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I've got a bunch of friends that are interested in starting their own enterprises but are having a hard time finding mentors. Right now the main sources of mentorship seem to be ondeck and y combinator, but these are for people who are interested in build tech stacks and apps - what if you want to start a spacetech company? or an online publishing company? or an online fitness co? All things that are going to integrate tech, but which don't actually fit into the ondeck/ycombinator model.

interested in seeing what you guys have come across..

Title says it all - curious to know if all scientific research has gotten more expensive over time, or if that kind of price tag creep is only for particle physics

History is littered with examples of science being used to cause enormous harm - eugenics, phrenology, lobotomies, MKUltra, The four pests campaign, lysenkoism, introduction of cane toads into Australia, etc, etc, etc.

What are the best counterexamples? The unsung victories that go beyond taking lead out of paint and gasoline, and the closing of the ozone hole?

There's more thinkpieces than you can count out there about why humans are incapable of interpreting risk, of the cognitive biases that inform our thinking, of the ways in which we underprepare for everything from asteroid impacts to stock market crashes.

What it comes down to is the fact that humans are emotional, intuitive creatures that like to do the kinds of things that FEEL right, even if they don't bring the best outcome.

This makes sense, except for when you run up against the fact that we, as a society, have to figure things out for the whole as well as for the parts within it.

Does some of our thinking run aground because we can think about ourselves, but have no way of thinking about the whole, or the other way around?

From where I'm sitting, seems like the naive divison of dem/repub is based on how we think about risk and what things we pay attention to losing, but I'm not sure.

All that to say - what is the weirdest thing about risk to you?

In 1887, Michaelson & Morley did their famous interferometer experiment, which demonstrated there was no such thing as the luminiferous aether. Which, fine. The idea that there's a stationary substance through which everything transits seems a little absurd.

But things like entanglement and vacuum energy seem to suggest that there IS some kind of connection between atoms. So if the connections between the atoms and the atoms themselves are made of the same thing, how could you possibly detect it?

For a longer exposition on the difficulties of demarcation problem outlined below: https://youtu.be/bQP-7xgo1uU

In the modern world, there’s a sense that there’s only one way to evaluate your perspective on the world - and that’s application of an empirical scientific method. Can you show it through a double blind controlled study? No? Well then you might be a pseudoscientific crank!

But then, over time, the narrative around the idea changes. Suddenly, there are articles about it in big newspapers and magazines. People are entertaining the perspective you’ve held all along! In some cases, the paradigm shift completely, and life continues on with the very idea that was dismissed as “unscientific” now becoming a well-accepeted - perhaps even beloved - addition to the canon of human understanding.

We were curious to understand how the pejorative language is used by some members of the scientific community to muddy the waters, especially as measurement and explanation became intertwined and then hopelessly confused during the technological revolution of the last century. Is there a place for such language in discourse about how we know the world, and if there is, where does the line lie?