couple off points where I'll go back and add commentary after I get done with this one.

I work in an information profession that serves the public, so most of the time, when I encounter the ambiguity of knowledge, it's because the person making the request doesn't completely know what it is they're asking for, or because the responses that we've been able to find are inconclusive. A large part of my job is getting people and resources in close enough proximity to each other for the people to read the resources and draw their own conclusions. (Or read the books and decide whether they like them as entertainment or not. Same principle.)

Most people are okay with that, because when they come to us, they leave with a much better idea of what they're looking for and places that can help them answer the question.

I'm okay with ambiguous knowledge. I think some part of that comes from having decided to stop believing in the monotheistic religion of my upbringing and its haircut that insisted there was only one right way, whose interpretations were solely the province of the clergy. Since I believed in a different path, one that fundamentally acknowledged the universe as ambiguous and sometimes capricious, I think that helped me accept the idea that knowledge is never absolute, but always moving toward better and better representations in a Zeno's Paradox sort of way.

I'm more worried about the fact that our knowledge is rapidly outpacing our ability to store, archive, and preserve it. We'll always be able to design better models and crunch more data, but our ability to recover from failure or to make knowledge permanent is currently a panic.

[jenett]

Argh, meant to comment on this before this point in the day. Yes, on the job of helping people deal with the ambiguous knowledge.

Also on the thing I refer to as 'embrace the power of 'and'' - that accepting that there's more than one possible answer or outcome or possibility in one part of one's life does tend to expand it in other places.

I am also worried about the ability to store/archive/preserve it. And about the fact that no one these days can even keep up with the broad outline of more than a very tightly defined field themselves: we have SO MUCH STUFF

(See: what happens every time the Internet Explodes over something: if it gets to be more than 20 or 30 links, the majority of people in the conversation cannot possibly have read them all, and we are not yet graceful about negotiating some of that. It only gets more complicated when we're talking science or history or politics or whatever.)

(I am also thinking a lot about three or four different things about ebooks I've seen recently, but it will take time for that to gel.)

[pj]

I can't possible read everything posted thus far, damnit! I glimpsed at stuff.

So, for me - ambiguity of knowledge is something that I thrive on. It stomps hubris flat. It keeps the mind sharp. I follow medical things more than the other sciences and it built on ambiguity so maybe my POV stems from there. At times I am deeply disappointed to find something is no longer so, but I try (try, not always succeed) to get too attached to learned knowledge because it all changes so fast.

Sometimes it is overwhelming, but usually volume does that to me more than change.

I have at least 10,000 of the ten thousand stories. Some weeks it seems a daily occurrence that others know things that everyone knows except me. Most often pop culture, but frequently sociological which always throws me because it seems I fail at understanding the humans when they're mean. I am 52 fucking years old and it still happens. Sometimes this dismays me, the feeling that I do indeed live under a rock, in a bubble, pick your metaphor. Shit, is that a metaphor or an analogy? *Googles* Analogy.

Oh - what drives me to look up more info on topics? People who's brain power and critical thinking skills I trust say, "Hey, *this* is interesting!"

[kyrielle]

Now I have another book I have to read! Drew is a serious dinosaur lover. I was as a child, and I'm rediscovering the fascination. And he can pronounce some amazing dinosaur names. :)

I don't mind knowing there is more to know that I don't know yet. I am sometimes frustrated at the relative time I have versus the time needed for everything (learning and other things).

(Which may be why I'm enjoying MOOCs so much - downloading lectures to my phone to listen to during my commute adds knowledge *and* improves an otherwise aggravating dead time in my day. Double win.)

Currently I appear to be on a peach kick for tea. The white peach from Teavana (not my favorite place, and yet that tea is so tasty), and a green peach from Bigelow. I've got all these lovely Tea Forte teas, but not that I'm in the mood for this minute, apparently.