Hi, welcome to the talk page! This is where I take an opportunity to reflect on the article, review the process of composing it, and give some commentary. I like the talk page because I allow myself to ramble and editorialize much more here, which is a lot closer to the conversational tone that comes naturally to me. If you haven't read the main article yet, make sure to go and read it now before I spoil everything. Now let's talk about the article.
The elephant in the room
This is the first article on my blog, and I acknowledge the subject is pretty bold. The intention of my blog isn't to entertain or debunk conspiracy theories, push anti-establishment rhetoric, or be contrarian. The fact that this is my first article casts some doubt on that right off the bat. I knew I wanted to talk about this subject at some point because I had the idea in my head about how I could offer an interesting perspective on the debate that I hadn't seen elsewhere, but I didn't really want this to be a blog where that kind of topic was common. It occurred to me that if I had put this article later in the series, and started with topics that I'm more comfortable with like computer science or signal processing then I could undermine the intention of the article by establishing myself as an authority. I wanted to structure this article in a way that made it clear that I was not leveraging authority to drive the discussion. I was careful throughout the article to avoid making assertions that could be construed as invoking authority since that was one of the central themes. Overall, I think this article fits as an introduction to the blog since it was a good exercise in going out of my intellectual comfort zone, discarding assumptions to approach a problem fresh, and reflecting on my own beliefs and biases. The central theme of skepticism, critical thinking, and systems is something that I want to carry forward in the blog.
I spent a while mulling over the imagery I used in the article. I'm conscious that I'm looking away from the camera in the first three images of the first article and I'm not really sure if people will read into that at all. I wasn't trying to be symbolic.
The process
When I started this article I really wanted to spend most of it discussing celestial mechanics and astronomy. I had a whole plan to review how sextants work, talk about orbital motion, discuss complex topics in geodesy like the geoid and vertical deflection, and a lengthy discussion on atmospheric refraction. When I started doing some research on the flat earth model, it became disappointingly apparent that it generally wasn't formulated with any mathematical precision. I could have tried reverse engineering some specific formulations, but that could have been construed as setting up a straw man model. It didn't end up being necessary anyway since the moon phase experiment didn't really require all that much background.
It worked out that I didn't need to go into depth on those topics since the philosophy portion ended up getting a lot deeper than I had initially intended. Initially, I wanted to discuss some of the philosophical matters from a high enough level that I wouldn't have to invoke words like epistemology and instead gently guide the reader through some of the important revelations without sounding like a philosophy textbook. By the time the article was done, the central thesis had seriously shifted into a fairly complex philosophy problem that needed a lot of explaining.
Unfortunately, while I enjoy philosophy I wouldn't consider myself an expert. I've read enough philosophy material to know a well-read philosopher could identify my writing style as a dabbler. I'd also say that around 90% of the philosophy literature I get through is in the realm of metaphysics; I've read a couple notable texts on the philosophy of science, but it was years ago and required a fairly deep recall to invoke that for this article. I find that the layout of my mind doesn't tend to be accommodating to caching encyclopedic information about the elements of scaffolding that distinct philosophers have provided toward a problem. When I read philosophy I seem to have a tendency to blend its thoughts in with my own little world of philosophy rather than try to triage it into any kind of biographically organized framework. I suspect that's noticeable to some readers in my approach to this article as an extension of epistemology rather than an exploration of the findings of the philosophy of science.
All that is to say I stuck to what I felt comfortable with but that may have limited the precision of my rhetoric in those areas.
My thoughts on the article
This article was very challenging for me to write. I wanted to approach it from an unbiased perspective and provisionally accept the common flat earth doctrine of the scientific community being untrustworthy for the purposes of the article. It ended up being very difficult to do that without sounding anti-establishment. The intention was to acknowledge that there are problems with the modern practice and instruction of science without being so heavy handed as to sound like I was trying to argue that we should reject the scientific community. What I wanted to do was demonstrate that some criticisms against the scientific institution require an exercise in disassembling its foundations in order to address, and that there's a version of science that allows us to do that. This also required a careful balance of emphasizing the importance of experimenting yourself while emphasizing that your personal observations can be misleading if they're poorly contextualized.
I was also a little bit worried that my criticism of scholastic science was going too far. I needed the section since it served a few narrative purposes:
- It acknowledges some legitimate criticisms of science
- It identifies the reason that the philosophical approach to scientific debate is so uncommon in the scientific community
- It serves as an example for the depth of introspection that can be necessary to truly answer a question I impose to the reader: is your skepticism misplaced?
I wasn't trying to use this section to criticize teachers and it was difficult to find wording that made that clear.
In general my biggest concern with this article is that the conflict I have between entertaining anti-establishment arguments and not pushing anti-establishment rhetoric manifested as awkward phrasing. I'm worried that there's a pattern of making a sweeping statement and following it with another statement to soften the blow, when really the sweeping statements were meant to be rhetorically concise conclusions that needed clarification so the reader wouldn't take them too far. I also left out most points that would defend the scientific establishment, mostly because I trust that my readers don't need that kind of affirmation and it would have diluted the intention of the essay.
I feel a bit bad for my define-and-dismiss approach for the philosophy of science since in a way it's what the whole article is about. That's exactly why I didn't want to talk about it; I was concerned it would turn the article from a case study into a subject matter overview.
I'm a little bit curious about how the ICBM tangent will be received. I included it because in general I like to include somewhat absurd lateral leaps in my writing to keep the reader on edge but I'm worried it was too unnatural. Of course, once I thought of the image I could put in it was too late to turn back.
My (positive) thoughts on the article
As I said, I hadn't originally planned to have such a heavy hand with the philosophy, but getting into it and going through several revisions really helped me understand the point I was actually trying to make, which I had originally struggled to articulate even to myself. Seeing the final structure of the argument really felt like I had finally understood something that I never even knew I was missing. The connection between the limitations of a typical science education and the manner in which earth-shape debaters always talk past each other really stood out. I knew I wanted to confront the "hypothesis" = "guess" conception but surprised myself with how coherent I managed to be.
I also think I got a good result out of the imagery I put into the article. The about page says I use the imagery to help readers visualize me as a person but I didn't anticipate the actual effect they would have, at least on me. The fact that most of the images don't really add anything to the article's contents gives them a really interesting quality of breaking up the dense article in a way that I think makes the whole thing easier to digest.
I almost didn't implement the footnote structure in the article's HTML template, but I found myself really wanting to satisfy the pedant side of me without interrupting the flow of the article so I ended up implementing it. I'm glad I did, I think it works pretty well.