I’m pretty sure it is essentially that any propensity the macro-scale universe has for the appearance of determinism is an illusion since the fundamental scales of the universe and everything it is built on are probabilistic. Nothing built on probabilistic foundations can be deterministic. It can appear to be. In large enough samples the law of large numbers smooths all the chaos out, but that is all our world is. Mathematically smoothed chaos. We as a species have known that for a very long time, but it has only begun to permeate the social zeitgeist in recent years and there is still a lot of pushback from certain sections of society.
On your latter point, I have taken to calling this “The Death of Expertise”. Not only has the state of being an intellectual been diminished to, at best, a hobby, but much of the population legitimately abhors it. This might be something of a narrow view based on my US nationality, but I have been attacked so many times for using “big words to pretend to be better than I am” that I struggle to see it any other way. I have north of a 100k-word vocabulary if you include jargon and other specialization-specific words.
But beyond that, and even worse, in my opinion, is the inherent and immediate distrust I see in experts. People who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of singular branches of knowledge or tasks are summarily dismissed for the very act that makes them the people to listen to. For a personal example, I have an MA in Visual Effects and a BS in Applied Mathematics, making me an expert in VFX and the computational and mathematics principles behind it, when the on-set shooting occurred a couple of years ago with Alec Baldwin, some guy on Facebook suggested in a friend’s post that all gunshots in movies should be CGI. I responded with my credentials and laid out not only that it was impossible, but also why in as lay terms as I could. He decided to argue with me that he was right and I should shut up, so I laid down a full mathematical analysis of the best-case scenario of implementing his change, with supporting evidence from industry standards groups, which showed that doing so would mean that every single VFX artist in the world would do nothing but put muzzle flashes on guns and it would leave about 3 man-months worth of time to finish every single other VFX shot for every other movie, TV-show, commercial, and music video. He still told me I was wrong. Toss on all of the 2020 right-wing nut jobs who emphatically believed Anthony Faucci was wrong and stupid when he is literally one of the world’s foremost experts I epidemiology and virology, and so many more examples… People just don’t know when to sit down and shut the fuck up because they are amongst their betters in some specific topic.
The last time I rented a car they tried to double charge me and tacked in an extra 200 in cleaning fees for good measure. I reversed the charge on the credit card as fraud, which the credit card company investigated and accepted as fraud, and reversed the charge. Now Hertz is threatening to take us to court over it. We disputed it and have essentially been ignoring them since.
The time before that, a “different company” tried to accuse me of stealing the car because they had the wrong car listed as the one we had rented.
If you are in NE Ohio, don’t bother with a rental, they are likely to try to scam you.
I loved getting my math degree. Almost every professor provided us with copies of the book. One went so far as to hand out flash drives with the pdfs on them on day 1. For the few classes I did buy books for, I went online and found the international edition, which was generally around 30 bucks instead of 300.
Fuck text book publishers and fuck school bookstores.
I can see the points on it, but I also know that I am prone to ordering delivery from my local shops or going to the mom and pop restaurant around the corner. The only ones who will really be hurt by a mostly WFH society (at least in this vein of thought) are big corporations who have heavily centered their efforts around the offices. Starbucks will have problems justifying having 4 shops in one block in NYC with 1/10th the foot traffic. I would rather buy from local small businesses and actually support my economy than funnel more money into some gaping dragon’s maw. I have been WFH for 7 years now and pray I never have to go back to working anywhere else.
Lol, they are. In astronomy anything heavier than Helium. is considered a metal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallicity