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

[Toolbox]

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.

After nearly 78 years and all the bullshit that everyone on every side of the equation has pulled? Sure, not entirely impossible to glean some information from that but we're talking majorly pre-computer data and who knows how much simple laziness lead to the fudging of numbers on any step of the way. If you're saying just trust the data of some data keepers pre war, mid war, and post war then that is a lot of points of failure. I'm not even one of the spergs that legitimately cares whether or not it was 6 million or 4203940992034 gorrilion but any exact number isn't going to be right. Just think about how many people were simply undocumented in the pre digital era. Even going into the first decades of computing there was no botnet tracking everyone until at least the 80s. Some agencies may have tried but that's practically impossible without the tech, and plus that information wouldn't have been made public even by today. You can extrapolate this problem to any question about population numbers in any situation throughout history.

 

[byuu]

After nearly 78 years and all the bullshit that everyone on every side of the equation has pulled? Sure, not entirely impossible to glean some information from that but we're talking pre-computer data and who knows how much simple laziness lead to the fudging of numbers on any step of the way. If you're saying just trust the data of some data keepers pre war, mid war, and post war then that is a lot of points of failure. I'm not even one of the spergs that legitimately cares whether or not it was 6 million or 4203940992034 gorrilion but any exact number isn't going to be right.

I don't think anyone ever said exactly 6 million Jews died. Except maybe people really bad with history.
It's an estimate, some historians go as low as 4 million, some as high as 10 million.

 

[Toolbox]

I don't think anyone ever said exactly 6 million Jews died. Except maybe people really bad with history.
It's an estimate, some historians go as low as 4 million, some as high as 10 million.

My point being. Anyone who does it a barely functioning retard.

 

[skykiii]

So I wanted to necro this topic because the kind of thing this topic covers has been on my mind again.

So I was watching a thing earlier and it mentioned how diamonds are formed and carbon atoms and I'm like.... "how do we even know atoms are real? And f we do know, how do we know this is what an atom or a molecule looks like?"

I've been told that nukes explode because of "splitting the atom," but how exactly are we sure that's what's going on?

For that matter, how do we know that DNA looks like a double-helix? I've been told the guy who figured that out was high at the time.... which yeah, sounds right, but he might not have been alone.

What, is there some kind of super microscope that actually lets us see this stuff?

 

[N Space]

What, is there some kind of super microscope that actually lets us see this stuff?

Quite literally yes, they are called electron microscopes and they are capable of resolving individual atoms, a cool example of this was IBMs stop motion animation "A Boy and His Atom". Nonetheless, solid evidence for the existence of atoms emerged in the early 20th century with the observation of Brownian motion.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

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?

I don't know myself, but I think it comes in part from missing population, like we know what the Jewish population was before, what it was after, how much it should have been.

 

[John Freeman]

The answer is we don’t know anything for certain. Every day something we thought an immutable scientific or mathematical truth is disproven, and a new theory that will be replaced in the same way 50 years down the line is formulated.

 

[Fek]

It gives me hope to see people questioning this sort of thing.

Think of just how much stuff you have to take by [authority figure]'s word. Think on just how often there's a whooole institution or organization or committee or whatever other gatekeeping technique employed to surround [thing you don't know] in obfuscation. It can create quite a cozy racket in a hurry.

I'd suggest anyone questioning things to keep it going. I mean really think on how you know the things you know, and realize how much of it is just taking someone else at their word.

The "photographic evidence" where you can't even tell what you're looking at without (once again) being told what it is.​

-ambiguous video evidence​

-cgi models​

-news reports​

-historical facts​

-"scientific" facts​

-religion/government figures​

Etc, etc.​

​

Hell, they'll even tell you that you can't trust your own 5 senses (especially those pesky lying eyes of yours). They'll try to shame you or make you feel guilty for daring to think on your own**.

If you do this honestly and without shying away from any subject, you will find yourself in very strange waters very..very very quickly. Think about how you feel when you know something. Take anything at all that you >know< as an example (however mundane or simple). Now try to apply that same feeling to some bullshit peddler's hot take. Feel the difference?

Hope you're prepared to lose some friends and get called a loon. It's part of the fun.

**Incidentally, this is a pretty good way to realize you're on the right track. Truth need not hide behind anything, let alone shame/guilt.

 

[Creative Username]

We know a lot of these things (at least in the natural sciences) because some very smart people made educated guesses based on existing knowledge and tested them. These guesses turned out to be correct, so they were accepted as the truth until a later guess disproved them. Sometimes these guesses were right, time after time, for so long that it stood unchallenged until a guess that incorporated more unknowns of the universe while being able to accommodate the original was made. Sometimes these guesses were observably wrong, but they were the best we had. An iterative process has refined these guesses into something closer to the truth. The holy grail of science is a guess that can explain and predict everything that ever happens. That's but we could get it one day.

At least that's how I understand it all.

 

[skykiii]

I'd suggest anyone questioning things to keep it going. I mean really think on how you know the things you know, and realize how much of it is just taking someone else at their word.

I'd like to add that it's not even just the science and history stuff. I've been into more esoteric subjects (whether or not "magick" is real, lucid dreaming, ghosts etc.) but that stuff is hard to talk about period because even when you find people who think its real, they've already invented mythology about "demons" using it to corrupt you, or its all highly systematized into something that only works in a group or requires you to jump through ridiculous hoops.

Then there's responses like:

the only thing left that is true and accurate, is the bible.

Except the Bible itself is clearly a human-written, human-edited document. I do think there's truth to it but not in a "take it at its word" way.

Speaking to God can be achieved in moments, and I feel the best way to understand the Bible is to ask God and fact-check everything. One thing that is apparent even without that though is that the authors of the Bible did a lot of projecting and reflecting their own limited understanding (this is the only way to make sense of the part about the plagues of Egypt for example, since every translation explicitly said that God made Pharoah obstinate, only to then punish Pharoah for his obstinance... which makes no sense. It makes more sense to think that either something was lost in translation or else that the original scribe misunderstood something... not helped by that the Bible began as an oral tradition and thus probably was subject to the Game of Telephone effect before anyone had a chance to write it down).

 

[gorgoroth7134]

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

History is all wrong. I've seen several photos suggesting we live in 1023 instead of 2023 as well as buildings (including one I found in Lacombe, Alberta) with basement level windows that are full sized suggesting their basements extend even further.

 

[Samson Pumpkin Jr.]

History is all wrong. I've seen several photos suggesting we live in 1023 instead of 2023 as well as buildings (including one I found in Lacombe, Alberta) with basement level windows that are full sized suggesting their basements extend even further.

It all has to do with perspective. Everyone’s experience is subjective within a certain margin. If a dictator increases the salaries of the working class 50%, the teachers at schools will tell you "the best president ever", but if the same dictator raises the taxes of the wealthy class by 50% and enacts laws that prevent outsourcing and other fraudulent practices, the CEOs of big companies will tell the media "that dictator is crazy, a madman, a violator of human rights and liberty!"... perspective

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

I'd love to know who woke up one day and decided to look at duck genitalia. Especially the Pac-Man maze vagina.

 

[Saint Agustin]

I know you are a fat faggot just because of this thread.

 

[Makhnovshchina]

I think much of the same with science and the ideas of microscopic molecular entities. As a kid I heard you have millions of tiny mites on your eyebrows yet you never see them within your iris if they're that close. Also the concept of Atoms, that literally everything is made of tiny lego pieces so much that sheeple think IBM could make a stop motion movie with them. Simply put, every ruler in history controls the most in controlling the flow of information and sciences, NASA is just the same as the Pharaoh telling Egypt the sun rises because of him.

 

[Tablet County]

'Cause if you know, you know.

 

[RMQualtrough]

We know the Central Park 5 are guilty of participating in gangrape with the sixth nog whose DNA was there. Perhaps this is the most certain of facts upon which all facts can be measured.

 

[NoReturn]

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?

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.

What gets me is the whole "6 million holy number" thing and the fact the number came up in newspaper articles about Russia before WWII.
iirc the Red Cross immediately after WWII put the number much lower as well.

.... you literally think the Bible was penned all in one session, by a guy who was literally told by God what to write?

You might like this, not because of the main topic of the video, but the section on how the book was written:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Kpkp2vxX3I

 

[Lemmingwiser]

This post is probably gonna make me sound like an idiot

No it makes you sound like someone that is done with listening to priests (of science) and is thinking about the nature of truth, the essence of understanding things for yourself. A noble, difficult, thankless and valuable persuit.

One thought I had that was related to yours: Why did I learn in school that there are religions with gods (islam, christianity, hinduism) and religions with spirits (animism, voodo).

I was thinking about who translated these religious concepts. Who more than anyone was talking to african or south american tribes and trying to understand their spiritual life? Missionaries. Who translated these concepts? Missionaties. And unlike established societies, these tribes did not have the organization to semd representatives to rome and such to really understand the other culture well enoigh to understand the language and difference between a spirit and a god. But in all likelyhood a tribesman did not think of his spirits as inferior to a god as conceptualised by the monotheistic religions.

Maybe not a very valuable thought, but I thought it was an interesting thought about the nature of translation.