Ever wonder "how do we know this?" (in terms of science, history, etc.)

[skykiii]

This post is probably gonna make me sound like an idiot (not that this would be news to anyone) or like a conspiracy theorist, but really, the older I get the more these things bug me, and worse is I've never gotten a real answer anywhere else. Usually people just shrug and say "well, scientists say this so I guess its based on something."

But sometimes I find myself wondering how we know something, and in fact how we can know something.

Like just for example, earlier in the day I was listening to something and it mentioned that in Aztec cultures a man giving cocoa to a woman was basically a marriage proposal.

And my first thought was "that sounds made up."

Because like... this really seems like the kind of thing you couldn't possibly know without them having said so in some sort of surviving record, and last I checked, weren't the Aztecs kind of a lost civilization because of the Conquistadors?

The thing is though, a lot of world history for me sounds exactly like that. Okay, for a lot of it I can accept that maybe we found old journals or scrolls or something, but then I'll suddenly hear that some kingdom in 600 BC passed legal reforms as a way of avoiding war, and like.... that seems awfully specific for you to know about something that happened 2600 years ago from a culture that probably does not exist anymore.

But now let's talk science.

Like, one of the well-known scientific principles is "matter can neither be created nor destroyed."

.... How, exactly, do we know that? Seriously, I tried to look this up, and the results I found didn't really make sense. If I remember the experiment correctly, a scientist melted a thing, but then he melted a different copy of the same thing but in a space with no oxygen and this caused it to bend in a different way. Like, okay.... how do you see "this thing bent a different way" and come away with this grand revelation about "matter"?

And then there's any science that requires a specialized device, like say a particle accelerator or something that detects spectrums of.... light, sound, whatever.

I know I'm sounding autistic right now, but follow my logic here:

Back in the day I would hook PC monitors up using VGA connectors, and if something were wrong I would know because the monitor would have the wrong colors or something. This I could tell with my eyes. Or if something was wrong with my speakers, there would be noticable audio issues which I could hear with the naked ear. Or if there was an issue with my keyboard, I would find out because a keypress wouldn't do what it's supposed to.

Same goes for fixing a car. You don't need a specialized machine to know your tire is flat.

But now imagine if there was no noticable difference between a flat tire and a full one, and the only way you knew would be some thing on the car telling you its flat, and the auto shop guys pointing a Buck Rogers-looking device at the tires that somehow tells them "yeah, its flat." Wouldn't that make you skeptical?

That's how I feel about things that, for example, let you see electrons or accelerate particles. How do we know these devices are actually detecting a real thing and not just putting a light show on a screen, or making a sound when you press a button?

And what if these devices broke? Would you need another electron-seeing device in order to fix the first one? Which then would beg the question of how these devices came to exist in the first place.

I hope I'm making sense.

I actually asked something like this on some other forum, but that place just kinda went REEEEEEEE! and accused me of being the kind of guy who denies Covid (which, well.... close enough). Which honestly, just makes the whole thing sound even more bullshit. There is never ever a good reason not to question what you've been told, after all.

Anyway, I'm hoping maybe KF can give me compelling answers (and hopefully answers that my dumbass brain can understand).

 

[Meat Target]

Welcome to the field of Epistemology.

 

[Grub]

But now imagine if there was no noticable difference between a flat tire and a full one, and the only way you knew would be some thing on the car telling you its flat, and the auto shop guys pointing a Buck Rogers-looking device at the tires that somehow tells them "yeah, its flat." Wouldn't that make you skeptical?

That's pretty much how modern cars work. New cars do have tire pressure sensors that will turn on the check engine light if pressure gets low. Then the mechanic will plug his handy dandy obd reader into your car and tell you your tires need air.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

I've started to wonder recently, and I'm not meme'ing, how they came up with the number of 6 million for the Holocaust.

Now I have absolutely no doubt that there were concentration camps and mass exterminations. But nobody seems to know where this number actually came from. When I've researched it, the usual explanation is that it was the number given in the "earliest estimates". Well, okay, having a source close to the event has value... but how did they come up with that number? Were they extrapolating from mass graves? Capacity of the camps? What?

 

[HarveyMCR]

I originally started college for a history degree. The very first history class I took focused on Historiography and demanded that we think about who was the ones actually documenting things. Because unless you were nobility or clergy, chances are you didn’t have the knowledge or resources to write down and keep documents.

History is notoriously shoddy for how we “know” things. At this point in my life, whenever I read a history of something more than 200 years old, I essentially always read it like it was written by a snotty 15 year old who really hated the other guys for some reason and wanted to paint them in the worst light possible.

Unless we find direct evidence for something happening that obviously wasn't planted, chances are there was some sort of agenda behind its documentation. Almost all surviving histories of the late republic - early Roman Empire were commissioned by Caesar Augustus and his family, and paint the Julio-Claudians in the best light possible. It is entirely possible that they were horrendous dictators that everyone hated, but any works that would have said that were either not written or lost to time due to a lack of preservation. Towards the late empire, almost all histories are exceedingly critical of the imperial family - but that’s also because they were written by the senatorial class whose power had evaporated and were increasingly being replaced by the military. Every emperor is always seen as the greatest man who ever lived (if he restored senatorial power) or the greatest villain of all time (if he degraded senatorial power).

Our best way to “know” if something happened is ideally if it was unintentionally preserved. Pompeii was an absolute gold mine because it preserved contemporary pieces of art (not just the ones worthy of keeping for thousands of years) and acted as a slice in time showing what the daily lives of Roman’s looked like (which previously was too mundane to write down).

Jesus, funny enough, is better documented than most historical figures. Even if we don’t have his birth certificate or first hand accounts of his existence (unless you count, you know, the Bible), there are several contemporary accounts of people who absolutely HATED Christianity who wrote to each other about Christ. Essentially all of their accounts say “that Fucking Jew in Judea who got himself crucified is annoying and all his followers get under my skin” which is way better evidence for him actually existing than you could ever hope for. These people hated the guy, and they still wrote about him as if he really lived and really died on a cross, so we can be pretty certain, at minimum, there was a guy in Judea at that time period who preached love and kindness, called himself the son of God, and was crucified by the Romans.

To go back to your earlier question about how do we know if Aztecs gave cocoa as marriage proposals - go find a historically source that mentions this and follow the citations and judge if you believe it or not. If it is a widely documented phenomenon that can be traced all over the Aztec empire, great, you can pretty safely assume it’s real. But if instead you find that the origin and sole source of this tradition was allegedly “a peasant who told a conquistador that this was customary, and oh yeh that conquistador was trying to sell cocoa to the king and asked for a royal monopoly on the stuff + 50 slaves to start a plantation”, then there’s a non-zero chance that it’s bullshit. Or who knows, non of the Aztecs lived to write down their pre-Columbian marriage proposal trends

 

[Fastest Hand In The East]

Not gonna lie, this is very autistic.

 

[melty]

You are not wrong. They say history is a set of lies agreed upon for a reason.

Very very frequently when I look into some claim, like your cocoa example, the original source is the historical equivalent of "trust me bro"

We see this a lot right now with current year politics invading history. Now imagine this happening over a period of thousands of years, with multiple people injecting their biases into their research, then the next generation re-interpreting it with their biases, etc. Scientists and researchers are only people, and people don't change that much. This has been going on a long, long time.

So I guess no, you are not crazy, you are actually noticing things correctly, that's actually how things work.

 

[Phalanges Mycologist]

Yea this sort of thing does hold a practical interest and intellectual use case to me, for example right now I am working my way through some VERY old documents that have been archived like letters and diary descriptions to track when something was originally made and then restyled this isn't something that's a sexy subjects for academics either so it's easy but you have to take the descriptions are tinged with peoples own backgrounds and education i.e. a young English Nobelman in 1500 who had a Italian Tutor who had spent time in France would have imparted information that another young English Nobleman from the same era who had a Italian Tutor who had not been to France but spent time in Egypt and some of the many Italian City States like Verona or Naples who then spent some time at Oxford.

Another example is tool's, there are a lot of pervasive myths surround when and where tool existed and a lot of this research at best dates to the 1950's and before that a long time before by a century and a half or so, and was mostly written by people who had never used that tool and viewed workmen as people who use the back door and are not worth talking too.

For example there is a pervasive idea that the Anglo-Saxons didn't use planes much but we have examples of planes from that era and work finds from that era that you could not make without a plane, hell there are examples of Iron body planes that where called "Locks" until recently found in England and they date from the Roman era and this explains why English planes have a variety of shapes and styles and forms that you don't see on the content.

I'm going through a lot of historical works and I am trying to correctly identify some tools and I may one day write a book on the topic.

The one that always get's me though is the first person who put 2+2=4 and came up with something new, think about it for a second there had to be a guy one day who was around a really HOT fire and found that there was some oddly shiny rocks in the embers, and discovered Coper and then some time later another dude thought hey what if I add some of this stuff to it (tin) and came up with Bronze.

 

[glad vlad]

I am also an autistic retard and I share many of your questions. I feel like there’s a valley of understanding where you no longer think “oh yeah everything I’m told is true” but you don’t have the subject expertise yourself to assess anything. I also imagine that the past handful of years has really destroyed many people’s faith in Facts and SCIENCE.

Your cocoa marriage proposal skepticism makes me think of the great book Motel of the Mysteries:

It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization.

Body Ritual Among the Nacirema is a similar gag.

 

[Rei is Shit.]

 

[Idiotron]

Like just for example, earlier in the day I was listening to something and it mentioned that in Aztec cultures a man giving cocoa to a woman was basically a marriage proposal.

Those things were actually told to the Europeans by 16th century Aztecs.
Maybe those fuckers lied but that's what the Aztecs themselves said.

Like, one of the well-known scientific principles is "matter can neither be created nor destroyed."

That should be "we don't know any way to create or destroy matter" because maybe there is a way that we will figure out something in the future.

That's how I feel about things that, for example, let you see electrons or accelerate particles. How do we know these devices are actually detecting a real thing and not just putting a light show on a screen, or making a sound when you press a button?

I suppose you can get into engineering and science and spend 8 years learning about how the fuck these things work and then find out for yourself

I actually asked something like this on some other forum, but that place just kinda went REEEEEEEE! and accused me of being the kind of guy who denies Covid (which, well.... close enough). Which honestly, just makes the whole thing sound even more bullshit. There is never ever a good reason not to question what you've been told, after all.

It's really good to question things all the time.
That includes COVID.
I grew up around thieves and con artists so I've learned early on that you can't just trust what you're presented, you need to dig deeper.

I think you're slightly brighter than most people just by asking questions, even if those questions are "dumb" by society's standards.
Most people don't question things at all, that's how we get the belief that men can just become women, a lot of people genuinely believe that's possible because so many people in positions of power and authority said so.
[/QUOTE]

 

[I'm Retarded?]

That's how I feel about things that, for example, let you see electrons or accelerate particles. How do we know these devices are actually detecting a real thing and not just putting a light show on a screen, or making a sound when you press a button?

extrapolation exists. if the output of a particle accelerator's telemetry can be verified against a process that can be measured some other way, i.e., the reduction of a known compound into its known atomic components, then when that same telemetry is used to observe an unknown process, certain conclusions can be drawn based on the previously established tenets.

And what if these devices broke? Would you need another electron-seeing device in order to fix the first one? Which then would beg the question of how these devices came to exist in the first place.

these types of devices include rigorous internal diagnostics and technicians who know how the thing was built. if you turn your light switch on and the light starts flickering at half brightness, you know something fucked up. similarly, if you try to use a thermometer to measure the temperature outside and it says it's -999°F and your flesh wasn't flash-frozen in the process, you know something fucked up. however, here's a fun anecdote:

back in the 60s, a cutting-edge radio telescope was built in the UK for the purpose of measuring an obscure cosmological phenomenon. however, one of the first things they found was a distant radio signal, pointed directly at Earth, oscillating at perfectly regular intervals, almost like... a synthetic beacon constructed by sapients unknown. figuring it was an anomalous observation, the operators checked and re-checked their instruments to search for some kind of error in the equipment, but found none. moreover, they reached out to another radio telescope to double-check their findings, who confirmed that they observed the same signal. it turned out that the existence of a phenomenon consistent with these measurements had been theorized before - pulsars - and although obviously there was no reasonable way to send a probe out that far to get a better picture or anything, this explanation provided a context for these results that was later borne out by observation with better tools. the existence of a great many pulsars are now well-documented in many more forms than their radio emissions. but for a moment there, just a few months, some scientists were trying very hard not to allow themselves to hope that they had found proof of intelligent extraterrestrial life.

 

[byuu]

Now I have absolutely no doubt that there were concentration camps and mass exterminations. But nobody seems to know where this number actually came from. When I've researched it, the usual explanation is that it was the number given in the "earliest estimates". Well, okay, having a source close to the event has value... but how did they come up with that number? Were they extrapolating from mass graves? Capacity of the camps? What?

It's by comparing the demographics of Jews living in Europe before and after the war (while also tracking migration, birth rates, etc.)
Not hard to find out.

 

[Brahma]

I can't answer your questions but this is an excellent thread

 

[The Skeksis Emperor]

The thing is though, a lot of world history for me sounds exactly like that. Okay, for a lot of it I can accept that maybe we found old journals or scrolls or something, but then I'll suddenly hear that some kingdom in 600 BC passed legal reforms as a way of avoiding war, and like.... that seems awfully specific for you to know about something that happened 2600 years ago from a culture that probably does not exist anymore.

@skykiii
This makes me want to powerlevel but I can't.
Let me just say that as far as knowledge of social and political life in ancient societies goes, you'd be suprised how detailed the ancients wrote certain things down, as soon as writing became possible. The problem with ancient sources is that you never find them evenly distributed and you can't control what you find, so some things end up being very clearly established by sources, and some things are completely unknown because there are no sources for it. But when you strike gold, you strike gold.

For example, you want to know all the rules for how to sell a house in ancient Egypt in 600 BC? Well, Codex Hermopolis describes exactly that. And also all the hypothetical problems you could run into, and how to solve them in a legal and correct way. This text also includes legal rules about how to arrange inheritance and what to do when you, for example, want to disinherit all your kids except for one, and what to do when you have a legally binding marriage contract with your wife but she dies, or you die.

Do you want to know about accounting in ancient Sumer? Well lucky you, because there are literally thousands of clay tablets that show how that goes. Thousands. Plus, there are school exercises preserved for Sumerian student-scribes who needed to learn how to do accounting themselves, so you as a modern researcher can learn right along with them.

Another example: The Amarna Correspondence is the royal correspondence between the court of Egypt and foreign courts and vassals from 1360–1332 BCE that was preserved by chance. It contains literal letters from kings to other kings and their vassals (dictated to a scribe), and they are often extensive enough that you can see something of the personality of the sender in them. Amarna letter 162 is literally the king of Egypt flipping his shit at a vassal who was a complete pain in the ass and plotting against everyone. You can see real historical events happening over the course of these letters, and to some extent the feelings of real historical figures expressed in their own words.

Of course all sources must be approached carefully and the context should be kept in mind, but there is a surprising amount of relatively good evidence from the earliest phases of human history, for some topics. Even ancient historiography isn't per definition unreliable, just tainted by the opinions and feels of the people who recorded it. But sometimes you can still derive real facts and events from that, if you understand the culture and perhaps have corroborating textual or archaeological evidence.

 

[SilkGnut]

You are not wrong. They say history is a set of lies agreed upon for a reason.

Very very frequently when I look into some claim, like your cocoa example, the original source is the historical equivalent of "trust me bro"

We see this a lot right now with current year politics invading history. Now imagine this happening over a period of thousands of years, with multiple people injecting their biases into their research, then the next generation re-interpreting it with their biases, etc. Scientists and researchers are only people, and people don't change that much. This has been going on a long, long time.

So I guess no, you are not crazy, you are actually noticing things correctly, that's actually how things work.

It is a wonderful rabbit hole once you discover it. It feels that an overwhelming majority of things that are "known" about this world are best guesses presented with an air of authority, believed by the overwhelming mass of humanity that has no reason to question any of it. As one peels away the layers of the onion it is amazing how little actual "objective truth" there is to this world.

What a fascinating idea that history is just a battle of narratives. I suppose it is just his story, after all.

 

[HarveyMCR]

It is a wonderful rabbit hole once you discover it. It feels that an overwhelming majority of things that are "known" about this world are best guesses presented with an air of authority, believed by the overwhelming mass of humanity that has no reason to question any of it. As one peels away the layers of the onion it is amazing how little actual "objective truth" there is to this world.

What a fascinating idea that history is just a battle of narratives. I suppose it is just his story, after all.

I will say, the number one reason I jumped ship from History is the major is literally just a propaganda machine. Time after time they told us that "The value in this degree is not knowing when a battle was fought our how an empire rose and fell, but instead in telling a coherent story using historical documents". Which is fine and all, but then it becomes a problem when all the 3000-4000 level classes are focused on social justice topics and you're required to write about a "social issue that still has an impact today" and the only way to pass the class is to write about how women are still suffering from the Mexican Civil War or something like that. On top of that, there are literally next to no jobs in History. You either go work as a history teacher (which has terrible pay), get a PHD and go into academia, or you work for the government (seriously, half the people from that I keep in touch with from that program work for a 3 letter agency right now).

I guess the point of my comment is to say to not trust anyone who tries to sell you a history degree. They're expert propagandists, and in return for 4-years of writing SJ fluff pieces you'll be rewarded with terrible job opportunities.

 

[YE24]

Like, one of the well-known scientific principles is "matter can neither be created nor destroyed."

.... How, exactly, do we know that? Seriously, I tried to look this up, and the results I found didn't really make sense. If I remember the experiment correctly, a scientist melted a thing, but then he melted a different copy of the same thing but in a space with no oxygen and this caused it to bend in a different way. Like, okay.... how do you see "this thing bent a different way" and come away with this grand revelation about "matter"?

The irony is that this understanding is painfully anachronistic. We haven't viewed physics/chemistry this way since before Einstein. His famous equation (that there is evidence he scammed from others), E=mc^2, describes a contrary case to your scientific principle: mass is energy.

But reeling that back in, we come back to the old thermodynamic principles: when you describe the energy into a system and the energy out of a system, it always seems to balance out. This isn't arbitrary, this is well-established by centuries of experiment, and is a common lab assignment. It's believed to the degree that if you have a difference between input and output in a system, either you missed something, or you measured wrong. You're not going to find that energy wasn't constant.

Einstein's equation actually extends this principle; now matter itself can just be injected into the equation as energy, and so in contexts where matter becomes energy (nuclear physics), the laws of thermodynamics continue to hold.

Richard Feynman (better physicist than Einstein) says about science: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." This highlights his own philosophy of science, but is consistent with how the field works: it works by someone creating saying "huh, this doesn't make sense, let's try something different" and finding evidence for it. The ultimate scientific virtue is skepticism, especially skepticism of the narratives of authority. Today, this is the kind of science we need. Thank you for doing your part to further science.

 

[Nuclear Poisoning]

Welcome to the field of Epistemology.

And historiography.
I used to think both were meme-tier disciplines invented by idle academics as yet another way to package their inane ramblings as something of value (while real scientists and real men are busy doing important things), but my appreciation for them has recently increased massively, probably because I'm going through a similar phase as OP.

 

[HarveyMCR]

Since nobody addressed it, I wanted to touch on your point about how do we know anything about science. There's a reason why school's hammer you with the scientific method. It's not just the "correct" way to do something, it is the way the actually "proves" something is true. If you are able to perform an experiment that confirms your hypothesis in a way that no other explanation could explain, and everyone else on the planet can recreate the methodology and get the exact same results as you, you can reasonably say something is true. Granted, this was a lot easier in the 17th century when it was originally invented, when the height of a historical discovery was "bro if you boil pee long enough you get this white substance that smells weird. Yeh you can do it with anyone's pee".

With super colliders, there is a great deal of trust behind the process because there are only a handful of them in the world. This is why results are published publicly and required to stand up to a high level of scrutiny. Let's be clear, results HAVE been fabricated in the past (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe5WT22-AO8 this is a great video about a man who faked the discovery of several elements), but by making the data public and putting a massive bounty out for anyone who can identify wrong doing, you can at the very least assume there isn't a grand conspiracy to fool you.

This is why data transparency is so important. The FED makes all economic indicator statistics public (at great embarrassment to the US State sometimes) not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because when they say "there is rising inflation, we need to increase rates" they need to have the good will/legitimacy to have the people believe them. If life was chugging along as normal, and the FED just suddenly said "oh yeh, it's now twice as expensive to buy a house", that would be seen as tyranny from the top down (and indeed, a lot of retards do view the FEDs as tyrants)

Truth is based on trust. If you went to a mechanic and he told you you had a flat tire when you obviously didn't, you'd know he is likely trying to scam you. You can't see your engine on the other hand. If your car is running fine, and he says "you need to replace your coolant fluid or your engine might blow up", that's when you need to do a 'risk-reward' assessment of "do I trust him. If he's lying to me, and I follow him, what does it cost me? If he's telling me the truth, and I ignore him, what will it cost me?". If you read a report tomorrow that says that this mechanic was a scammer, and he's been exposed by a watchdog group for falsifying his results for personal gain, then you'd probably ignore him or at the very least go to another mechanic for a second opinion.

But that then begs the question, who watches the watchdogs?