Video: smart people ponder "What Scientific Idea Is Ready for Retirement?"

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What Video Editing Idea Is Ready for Retirement?

“Edgy” jump cuts and repeated deliberate video distortions make your video more compelling.*

*Exception that proves the rule: Max Headroom

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We could at least replace the jump to a brief monochrome side shot to a brief monochrome top shot. We see little enough of tonsure and nose-bridge as it is.

Yikes! I can’t even listen to it with the video minimized. Too much audio jabassing as well.

Yeah, that was beyond painful.

As far as actual harm combined with long-disproven discardability goes, Malthusian population dynamics applied to human populations has done much more harm over the past 50 years than any of the misconceptions listed on the video.

Granted, demographers have abandoned the idea, but the Malthusian collapse is exactly the kind of hard-headed, cynical theory that makes its adherents think they’re clever even though its predictive power has been disproven in every society, except maybe China, which has ever industrialized.

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How so? Honestly curious here. I mean, population dynamics were how I was taught exponential functions in high school, but we all knew that populations couldn’t be modeled with any accuracy with something as simple as P(t)=P0ert. It’d be absurd if that were true because there would be so many more people than there actually are.

You’re forgetting about The Flood. Reset the clock. Carry on with your calculations. (Not sure where to put the smiley face, there.)

Now you’re just baiting me :smirk_cat:

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Frankly, because when women are given the right and alternative, their fertility rate falls below replacement in just a few generations, with the transition happening more quickly as each region develops.

The harm comes, politically, in driving the brainless and brutal attitude that thinks of the masses as some kind of herd animals to be farmed. It makes the kind of cruel entitled behavior of police and militia and armies seem inevitable. It gives a pass to mass fraud. It validates the idea that democracy is a joke.

We do have problems, but ravening hordes of bunny-littering poors is not one of them.

I get it now.

I thought you were talking about retiring that model from science, but, correct me if I’m wrong here, you’re saying that the general cultural idea of exponential growth of populations is a harmful meme that influences social attitudes.

Interesting point. I hadn’t thought about it that way very hard. Thanks for pointing it out.

Maybe a larger point is that scientific ideas retire themselves when superceded by something more useful unless the idea becomes politically useful.

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