What is Something Scientific that you just don't believe in at all?
EDIT: Let's cool it with the downvotes, dudes. We're not out to cut funding to your black hole detection chamber or revoke the degrees of chiropractors just because a couple of us don't believe in it, okay? Chill out, participate with the prompt and continue with having a nice day. I'm sure almost everybody has something to add.
Dark matter. Sounds like a catch all designed to make a math model work properly.
You’re not wrong. According to the current scientific understanding of the universe, that’s exactly what it is. They just gave it a badass name.
Do you want slightly darker matter? Cause that's how you get slightly darker matter!
Yeh, that's how the scientific method works.
Observations don't support a model, or a model doesn't support observations.
Think of a reason why.
Test that hypothesis.
Repeat until you think it's correct. Hopefully other people agree with you.
People are also working on modifying General Relativity and Newtonian Dynamics to try and fix the model, while other people are working on observing dark matter directly (instead of it's effects) to further prove the existing models.
https://youtu.be/3o8kaCUm2V8
We are in the "testing hypothesis" stage. And have been for 50ish years
"Repeat until you think it’s correct. Hopefully other people agree with you."
Dark Energy has entered the chat.
For those with time to spare: study all you can about neutron stars (including magnetars and quark stars), then go back to "black holes" (especially their event horizons and beyond) and there's a good chance you'll feel like a lot of aspects in BH theories are mythologies written in math - all of it entertaining, nonetheless.
For those who seek extra credit, study zero-point energy before reflecting on cosmic voids, galaxy filaments, galaxies, gravitationally bound celestial systems, quantum chromodynamics and neutrinos. Then, ponder the relativity between neutron stars, zero-point energy and hadron quark sea.
All of physics is a "math model". One we attempt to falsify. And when a scientist does prove some part of the model wrong, the community leaps up in celebration and gets to working on the fix or the next.
Dark matter started as exactly a catchall designed to make the model work properly. We started with a very good model, but when observing extreme phenomenon (in this case the orbits of stars of entire galaxies), the model didn't fit. So either there was something we couldn't see to explain the difference ("dark" matter), or else the model was wrong and needed modification.
There's also multiple competing theories for what that dark matter is, exactly. Everything from countless tiny primordial black holes to bizarre, lightyear-sized standing waves in a quantum field. But the best-fitting theories that make the most sense and contradict the fewest observations & models seem to prefer there be some kind of actual particle that interacts just fine with gravity, but very poorly or not at all with electromagnetism. And since we rely on electromagnetism for nearly all of our particle physics experiments that makes whatever this particle is VERY elusive.
Worth observing that once, a huge amount of energy produced by stars was an example of a dark energy. Until we figured out how to detect neutrinos. Then it wasn't dark anymore.
In short, you're exactly right. It's a catch-all to make the math model work properly. And that's not actually a problem.
I know, I was so hype a few years ago when a new gravity well model supposedly eliminated the need for Dark Matter, but recently it's been in the news as a scandal that also doesn't fix everything.
Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). It's been the dissenting voice in the modern Great Debate about dark matter.
On one side are the dark matter scientists who think there's a vast category of phenomenon out there FAR beyond our current science. That the universe is far larger and more complex than we currently know, and so we must dedicate ourselves to exploring the unexplored. The other side, the
On the other you have the MOND scientists, who hope they can prevent that horizon from flying away from them by tweaking the math on some physical laws. It basically adds a term to our old physics equations to explain why low acceleration systems experience significantly different forces than the high-acceleration systems with which we are more familiar -- though their explanations for WHY the math ought be tweaked I always found totally unsatisfactory -- to make the current, easy-to-grock laws fit the observations.
With the big problem being that it doesn't work. It explains some galactic motion, but not all. It sometimes fits wide binary star systems kind of OK, but more often doesn't. It completely fails to explain the lensing and motion of huge galactic clusters. At this point, MOND has basically been falsified. Repeatedly, predictions it made have failed.
Dark matter theories -- that is, the theories that say there are who new categories of stuff out there we don't understand at all -- still are the best explanation. That means we're closer to the starting line of understanding the cosmos instead of the finish line many wanted us to be nearing. But I think there's a razor in there somewhere, about trusting the scientist who understands the limits of our knowledge over the one who seems confident we nearly know everything.
There's no scandal. Some people who are leading proponents of MOND theory recently published a new paper using what might be the best scenario we currently have to detect MOND (wide binary stars), and their more precise calculations...are not consistent with MOND. They published evidence against the very theory they were betting on.
https://youtu.be/HlNSvrYygRc?si=otqhH6VINIsCMfiS
The best kind of researchers, I bet that really took a lot of courage to do since it's so far from human nature.
Great example, and this brings up a great point about this topic - there's a difference between what's a scientific pursuit vs. what is current established scientific understanding.
Dark matter is a topic being studied to try to find evidence of it existing, but as of now there's is zero physical evidence that it actually exists.
Its observed gravitational effects is evidence. Otherwise nobody would have given it a name.
I mean that is pretty much correct. We don’t know what it is, but we can see it’s effect
Even more so Dark Energy
Can we not push more anti science rhetoric please
Chill science should be questioned otherwise it's not science
Science should be questioned by people who understand the science, not by random people who don't understand the research. Which a lot of people who know nothing about the science or the maths/data or whatever try to question it
Right, all the people talking shit about dark matter in this thread surely all have 4 PhDs up their ass
No investigation, no right to speak
This is a really stupid take, how do you think new scientists are made if not reaching for enlightenment to answer their own questions?
Science is about being wrong and learning.
Yes, and people that challenge the science who then become scientists actually research/experiment thenselves. They don't go and claim science is false until they have actual reason/evidence to believe so. One can question science all they want when they do their own science on the matter and it isn't handily disproved beyond reasonable doubt by existing evidence.
Most science deniers do not do that. Making anti-science claims without obtaining solid, consistent evidence is not science.
Chiropracty isn't "scientific".
My mum has a severe bad back and she had to go on a fortnight physio retreat thing. There were a couple of people there that had a mild back problem, went to a chiropractor and ended up with severe chronic pain. Ill never forget that and have never been to one because I don’t see it as worth the risk
It never was.
That mothers shouldn't co-sleep with infants. Every other primate I know of co-sleeps with their offspring. Until very recently every human mother co-slept with her infants, and in like half of the globe people still do. Many mothers find it incredibly psychologically stressful to sleep without their infant because our ancestors co-slept every generation for hundreds of thousands of years.
I would bet money that forcing infants to sleep alone has negative developmental effects.
The reason for this is that we tend to sleep deeper now than our ancestors. Because of this, we are more prone to roll onto a baby, and not wake up.
It can still be done, you just have to avoid things like alcohol, that stop you waking. You also need to make sure your sleeping position is safe. Explaining this to exhausted parents is unreliable, however. Hence the advice Americans seem to be given.
Fyi, if people want a halfway point, you can get cosleeping cribs. They attach to the side of the bed. Your baby can be close to you, while also eliminating the risk of suffocating them.
I think something on the UK's NHS implied the risk is primarily for mothers with various kinds of problems (including drug or alcohol abuse). Made me wonder if it's largely recommended for everyone to cover the many people who are at risk but don't want to think they are.
A lot of the advice is almost insultingly obvious. You get treated like you have a single digit IQ. After a couple of months, I fully understand why we were treated like that! It's a fight to keep your iq in double digits!
The baby shaking one is the big one. It's obvious, you don't shake your baby. It's also obvious that they can be safe, even while screaming. After 2 hours of constant crying, combined with sleep deprivation, I fully understand why they reiterated not to shake your baby, the urge was alarmingly strong! It also made sense why they pointed out you could leave them to scream, if you really needed to. So long as they are clean safe and fed, 10 minutes down the garden is completely acceptable.
With the original advice, telling when it will apply to you is harder than you think. The default advice has to be to play it safe. Some can be deviated from, some can't. Deviations must be consciously made however.
The other thing is SIDS, if the baby can't lift their head from a suffocation position they suffocate.
We have ours sleep in a cosleep crib beside the bed so you get the closeness and can make contact in the night.
Maybe if you can avoid stuff like alcohol (easy for most) but also you can avoid sleep deprivation - way harder with little to no maternal leave and forget about paternal leave here in the US.
If you (Royal you, not parent commenter) can live with yourself if a tragedy occurs on your watch while you are flaunting medical advice, then go ahead and risk it, but otherwise yes! Buy the bedside attached crib!
In the UK, it's not an absolute no, but a "be careful". Interestingly, my wife's sleep habits changed considerably. She was instinctively aware of where our baby was, even while asleep.
The main dangers seem to be either the dad (my instincts were far less affected) or a sedated mum. It also becomes a lot less risky when the baby can move. Our daughter was perfectly capable of making her comfort concerns felt.
It's not zero risk, but it's far lower than you might think. New mother sleep deprivation is quite different to normal sleep deprivation. I see why the default advice is what it is, however.
What I've heard was that it is to build independence for the child, so the parent can leave the child to sleep and do something else. It depends on the age I guess.
I’ve always thought the classic Hunter - Gatherer gender division of labor was bullshit. I think that theory has gone out of fashion but I always thought it seemed like a huge assumption. It seems so much more plausible to me that everybody hunted some days (like during migration patterns) and gathered others. Did they even have the luxury of purely specialized roles before agriculture and cities?
Another reason I think that is because prehistoric hunting was probably way different than we imagine. Like, we imagine tribes of people slaying mammoths with only spears. It was probably more traps and tricks. Eventually, using domesticated dog or a trained falcon or something.
You can read the dawn of everything book which is a very interesting take at a lot of those assumptions which are indeed false. This book goes deep into the ideological bias scientists have when interpreting evidence.
The hunter-gatherer gender division is actually proven wrong now.
Also, hunting mammoths was a very rare activity. I would expect it to be some kind of desperate activity in fact. People weren't more crazy than we are, they would rather live than to be trampled by a mammoth.
That makes sense. There were tons of other smaller creatures around, why would you mess with something that's like a boar up sized 30 times.
I always assumed that hunter gatherer division was mostly down to the individual, some traits make some better at hunting than others.
I struggle to locate static objects, I for the fucking life of me just can't see it. I'll be looking for something and either look right over it or walk past it multiple times
But if I go outside and look in the trees I can spot all the squirrels within seconds. Not like that's a talent or anything special, but my point is that I'd starve if I had to look for food in the brush, and likely I imagine these types of traits are what defined who did what job, meaning who was good at what, and likely considering lots of hunting was endurance based and not skill based at all, then most adults probably participated to some degree.
I've also gone shroom hunting and had to come back empty handed because I can't see the god damned things.
Is this why I could never find stuff and then when my mother looked she would just go right to it?
Yeah, exactly that. It's RIGHT FUCKING THERE but I'm not gonna see it.
When you start looking at older debunked theories that lasted for a long time you can see the human bias in them. Not just a human bias but a a western bias.
Two that stick out for me:
Trees compete for sunlight - I think it makes sense to us humans because we compete for resources but in truth trees are way more 'community' based
The male alpha wolf - It's how the western world has been organized for centuries so it's easy to see that in a wolf pack even though its not true.
I don't think I ever heard that hunters and gatherers would have been divided by gender.
I am pretty sure that modern archeology agrees with you in at least some ways (know an archeologist, not an archeologist). I don't have any specific evidence for mammoth trapping but there are these really interesting stone funnel traps that were used to trap gazelle herds https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2011/04/ancient-gazelle-killing-zones.html
Also consider how long humans have walked the earth as hunter gatherers. Agriculture goes back to around 10.000 BCE. The entirety of time between 300.000 BCE and 10.000 BCE was likely (mostly) spent as hunter gatherers. Imagine in how many ways local roles and culture could have differed in that time!
Op: what are some inherently enraging opinions that fly in the face of everything we know about logic?
Also op: omg guys stop downvoting these inherently enraging opinions. I implicitly made that rule ...triple stamped it no erasies!!
I'm going to give you a couple examples:
A study showed Dementia brainscans heavily correlating with a form of Plaque. For decades people believed it, but then it was debunked. Someone expressing disbelief in it before the debunking would not have been "flying in the face of everything we know about logic." They would have been right.
A researcher made a study where Aspartame used to sweeten Gatorade correlated with fast developing terminal cancer in mice. The researcher who developed Aspartame shot back by saying they fed the mice daily with the equivalent to 400+ Gatorades. Of course, a French study later showed at large scales people who consumed aspartame were slightly more likely to develop cancer in the following decades, but the outcome was still preferred to the consumption of sugar. This is an example that is much more clearcut in the favor of science, but I think there is still room for skeptics to express doubts.
I think talking about these things in a welcoming environment can both alleviate certain less scientific beliefs while also giving a great idea of how the general public views certain topics. Also it's fun. There is a guy in here who thinks maybe a dude can fight a bear, not that they should.
Okay, but if anyone forms full beliefs from single studies, they've grossly misunderstood the details of how science works.
This particular hierarchy is specific to medical science, it doesn't fit the other scientific disciplines perfectly.
Also, if I had a nickle for every conflicting pair of meta-analyses... happens so often.
Yeah to be fair a few of the responses were that. I just don't know a way to keep away the oxygen consuming idiot opinions like the woman so proud of doubting the moon landing.
Basically if you've got a logical explanation I can get on board with your idea as a hypothesis, but some of these replies are not that and are insane.
Yes we should be out to revoke chiropractors' degrees, but I'm not sure why that's coming up here since you asked about science specifically. Which chiropractic is not.
No one should be ok with people who run around pretending to be doctors and occasionally paralyzing babies and crippling people by trying to work magic. It's also revolting that any of it is covered by insurance and health plans, which materially takes real resources away from real medicine for people.
I was making an obvious strawman with that statement to poke fun about how defensive people were getting.
I knew you'd come for my fucking black hole detection chamber you swine
Curses! You've found me out! I'LL GET YOU NEXT TIME! MYA~HEHEHE!
The idea that animals do not have feelings. I don't believe complex thought is necessary for emotion. You can take away all our human reasoning, and we would still get mad, or sad, or happy at things.
It's definitely NOT science that animals don't have feelings. Maybe 50 years ago.
Now, there's a concerted effort to discern thoughts and emotions in animals.
I don't think there is a scientific concensus on this. We are constantly finding previously unknown similarities between the minds of other animals and humans. I've put together a small lemmy community on animal communication and digital bioacoustics, it is somewhat related to this stuff.
!digitalbioacoustics@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/c/digitalbioacoustics
If anything I think emotional response is the least advanced part of a human mind. However, if we're talking about brains of sharks, small lizards, or ants then I think emotion would be a word with a lot more nuance than whatever it is they do.
The range of what "emotion" can cover is very broad as well. Like feeling good or scared and shame or respect.
I have remind my partner that dogs don't share all of the complex emotions we do or at least it's a lot easier to deal with them if you act like they don't.
I.E. my dog is never going to care if feeding is fair, and they aren't going to listen to you out of respect about it. They will however eat a certain way because the like being obedient and knowing their place in the pact, but that takes repetition, rewards and punishments.
that comes from religion not science
Bees play with toys and do happy actions when given toys. I'm of the opinion that some form of internal experience extends at least as far down the brain size scale as at least some bugs, and might extend into single celled organisms and plants.
It's scientifically proven that rats giggle when tickled:
https://youtu.be/78PfGQbL-g0
The moon not being made of cheese. The moon is in fact made of cheese. I do not care how much a bunch of nerds insist that it is not made of cheese. I am objectively correct about this and anyone who disagrees is wrong.
If the moon was made of spare ribs, would you eat it? I would. It'd be delicious!
I call on the FDA, USDA, or whatever agency to use their power to add lunar regolith and all otger moon constituents to the accepted definition of cheese. I also suggest all other countries to just take our word for it since only us and the nazis have set foot on the moon and who are you going to trust? Us or the nazis?
Lots of stuff from both social sciences and economics.
Social science suffers greatly from the Replication crisis
Economics relies largely on so-called natural experiments that have poor variable controls.
Both often come with policy agendas pushing for results.
I take their conclusions with a grain of salt.
Economics is purely based on assumption, at it's core. There's no proof the assumption is true, and recent trends seem to point towards it being false.
Economics assumes people are rational spenders.
But the "economy" is often just represented by the stock market, which is both not rational, and not a good measure of the economy. It's a great indicator of how much wealth is being extracted from the working class, but it's shit at representing how most of the money is being spent.
Economics all makes sense when you understand that they are being paid to produce data backing up the position of the person paying them.
We don't need more anti science rhetoric in this world. Why even start this thread?
So obscure opinions are made visible and we can talk about them?
If you can't be questioned, you're not science.
IQ score is a sham - the tests are quite fallible, and historically they were used as a justification to discriminate against people who are poorer or with worse access to education. Nowadays, I see it quite a lot in the context of eugenics, where some professors and philosophers attribute poor people being poor due to their low intelligence (low IQ score), and that they can't be helped while rich people got where they are due to their intelligence (as in they have a high IQ score on average).
IQ testing is reification fallacy. If I told you I had an instrument that could objectively measure every human by how beautiful they are, you'd see the problem immediately.
IQ depends on their being one kind of intelligence. You only get one score and it's the supposed measure of general intelligence. If street smarts vs. book smarts is a thing, IQ cannot be.
IQ measures racial difference that cannot be biological. Race is cultural, so since the test measures consistent difference between racial lines, it's proof that it's not measuring something biologically determined. It'd be like if IQ showed blondes really were dimmer than their peers, but you found out the effect carried over to bottle blondes.
I recommend the book "Mismeasure of Man" by Gould. His thesis shows the historical folly and logical impossibility of not just IQ, but biological determinism. I've just posted the common sense arguments against IQ, Gould brings the receipts.
In adults its well correlated with ability to learn and perform. If don't care why and just want to hire the best candidate its a good test.
Science articles that reference paywalled journals you can't actually read. Most of them are probably making stuff up because they know no one will be able to call them out on it.
First, let me start off by saying that I agree with what I believe your actual premise is (or should be) - that articles in science journals should not be behind paywalls. I’m strictly against the practice, I think it’s a massive scam, and so does everyone I know who does research. I have paid to open source every paper I’ve published. Well, not me personally. But thank you taxpayers for funding me to not only do my work but to make sure you have access to it too. I’ll talk about this more at the end.
With that out of the way, I’d like to mention a couple of things. First, the scam is on the part of the academic journals, not the researchers or the journalists writing the articles. It’s not part of some scam to hide the fact that the journalist is making crap up. If the authors were unwilling or unable to pay the fees for open sourcing their papers ($3-5k when I was doing it several years ago), then you’re either going to be in an institution that has a subscription to the journal or you’re going to have to find some way of acquiring it.
Search for the exact title in quotes. Sometimes the Google Scholar engine will return with the default link to the pay walled page, sometimes it’ll have a link to a prepublication server. Arxiv is one of the more popular ones for physics, math, and computer science of all stripes. Step 2 is to go to the institution web page of the first author. Very often, researchers will keep an updated list of their publications with links to the PDFs. If that still doesn’t work, you can write the author and request the paper. We love those emails. We love it when people read our work, especially when they’re so excited that they wrote to request a copy. None of these involve copyright infringement. That prepub that you get is the same paper (usually but you can confirm with the author if that’s a question), but possibly without the masthead and layout from the journal. It’s still cited the same.
So, why are so many journals behind a paywall? Because the publishers want to monetize what today should be a cost free (or minimal) set of transactions. Here’s what happens:
As you can see, the role of the publisher is very small in the overall amount of effort put into getting an idea from my head into yours. At one point publishers had an argument that the small circulation numbers for things like The Journal of Theoretical Biology justified their $21k/year institutional subscription price.
And I shouldn’t have saved this til the end, but for the one person who skimmed down to see where all of this was going:
Any science article / press release that cites a paper whether or not you have access to it at least is citing something that has undergone peer review. Peer review can only do so much and journal quality has a wide range, but it’s about the best we have. If it’s a big enough deal to actually matter and the media in question has wide enough reach to care, then it will get back to the author who can then clarify.
Just because you said you guys love it when people read your work, I thought I'd let you know I read your entire comment.
Thank you!
Appreciate the thoughtful and in-depth response. My worry is more that a science article's editorialized interpretation of the paper may be wrong or misleading, than that the public isn't very able to scrutinize the quality of science in the paper itself. Waiting for a possible email response from a researcher is pretty much always going to be a little too high effort for someone wanting to spend a few minutes comparing claims in the article and claims in the paper to potentially call bullshit on discrepancies between them in an online comment.
I absolutely agree with you there. I just commented a short time ago on an article about the effects of primate vocalizations on the human brain. The article not only got the conclusion of the paper wrong, they got the very nature of evolution wrong. I didn’t even have to read the paper - I haven’t gotten to it yet. It’s admittedly the kind of mistake non-biologists make. Journalists should probably avoid drawing conclusions that aren’t specifically in the source material. My point is that, going off of the author’s quotes the pulled and my own knowledge of evolutionary dynamics, I knew it was wrong. However, I am not at all sure that someone without a background in biology would be able to understand the paper well enough to catch the error in the article.
I am all for open access, and I share your frustration. I think you should be able to access any paper you want for free. But I’ll also say that if you don’t have the background in the subject to know what the underlying paper will have said, the chances are pretty good that you’re not going to understand the paper well enough to find the flaws.
I used to talk to a physicist named Lee Smolin who proposed a Darwinian model for universe formation. I can follow the evolutionary part, but when it gets down to the physics of it, I’m lost at sea. So when I read an article about him - I read something about him recently - I mostly have to go on my basic understanding because there’s no way I’d make it through that paper.
And literally the only reason I’m throwing this out there at all is that, unlike a physics paper that’s totally incomprehensible and obviously so, people believe in their own interpretations on social science or public health papers. I see more kinds of cherry-picking abuses and simple misunderstandings there than elsewhere.
It’s great to see people so inquisitive though.
Thank you for the write up, very interesting!
To add onto that, whenever a newspaper says "based on the findings of researchers at [Random University]" but they don't list the citation anywhere at all. That is just evil, but somehow industry standard.
I've had a field day while writing my thesis recently, realising I could bypass the paywalls by accessing the papers through the university proxy. It's still bs, though, because it leaves this stuff only accessible to researchers and not your regular people who may be interested.
Though like PrinceWith999Enemies said, many paper writers will happily send you a copy if you email them about it.
I'm probably going to get eviscerated for this, but that sexuality is purely genetic. I think that for the vast majority of people, sexuality is way more fluid than not, and much more influenced by environment than people would like to think.
I also don't think that has any bearing on people's right to choose.
It's not thought to be genetic otherwise it would be heritable and its clearly not. It would also have self extinguished before too long if it ever got a foothold in the first place.
It's likely a construction issue having something to do with something that happens in the womb rather than to do with the blueprints.
As a member of the LGBTQ community, I fully agree.
I’ve believed that we are a mix of nature and nurture for as long as I can remember, and it stands to reason that sexuality is a part of that. I also think the vast majority of people are far more sexually fluid than they would admit due to cultural stigma. Not everyone is bi, but I do think there’s a bell curve.
That said. I do also believe that people are born the way they are and the nurture aspect is more of a determining factor for how they express not who they are. I was raised and socialized as a straight male but realized in my 30’s that I’m queer and non-binary. Realizing that put so much context to the struggles I had growing up on a Christian environment and solidified for me that this is who I am, despite how I was nurtured. But had I not gotten out of the religion, I’d have never changed and just silently suffered and struggled until I died. My expression wouldn’t have changed who I am, only how I acted.
You can believe what you want to believe, you didn't say it in a hateful way at all.
I'm curious about what your opinion would be of trans people going through HRT though. When starting hormone therapy you are warned of potential changes to your sexuality. I am transfem, and prior to transitioning I was bi. Since starting HRT, I tend to have an aversion to men sexually and am more lesbian aligned now.
I guess that is fluidity and environmental factors, but biological factors even still.
Other people meanwhile experience the opposite effect (which is what I expected) or none at all.
I don't know about transitioning, other than I probably would have thought I was trans if I'd been born later. I'm glad I wasn't told I'd have to go through surgery and hormone replacements to be what I truly am. I was able to define my gender for myself.
But I don't think anyone can judge another person's choices like that. I just look forward to the day when people are allowed to freely make choices about how they live their own lives. I don't think either political side is terribly flexible. (Though certainly, the right is far more rigid.)
I've seen too many people ostracized for changing their minds about being trans or changing their sexuality by people they thought were open-minded friends. Or people hated on for changing their faith by those who pretend to follow a loving God. It's painful all around. We shouldn't have to agree with someone on every point to celebrate and adore them.
Just wanted to pop in here and say: no one is being told they have to go through surgery and hormone replacements to be who they are. In fact, things are changing in the opposite direction. There used to be laws requiring physical surgeries to be able to legally change one's gender but those have mostly been removed.
The options are there and are becoming more widely available and easier to access for those who want them. They are major life choices that aren't taken lightly. I can tell you right now, if you weren't trans then, you wouldn't be now either. You would be suffering and begging for treatment, not stumbling into it out of mere curiousity.
I am out to revoke degrees from chiropractors.
Giving them a degree is like calling myself a writer because I post bullshit comments on Lemmy.
I tend to take things very literally so I will say: it's got a lot more hoops than that comparison. Anybody can become a writer if they have the bare minimum tools, imo. They can't all be good writers but that hardly matters given the low risks.
To play the devils advocate, almost everywhere these days regulates chiropractors requiring licensure with an organization who themselves require degrees and comprehensive knowledge testing.
For example, Doctors of Chiropractic (admittedly a 3 to 5 year program just like most entry level Engineers) are licensed in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia and many U.S. territories. They are also regulated in many other countries throughout the world. Just a random specific organization, the California Board of Chiropractic Examiners require:
The Aforementioned Degree
NBCE. Chiropractic students must pass parts I, II, III, IV, and physiotherapy of the National Board of Chiropractic Examiners (NBCE) exam to be eligible to apply for a state license.
A full criminal background check with fingerprinting
CCLE. The California Chiropractic Law Examination (CCLE) is administered through computerized testing on a continuous basis. Once the board determines the applicant is qualified to take the CCLE, the applicant will be notified by letter.
As well as a bunch of associated fees and insurance requirements.
So, no, it's not as easy as publishing comments on Lemmy.
Do I think there should be non-medical doctors twisting people's necks and giving X-Rays? No, I goddamn don't, but we can say that without bullshitting.
Don't believe in, or can't understand?
I don't believe we understand the fundamental nature of time, or the universe - we are limited by our bodies, can't perceive or even think about everything that probably exists. But I don't distrust the math or research that scientists are doing. In terms of how it is presented to us laypeople I think profit has poisoned the message, it is impossible to be current and knowledgeable in the way you'd need to be to pull apart all that messaging.
If you mean what do you understand but still not believe? I am still not convinced radio is not magic. I understand how it works but what the heck? Magic.
I made a laser radio once - hooked up the transmitter half of it (AM) to a laser pointer, then beamed it across the room to a photoreceptor which then turned that back into sound played from my phone. Was a cool way to learn a bit of electrical engineering
Psychologists branding everyone with a disorder. You can spend a whole lifetime trying to understand yourself and you won't. 4 years of schooling and a book full of labels doesn't give you any extra magical understanding of everyone else.
You know I felt this way for years. I felt that way through psychopharmacology in pharmacy school, and I felt that way during our psychiatry and behavior lectures in medical school. I felt like psychiatry was minimizing behavior to these boxes was far too reductionist. Then I spent a month in an inpatient psychiatry facility as a third year medical student.
While I completely agree that each individual is unique and people are more than their diagnosis, you'd be absolutely shocked by just how similar patients' overall stories, maladaptive coping mechanisms, and behaviors are within the same psychiatric illness. I can spot mania from a doorway, and it takes less than five minutes to have a high suspicion for borderline personality disorder. These classifications aren't some arbitrary grouping of symptoms: they're an attempt to create standard criteria for a relatively well preserved set of phenotypic behaviors. The hard part is understanding pathology vs culturally appropriate behavior in cultures you don't belong, and differentiating within illness spectra (Bipolar I vs II; schizophrenia vs bipolar disorder with psychotic features vs schizoaffective)
4 years where? To become a real psychologist (not a therapist) in most places you need a PhD or a PsyD. In total, you probably do at least 8 years of schooling.
Not to mention that that "book full of labels" is constantly reviewed and was made based on consensus from psychiatrists, which are medical doctors with a lot more than 4 years of schooling.
I'm incapable of coming to terms with the scientific fact that a 194cm male could not take a grizzly bear in a fight
I can respect that, but stay out of the enclosure.
Maybe if he was 195cm ?
Sorry to disappoint, but I am 200cm tall and I would get annihilated in an instant.
Is your height 194 by chance?
Full moons do not have an impact on people with mental illness, make weird things happen, increase work load, or increase the chance of going into labor. I have worked in three separate hospitals in three separate states and the consensus is: full moons bring out the crazies and the babies.
It's not true. Your observations may be affected by confirmation, bias, or other things.
https://www.dukehealth.org/blog/myth-or-fact-more-women-go-labor-during-full-moon
However, barometric pressure can apparently induce labor
Unrelated - kind of - but I believe there are two documented cases of obscure programming bugs that manifest according to the phase of the moon!
That's actually really interesting, the medical professionals I've been acquainted with never seemed to mention that theory to begin with.
Hypothesis*, and it is very popular with nurses. Unfortunate, but people still believe many strange things.
It's entirely confirmation bias. The crazies come out, must be a full moon. It isn't? Oh, then it's just a bad day. It is a full moon? See, I told ya. Full moon and no crazies? Didn't even notice.
Statistics shows that the belief is wrong. It's funny I think that despite the hard numbers the people working there still strongly believe it.
I believe there have been multiple studies that found that full moons affect most people sleeping and make sleep a bit harder
There's something up with the placebo effect.
Sometimes, people just get better. Your mood affects your heart rate, your blood sugar, your mobility even. Thinking you are getting better helps you get better. This isn't controversial, the placebo effect has long been understood and accounted for in experimental design.
What I don't understand then is why we don't try to take advantage of this effect more often. If I have a small chance of making people feel better with a sugar pill, why not give out sugar pills and claim they have miracle effects all the time?
We do, I remember my friends mom had pills labeled placebo, and she said they where making her feel better, me and my friend looked at eachother and said nothing in front of her mom. When we where alone together we laughed a little and agreed that we shouldn't say anything since her mom was doing better.
One of the remarkable things is that a placebo still works even if you know it's a placebo.
Because you expect it to work to some degree because you know about the placebo effect.
We do. But if you were aware of it, it wouldn't work.
But placebos do still work when you know they're placebos.
Sometimes but not in all people. It's worth keeping it low key just for that.
I saw a study that concluded toilet seats in public restrooms were actually one of the cleanest surfaces in the restroom. Don't dispute that - it just means that the entire area lands somewhere in the spectrum between disgusting and eldritch nightmare. Due to the finding that the toilet seats were cleaner than most other surfaces in the restroom, it further concluded that it was perfectly safe to just plop down bare-assed onto that nastiness.
Abso-fucking-lutely not. The toilet paper bird-nest is a must. A few layers of splash protection toilet paper in the water before I even sit down is a must. 'Ick' factor aside, there are enough contact acquired pathogens to justify extreme caution in environments like that. I ain't risking ass warts over some hypothesis, study, full-blown peer reviewed theory, or anything in between.
Not just compared to the other surfaces in a restroom. I believe keyboards and phones both lost to toilet seats in that comparison too.
I could see it in Quantity but not the qualities of the pathogens. A disease contracted from a toilet that has had contact with blood and feces versus a grimy membrane keyboard shouldn't even be a contest.
It's probably bad form to bring this type of comment over from reddit but in this case I can't help myself.
Username checks out.
In my head, "dark matter" and "dark energy" are the names we've given to the limits of our understanding. At some point in the future the news is going to break that an Einstein or a Feynman or a Hawking will publish a paper titled "So we figured out what's causing the thing we've been calling dark matter this whole time."
But that's literally true and fully acknowledged by the physics and astronomy fields. It's why those things received the names "dark." Because currently we can't see what's causing those effects. And there are currently physicists and astronomers who spend their time researching these effects in hopes of publishing that exact "Hey! I figured out what it is" paper. Then we'll praise that person, add their name to the pantheon and fail to acknowledge the hoards of other people who contributed to the foundational research that allowed them to finally figure it out.
Same as it ever was.
Yes, I completely agree. Dark matter and dark energy are supposed to make up over 90% of the universe, yet we failed to detect them yet? No way! Those are just fill-ins, because our formulas are obviously not working that great on a grander scale.
This suggests the question why do most of the highly educated people who have spent their lives studying the question think differently? Why is the universe obligated to be made of something easy to measure and understand?
The idea that SSRI antidepressants work by increasing serotonin levels. If that were the case, why don't they start working immediately? Instead, most people don't see positive effects for several weeks.
Plus the idea that SSRIs work, period. They only work slightly better than placebo, and they count them as "working" as long as they help with a single symptom. So if they don't help your depression at all, but they do help with your insomnia, they put that in the "it worked!" pile. That's why suicide risk sometimes increases on SSRIs. They do nothing for your crippling depression except increase your motivation, so before you were depressed and couldn't accomplish anything, and now you're depressed, but also have the wherewithal to follow through on your suicide plan.
I have been having some mental health issues, and I was reading about this the other day. I was going through wikipedia with the various types of antidepressants, and it seems that SSRIs are just barely better than placebo, or even in studies not even better than placebo.
I know there are multiple classes of antidepressants out there. Are there any that do a better job, even if they are not as common?
There's different definitions of depression, for one.
And "do a better job" is going to be defined by the individual.
But there are SSRIs, SNRIs and SDRIs like Wellbutrin. They have vastly different side effects and play on different systems (serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine) many people find SNRIs to be more effective, but again it's all the individual.
Placebos just prove that your body can heal you, it just chooses not to.
So then what does one do to heal it?
If you're suffering from depression, look into Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). After over a decade on SSRIs and other meds had failed, it turned my life around in six months. Literally life saving.
The effectiveness is proven (at much better rates than SSRIs), but the exact mechanism is under study.
But... There was a recent study that suggested that many cases of depression are caused by misordered neuron firing, where the emotional center of the brain fires before the "imagine the future" bit finishes firing. Normally, when a healthy brain imagines a future state, the emotional center fires in response to our anticipated feeling. (Imagination: We're going to the movies. Emotions: FUN) But in a depressed brain, the emotional core fires immediately, resulting in the current, crappy mood being applied to every imagined future. (Emotions: Everything is shit. Imagination: We're going to the movies?)
TMS may work as well as it does because one of the things it does is increase neuroplasticity, allowing the brain to correctly order the firing of our emotional response to imagined futures.
Anyway - TMS is right at the edges of our understanding of treating depression, but it really does work for a supermajority of patients.
For me, I went from having literally lost all emotions and being essentially dead (and being willing to die), to feeling... normal. I haven't had a major depressive episode in the two years since. It's been liberating.
I was listening to a sleep scientist the other day and they were saying that one thing we know is that depressed people have more rem sleep on average, and SSRIs decrease the amount of rem sleep.
If it is something sleep based that goes some way to explaining why it takes time to have an effect. Building up or wiping out a sleep debt can't happen instantaneously.
That’s interesting… because I always thought that REM sleep was the most important part of sleep, and more was better.
In fact, I read an article once that suggested that REM sleep was when our spinal fluid flushed all the waste material out of our brains at night (which leads to the types of dream that occur during REM sleep), which is also a process that prevents brains from being clogged with waste material.
I always thought that our brains being filled with waste material was part of depression, and that flushing out that waste material would help our brains function more correctly.
Sounds like the opposite - like, our depressed brains are depressed because they think too much?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6386825/
Yeah, I think we have multiple types of sleep because we need them, and if you're getting too much rem sleep at the expense of other types it's going to cause problems.
we should totally revoke the degrees of chiropractors. And the ones of psychoanalysts while we are at it.
"Fucking magnets, how do they work?"
Baby formula is not as good as mothers milk this gets debunked like every two years and then they change the formula and claim that bs again.
A baby formula doesn't have the mother's antibodies which are made and adapted as new microbes appear in the environment. So, you are saying the mother's milk is superior, right?
Yes of course.
Yet breast milk isn't always better is it? I for one would advise against a mother with TB(or any other transferable disease/cancer) to breastfeed her child.
Most of the time breast feeding is better for the child, but science shows us that absolutes are usually bad.
It's also prone to being straight goddamn poison if you live in the wrong part of the world.
That somehow the dozens of microphones all around us aren't listening at all.
Pretty sure the science is very clear that they are. Research papers about smartphones are enough to make the KGB Blush. A study not too long ago looked at the data being collected and sent by TikTok app, turned out the app's installed data is more spyware than it is the app itself. I like using CalyxOS, which was built up from way back when Android was Open Source, personally because I can disable Microphone and Camera use with the slide-down screen.
But my google home tells me that the microphone is disabled when I say the magic phrase. How can you not trust that?
String theory always smelled funny to me. Don't know if it's still actively researched or if it fell by the wayside. Couldn't care less! Lol
I don't think that we currently know enough about physics to say for sure that faster than light travel is impossible.
I think it's likely that there are still scientific breakthroughs to be discovered that will make currently impossible things possible.
You might be misunderstanding the problem, though. "Traveling" is relative. It absolutely is not impossible to arrive somewhere faster than light traveling in "normal" 3D space would. For example, 3D space itself is a medium, not an absolute thing. A medium can always be manipulated.
It also depends on how you are measuring time. From the perspective of the light, all travel is nearly instantaneous. It's only from our perspective that it appears to take a long time.
We haven't seen anything in nature violate it nor in any lab.
Anything I think is ideologically motivated. Having a study to cite doesn't make you right if the study is bullshit.
Psychiatry and psychiatric drugs. But it is hardly scientific anyway
The problem with psychiatry is that it's expected to have quick fixes like other schools of medicine. Often the conditions are chronic and the treatment is long term at best which makes it slow and expensive. Drugs can help in the short term but they're often not able to be replaced by correct treatment due to funding.
That sounds about right. Could you give an example of what correct treatment should be? I agree that treatment for many conditions is long term.
It's a statistical science. While other branches can be all like "splitting atoms will definitely give you an energetic reaction" psychology is like "this helps in 60% of cases so we're gonna try it on you ".
To be fair here, technically throwing neutrons at matter has only some probability of causing it to fission, and statistics tells us how many do. It’s just that there are so many more neutrons and nuclei than there are people, so we can say with statistical confidence that under such and such conditions, y will occur when x happens.
Not that different. Just more samples and observations.
It took me awhile to accept it. But apparently planting trees on the wrong area could actually contribute to global warming. E.g. Planting on areas, traditionally has no trees, while reforesting would contribute to lowering temperature.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-021-00233-0
I learned that from a recent documentary of the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park from Vice.
The prompt is dangerous and indulgent for anti-science idiots. You don't "believe in" science... Science is. You can choose to believe in fairy tales, conspiracy theories and other made up shit like religious dogma, don't causally equate the two categories - ESPECIALLY not while naming science directly. Maybe say, "what's a thing that you can't believe it's real?" If you need to post.
I see your edit, but it's still a bullshit post, OP.
Science absolutely involves belief, the idea that the scientific method is a divorced concept from belief might fly in a badly written Wikipedia article description but in terms of actual science, belief absolutely factors massively into science. So does intuition.
Science is just a meaningless constellation of data points without any belief to connect them. One has to be very careful and continually retrospective about what those beliefs are, but it is absurd on the face of it to say that science is magically outside belief.
Science isn’t a collection of facts, it is a collection of questions that arise from hypotheses that themselves arise from belief and intuition. Just because that is scary and opens up the door to conversations about how belief always shapes our thoughts and actions even when it is in the context of science doesn’t mean you can just slam the door and demand that somehow science doesn’t include these things.
What differentiates science from other things is the intentional practice of questioning one’s conscious and subconscious beliefs, not the absence of belief.
Authoritarian minded centrists always want to bludgeon people with the idea that science is just a set of facts handed down by authority, but that is a lazy and ultimately fundamentally incorrect way to understand and advocate for science. The mistake we made was letting the word “skeptic” be redefined from a lifelong practice of questioning one’s own beliefs to being what some random person who knows nothing about a subject is when they just decide not to believe in something for no good reason.
I don't see the issue. Here is the truth, do you believe in it or not? Plenty of stuff I have had a hard time accepting which is another way of saying I didn't believe it. That doesn't mean I gave up.
Umm. So here's the thing. The scientific method is the best system we have for learning things about the world around us. The problem is scientists are humans.
There are papers published in reputable journals written by lobbyists and special interests to use the trappings and gravitas of science to push their agendas. There are medicines on the market that mostly or entirely don't work because they were in use before the FDA was a thing. There are lots of papers written by academics entirely to keep the grant money coming, or edited by university management to prevent casting the school in a bad light.
Science, as an institution, is not infallible, and should be examined and audited.
And indeed, a core principle of the scientific method is incredulity. A scientist publishes something, you're supposed to say "That doesn't seem right, I don't think I believe it." and then repeat the experiment to see if you get the same result.
Carbon capture 🥀
Yes, an absolute scam. Perfect for a demonstration project for a big polluter to point at to discourage legislation that would threaten their business model. Not useful for reducing carbon emissions at scale.
I mean, carbon capture works but if people are not willing to pay 5$ extra to prevent the CO2 from being emitted then they sure as hell are not going to pay 50$ to capture it. And capturing will almost always be more expensive than not producing it.
Carbon capture through technology? Agreed.
Carbon capture through hemp subsidies, or even just legalized weed would be doable, but we'd have to get global adoption.
It’s got to be Dark Matter. So many astrophysicists have spent so much time thinking about this stuff and all they’re really sure about is that there must be much more matter in the Universe than we can see, and yet we never actually seem any closer to knowing what it is. In conjunction with Dark Energy it just leaves the layman with the awkward possibility that maybe our model of The Universe is just fundamentally flawed somehow.
I think that eiher, we fundamentally misunderstand gravity at a quantum level, and we are seeing all of the matter there is, but can't anyway calculate gravity with our current understanding of it, or, we fundamentally misunderstand how time, gravity, and space interact.
Quantum entanglement. Having two particles latched in the same state even if separated by light years distance is something I currently cannot believe. Maybe too dumb, but my belief is that it 'has' to be some experiment error.
An incomplete but better than most pop science explanations is as follows: Suppose I have 2 envelopes and 2 letters. We have a stamp that has A and B on it next to each other. Without looking we put the letters next to each other, randomly Orient the stamp and apply it. Then we fold the letters up and put them in the envelops. Now we look at the stamp as see it has A and B on it.
We know that one letter contains A and the other B but not which, you take one and fly to Siberia while I enjoy a nice holiday in Tasmania (sorry but this is the sacrifice of science). I open my letter and see a B, instantly I know that in Siberia there is a letter containing A.
Light speed etc isn't violated here because we travelled below light speed when setting it all up, I haven't affected your letter just gained some insight about the overall system by inspecting one part of it.
Now there are a lot of things I've glossed over but it's much closer to opening letters than psychic woo particles.
edit: as to keeping them latched it's hard. The coupling is like conservative laws (e.g. spin up and spin down so no net overall spin) but any interactions destroy the coupling (or rather extend it to whatever just might've swapped spin with a particle). AFAIK nobody has maintained a system over lightyears for that reason among many, but like shipping pineapples to England the barrier appears practical rather than theoretical.
For me it's the origin of the universe. This shit has to be a simulation.
That simulation, so to appear believable from the inside, would have to be based on the real universe, or would look to simplistic//trivial from the outside. So, this pushes the question to a more complex situation, but doesn't seem to help to resolve it. Right ?
The singularity that supposedly lies inside black holes is more likely just a result of a huge gap in our understanding and a dead end in general relativity.
Fuzzball black hole gang rise up
Intelligence. I think that "dumb" people aren't really dumb, they're just processing information differently.
But isn't it outcome based? No matter how you process information, if your conclusions lead you to a sub-optimal solution to problems, whatever they are in whatever context, isn't that "dumber" than someone that can come up with the best or better solution?
If I decide "god will provide" instead of "if I research, think and work hard enough I can fix this problem", which one is exhibiting intelligence?
Lol, old memory popped in my head of a classmate back in highschool. She asked "won't the US sink if it gets over populated?" She was processing information way differently.
Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
I know in print journalism, you will certainly start noticing trending words go viral through the journalism community. Like the word “slammed” showing up in headlines repeatedly. Or the word “tony” to describe something ritzy/expensive that was trending a couple of years ago.
Slammed Is absolutely abysmal.
Did anyone else notice a reporting trend years ago where everyone was "tapping" everyone? They used it to mean a newly elected/appointed person recruited or perhaps sometimes consulted someone else, but it was around the time the term was also hot in pop culture where, of course, it means something entirely different.
I keep hearing about this one lately.
It's actually the simulation. It's not coincidence, it's not that we just noticed that thing and it's everywhere. It's the simulation running out of ram.
For me it's Colloidal Silver. It's been used as antimicrobial in wound dressings in the past but I just don't trust it at all. The reason it suddenly resurged was during the Covid Pandemic a bunch of televangelist snake oil salesmen started endorsing it. If a product contains silver I won't use it at all, and furthermore I reject brands that sell it. I would even rather bleed than purchase a CVS bandaid.
Colloidal silver sold as a cure or "supplement" is absolutely a scam and potentially harmful (it can and has permanently turned people blue/gray). But silver itself is incredibly useful as an antimicrobial and is commonly used in bandages in burn wards.
Silver isn't the only metal that is effective against bacteria, but other than brass and gold most other options are either toxic to humans in some way or not as effective.
TL;DR: bandaids with silver are fine, colloidal silver you put in your body isn't.
Silver in these bandages simply acts as a catalyst which uses oxygen from the air to oxidize bad stuff : it's like having a tiny source of peroxide.
Interestingly I really only know about because it's "popular" in the biohacker space for helping with cavities (as in AFTER you have cleaned a cavity you can use it to seal and protect it from further damage). Cheaper and more accessible then proper dental care.
I am afraid to ask this but what cavities are you referring to? Do biohackers feel the need for more cavities usually?
Cavities in teeth!! Oh no, I don't know of recommending anywhere else!
Birth order effect on personality.
It smells like predetermined horoscope nonesense.
That consciousness arises from matter as some emergent phenomenon. Integrated information theory, micro-tubules, or whatever: no.
I believe consciousness is fundamental.
How do you mean fundamental?
They probably mean that consciousness does not arrive from matter - that there is some other thing that causes consciousness, like another fundamental particle or whatever.
Essentially they are arguing for the existence of the "soul" or "spirit" in some fashion or another. Definitely unscientific as we have no evidence of such a thing.
The problem with consciousness is that everyone has different idea what is is.
That's the fundamental problem with everything, though.
I disagree with you, but that's because your comment means something entirely different to me.
And I, in turn, accept your apology.
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That's not scientifically proven though, just an idea.
Not sure why you mentioned chiropractors, I thought this was about scientific things.
I don't believe scientific progress is analogous with human progress or can be used to "decode" morality, ie the science vs religion dichotomy I don't believe in. I don't think science or "reason" guides human societies for instance. This belief is a result of studying Hume and moral philosophy. I think science tells us what is but not what ought to be, and that gap is irreconcilable through science alone, yet it can inform our sense of right and wrong. I disagree with objective morality as well, so the popularization of this science=objective morality idea that Sam Harris has attempted I disagree with entirely. I'm much more aligned with Patricia Churchland's ideas here, and her popularization she outlines in her book "Braintrust." I don't think, as some do, that measuring brain activity decodes human morality, because I don't believe such a thing exists. I don't believe human society is controlled and determined by rational actors, I have a more Darwinian and Maxian view on that. When people profess things like "politics should be scientific" I likely agree with their sentiment but I think "science" is not the reason why, and more of a distraction/lazy way to assert being morally right about something, which science can't actually do because it requires an appeal to human notions of morality, which science cannot determine as it has no measure of which values we ought to hold.
I mean, define "scientific". A currently-held, consensus theory? Because it's easy to find theories that were developed in accordance with scientific theory, held for a while, but discarded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories
The Big Bang Theory, ... and this despite the fact that I believe the universe is expanding now. This expansion is still accelerating so the small acceleration itself could result in the expansion (speed distribution) without having to postulate an extremely rapid acceleration at time zero and other ludicrous extreme physical conditions.
... and yes I know also about the cosmological microwave background's perfect black body curve and such observations.
Is there a competing theory you find more compelling? "I don't know what happened" is fine, but if there's something else I haven't heard of that could explain the facts as we know them I'm interested in learning about it.
Cosmic Inflation is a good one to read up on if you never have. Because the slow acceleration we observe right now in the expansion is actually vastly inadequate to explain what we see now, so the big bang theory currently involves spacetime itself having to go through a few phase changes that are hard to wrap your head around.
Oh, nooow I see why people just say it was god.
I believe one of the theories for a multiverse is that Inflation never ended, it is just a continually ongoing process in which out universe "bubbled" out of it. Other universes would have bubbled up too, and we "should" be able to see evidence of collisions between those other bubbles and our own bubble in the CMB, which there has been a little bit of success in finding.
They problem is that the universe is bigger than the speed of light allowed for. One thing I have seen on YouTube from HistoryoftheUniverse is that inflation was possible because it was the inflation of the universe itself which would not be inherently restricted to the cosmic speed limit (C)