this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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Science

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[โ€“] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

In statistics and with arbitrarily questionable assumptions that might be true, but there's other math.

[โ€“] ogmios@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Unfortunately there are many ways one can fool oneself into believing all sorts of asinine things with numbers. That was the point of the lesson: That math is effectively meaningless without an earnest desire to arrive at the correct answer, not just an attempt to confirm what one already believes. This article is actually a great example of that, because it presumes that our mathematical models are definitely correct, which is the farthest thing from the truth. Physics is a really interesting field because it's constantly discovering odd nuances of our world where our models don't actually align with reality, giving us the chance to improve them.