People make fun of ICP for not understanding how magnets work, but magnets are actually extremely complicated and difficult to understand. Not understanding magnets was the most valid thing about pre-redemption ICP.

Like you can *kind of* understand magnets through field diagrams, but it's an extremely incomplete model that doesn't always predict their behaviour accurately.

Actually understanding magnets involves a lot of shit about virtual particles and Feynman diagrams.

There's a video of Richard Feynman explaining why he can't explain magnets with easy to imagine metaphors, and the Youtube comments are full of people saying "lol this guy has no idea what he's talking about." But like, understanding magnets is literally what made Feynman famous.

The upshot is that you can't use convenient metaphors to explain how magnets work, because the things that make magnets work are more fundamental forces than the things that you'd use for your metaphor.

It's kind of like how you can't properly explain how an electron acts by modeling it as a billiard ball. The billiard ball acts the way it does because of the electrons in it (and protons and whatnot, but you get the idea), so the metaphor doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

The fact is that to understand quantum mechanics properly, you have to learn a lot of math, and you have to model the particles and forces involved as their own unique entities. You have to construct a new model in your mind, not rely on incomplete analogies.

But a lot of people find that idea really upsetting. They don't like the idea that to understand complex physics, you need years and years of study. They want it to be something a layman can revolutionise, and it just fucking isn't.

You can learn some pretty cool stuff through metaphors and clever explanations, but if you really want to understand how these things work, you have to get into a lot of really complicated mathematical models.

If we could explain these things completely without complex math, we wouldn't be doing complex math to model them.

I didn't finish my astrophysics degree, but I got far enough in to understand that everything is extremely wild and complicated, and honestly it's amazing that we ever managed to figure out anything.

It also taught me that everything we find important is actually very abstract, strange, and essentially illusory. If you start arguing that a concept is invalid because it's a social construct, I will fucking destroy you.

EVERYTHING IS JUST PARTICLES AND ENERGY AND SPACETIME INTERACTING

EVERYTHING THAT ISN'T A FUNDAMENTAL PARTICLE IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT, YOU FUCKS

Your face is a social construct! No, seriously. The difference between a colony of specialised single celled organisms & a single multicellular organism is essentially arbitrary. Your face is a collection of cells that you could reasonably argue are their own separate organisms.

And that's not even getting into the cells themselves, or the fact that the idea of any non-particle object being a single entity is also basically arbitrary.

Everything that means anything is just shit we made up to make an incredibly complex and chaotic world make sense. If social constructs don't matter, literally nothing matters.

This thread about ICP got extremely wild, and I apologise.

Anyway, ICP was right about magnets. Also, if you want to use a reductionist argument against me, I will always win. You will never be able to out-reductionist me.

I had an existential crisis when I was 8 years old. I WOKE UP EARLIER THAN YOU.