Ruminating

My sister was asking me about what's better between cast iron and enameled cast iron. I had a few thoughts about it, but wasn't sure about some of the practical differences, so I decided to consult the internet.

This is an important thing about the time we live in, I think. My sister and I have access to the same internet. She could do a search about this, look at the same articles and references that I'd look at, but we have a difference in ability to digest information about this topic. I spend more time in the kitchen, thinking more seriously about the tools of the kitchen. I have a greater background and understanding of chemistry, and how to think about the reactivity of cast iron, and how it's tempered by polymerization and the seasoning process.

I think a lot of people, on the ignorant end of the Dunning Kruger effect, look at the parity of access to information as a level playing field, without factoring in people's relative ability to digest information, and this is really dangerous for society.

Crystal's sister gets into fights with Crystal all the time, about things in like medicine, where they'll both look at a study, and draw different conclusions about it. Crystal majored in biology, minored in chemistry, and her sister has 2 art degrees. People who actually understand science understand how to be critical about papers. A paper by scientists that draws a conclusion, or is portrayed to have drawn a conclusion by pop science publications, isn't necessarily evidence of that conclusion. And even if the methodology is sound, and the sample size is reasonably large, and confounding factors are accounted for, everything in science must be couched in an acceptance that nobody fully understands anything.

Certainty is a hallmark of stupid people. If you talk to someone about a topic, and they aren't almost always adding qualifiers and saying "probably", instead of using absolute terms, that person is probably stupid. They likely looked at a couple of things that reinforced their prejudice, and decided that's right, and they know how things work.

Cows and a bunch of other animals are called ruminants. They're able to eat and digest stuff like grass, because they have specialized digestive structures, multiple stomachs, and they regurgitate their cud and chew it more, and so on. In historical agriculture, this allowed people to populate areas that couldn't grow better crops for people, because they'd let the animals eat the grass, and they'd benefit indirectly from it in the form of milk and eventually meat. Adult onset lactose intolerance is very normal, but these people who lived in those areas evolved to tolerate lactose, because the people who couldn't would die in those societies that depended on ruminants.

People with science educations are like people with specialized digestive structures. To ruminate is to chew on regurgitated cud, like a cow, but it is also to think deeply about something, which seems apt.