That sounds a very strange expectation. Most of my life post university I realized most of questions have complex answers, it is never as simple as you expect.
If the author would check how things biology and medicine work currently, I think he will have even more surprises than the fact that counting populations is an approximate endeavor.
I find the complication comes from poor definitions, poor understanding of those definitions, and pedantic arguments. Less about the facts of reality being complicated and more about our ability to communicate it to each other.
>But it’s good to be reminded that we know a lot less about the world than we think. Much of our thinking about the world runs on a statistical edifice of extraordinary complexity, in which raw numbers—like population counts, but also many others—are only the most basic inputs. Thinking about the actual construction of these numbers is important, because it encourages us to have a healthy degree of epistemic humility about the world: we really know much less than we think.
Apparent simplicity usually comes from weak definitions and overconfident summaries, not from the underlying system being easy.
Complexity is often there from the start, we just don’t see it yet.
If you're always chasing the next technicality then maybe you didn't really know what question you were looking to answer at the onset.
~1200 - omg chess is so amazing and hard. this is great.
~1500 - i'm really starting to get it! i can beat most people i know easily. i love studying this complex game!
~1800 - this game really isn't that hard. i can beat most people at the club without trying. really I think the only thing separating me from Kasparov is just a lot of opening prep and study
~2300 - omg this game is so friggin hard. 2600s are on an entirely different plane, let alone a Kasparov or a Carlsen.
Magnus Carlsen - "Wow, I really have no understanding of chess." - Said without irony after playing some game and going over it with a computer on stream. A fairly frequent happening.
Beginner: I know nothing and this topic seems impossible to grasp.
Advanced beginner: I get it now. It's pretty simple.
Intermedite: Hmm, this thing is actually very complicated.
Expert: It's not that complicated. I can explain a simple core covering 80% of it. The other 20% is an ocean of complexity.
What's missing more often than not, across fields of study as well as levels of education, is the overall commitment to conceputal integrity. From this we observe people's habitual inability or unwillingness to be definite about what their words mean - and their consequent fear of abstraction.
If one is in the habit of using one's set of concepts in the manner of bludgeons, one will find many ways and many reasons to bludgeon another with them - such as if a person turned out to be using concepts as something more akin to clockwork.
This sounds like someone who has never studied physics.
"Oh wow, I figured out everything about physics... except this one little weird thing here"
[A lifetime of chasing why that one little weird thing occurs]
"I know nothing about physics, I am but a mote in an endless void"
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Strong or weak definitions don't save you here, what you are looking for is error bars and acceptable ranges.
If you think I'm saying that the world is not infinitely complex, you are missing the point.
Sure, you can put it this way, with the caveat that reality at large isn't strongly definable.
You can sort of see this with good engineering: half of it is strongly defining a system simple enough to be reasoned about and built up, the other half is making damn sure that the rest of reality can't intrude, violate your assumptions and ruin it all.
Reality is such that, without integrity, you can prove almost anything you want. As long as your bar for "prove" is at the very bottom.
The problem I have with this literary device is that I think it works if most / many questions would fit it then he would go to disapprove it. Using it, for me, kind of indirectly reinforces the idea that "there are many simple answers". Which I came to loathe as it is pushed again and again due to social media. Everything is "clear", "simple", "everybody knows better", "everybody did their research".
How did this literal device make you feel? Interested? Curious? Bored? When I read it my initial instinct was "no, it's definitely not simple, so if that's what are you going to explain me, I will not bother".
anyway it is just a writing style. if you don't like it, fine. If you can't parse it, well, now you can.
Everything is basically a theory only judged on predictive capabilities. Even the idea that Earth is not at the center of the solar system is a judgement call of what we define as the solar system and center.
The math is simpler sure, but its arbitrary how we define our systems.
For further reading, I like Early Wittgenstein, but warning, he is a meme for a reason, you will only understand 10%...
Imagine we have a table with black and white splotches. We could use a square fishnet with a fine enough resolution to accurately describe it. But why use a square fishnet? Why not use hexagons? They both can accurately describe it with a fine enough resolution.
All of science is built on this first step of choosing (squares or hexagons).
Maybe something easier than Wittgenstein, there is Waltz Theory of International Politics, specifically chapter 1. But that is more practical/applied than metaphysical. I find this a difficult topic to recommend a wikipedia article, as they are too specific to each type of knowledge and don't explain the general topic. Even the general topic gets a bit lost in the weeds. Maybe Karl Popper too.
First we have to live. That has implications; it's the base for all knowledge.
Knowledge is developing all the time and can be uncertain, sure, but the foundations aren't arbitrary.
You are doing an idealism.
[0] https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/40782/where-is...
I used to focus so much on finding "elegant" proofs of things, especially geometric proofs. I'd construct elaborate diagrams to find an intuitive explanation, sometimes disregarding gaps in logic.
Then I gave up, and now I appreciate the brutal pragmatism of using Euler's formula for anything trigonometry-related. It's not a very elegant method, if accounting for the large quantity of rote intermediate work produced, but it's far more effective and straightforward for dealing with messy trig problems.
But they don't. We know they don't. Not unless you use a weird definition of orbit that is very different from the one lotsofpulp was using. And if you do that you're not countering their argument, you're misconstruing it.
Put another way, there's a reason we use latitude/longitude for terrestrial positioning, instead of Cartesian coordinates with Sol being at (0, 0, 0). For one, it keeps the math time-invariant.
And our universe has tons of matter with gravitational mass everywhere, few other types of interaction beyond gravity, and a vacuum that just doesn't want to stay empty.
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[0] - Not sure if this was mathematically proven, or merely remains not disproven.
Actual orbits being slightly off ellipses isn't what I meant.
If you don't have a definition of the solar system, the question about its center is meaningless. If you have then you can answer it according to that definition.
All of science is like this. Change your frame of reference/theory. Why did we pick one system vs another? Its arbitrary.