How Our Botched Understanding of "Science" Ruins Everything 795
An anonymous reader writes "Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry writes at The Week, "If you ask most people what science is, they will give you an answer that looks a lot like Aristotelian 'science' — i.e., the exact opposite of what modern science actually is. Capital-S Science is the pursuit of capital-T Truth. And science is something that cannot possibly be understood by mere mortals. It delivers wonders. It has high priests. It has an ideology that must be obeyed. This leads us astray. ... Countless academic disciplines have been wrecked by professors' urges to look 'more scientific' by, like a cargo cult, adopting the externals of Baconian science (math, impenetrable jargon, peer-reviewed journals) without the substance and hoping it will produce better knowledge. ... This is how you get people asserting that 'science' commands this or that public policy decision, even though with very few exceptions, almost none of the policy options we as a polity have have been tested through experiment (or can be). People think that a study that uses statistical wizardry to show correlations between two things is 'scientific' because it uses high school math and was done by someone in a university building, except that, correctly speaking, it is not. ... This is how you get the phenomenon ... thinking science has made God irrelevant, even though, by definition, religion concerns the ultimate causes of things and, again, by definition, science cannot tell you about them. ... It also means that for all our bleating about 'science' we live in an astonishingly unscientific and anti-scientific society. We have plenty of anti-science people, but most of our 'pro-science' people are really pro-magic (and therefore anti-science). "
In lost the will to live ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In lost the will to live ... (Score:5, Informative)
lol - I have to say though I feel rather vindicated. In the http://science.slashdot.org/st... [slashdot.org] discussion I was making this argument (though probably not as well) and got mocked for it.
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Then again, kirk was fairly unambiguously Christian in at least a few episodes. In a way supported sorta arbitrarily to be totally true by the plot of at least one of those episodes(the "sun worshippers" one).
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I would not disagree with your comment, but am perplexed as to its relevance.
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Well, I mean, it's just odd to take a notably Christian Character, in a unremarkable Christian setting, and cite them as a model for atheism. I mean, I get you can isolate out that one element of his character, and treat it as a completely arbitrary and replaceable thing, but you know, the whole Theseus's Ship problem arises.
If you start swapping out character traits, do you end up with same character or a new one?
Re:In lost the will to live ... (Score:4, Insightful)
We've veered way off topic by now, but since non-religious ethical systems is one of my favorite things to talk about, I'm still going to reply.
Non-violence can be derived from any ethical position that views others as equal to yourself in all ways. There's a certain naivety to it, but that doesn't make it Christian in origin or purpose, and I think asserting that it does sells Christians short.
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Yes, this. And not even in "all ways". All I need to do is see others as equal in the sense of existing to have an ethical position.
To treat others as I would like to be treated. The "Golden Rule" is not a Christian innovation. See, Uhl's "Enlightened Selfishness".
http://kantwesley.com/Kant/Sag... [kantwesley.com]
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That was the novelty of Christianity 2000 years ago-
It was already centuries old by the time Christianity started.
When Christianity (Followers of the Way) showed up around 50 A.D, Judaism was extremely focused on (i) racism - you had to be a member of Jewish descent - and (ii) works - you had to keep the law, which also reflected in social strata (e.g Pharisees, rich vs. poor, etc) in numerous ways (kinds of sacrifies one could use to fulfill the law, etc). Christianity did away with both of those, pointing only to faith in Christ as a requirement; making all equal.
Christianity also did away with the "mysteries" of
Re:In lost the will to live ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Or at least that's the only explanation I can see for a non-violent atheism.
Translation: You don't understand atheism, therefore your personal religion gets to claim all credit for any and all positive common-sense-truths.
Christianity incorporated things that were widely accepted as true or good long before Christianity existed, and which are widely accepted as true or good in societies that have never had contact with Christianity.... and you want to claim Christianity somehow "owns" them, and that atheists cannot interdependently agree with them.
I do not need to believe in Native American animal spirit guides to come to the conclusion that it's a good idea to avoid violence.
I do not need to believe in Reincarnation to come to the conclusion that it's a good idea to avoid violence.
And I sure as heck don't need to believe in your even sillier walking-talking snake stories to come to the conclusion that it's a good idea to avoid violence.
There are pure-logic reasons to come to that conclusion.
There are good reasons to come to that conclusion which may range beyond a strict definition of "pure logic", which have absolutely nothing to do with invisible mystical magical beings.
One of the great things about atheism is that we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Christianity that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Judiasm that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Islam that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Native American religion that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Buddhism that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Hinduism that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Confucianism that is true or good.
Atheists don't define "morality" as obedience to some random religion's claims about what some invisible-silent-magical-man wants. We are free to accept the best examples of morality and the best teachings on morality and the best reasoning on morality, from anywhere. Jesus said a lot of very wise things. Buddha said a lot of very wise things. Confucius said a lot of very wise things. I see no shame as an atheist, taking the best that Christianity has to offer. But there's no way in hell you can claim Christianity has some monopoly-ownership on the idea of non-violence.
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Re:In lost the will to live ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know quite a few atheists and am one myself. Most of us don't go around talking about it and are somewhat surprised to run into another one. If you're going to define a "sense of rightness" as "Deity" then I suppose that's your business, but it is not what I think anyone's common definition would be. I have a sense of rightness that derives from empathy. It doesn't take any notion of the supernatural or any deity to understand that if I can feel pain, then I can expect that my fellow humans can as well. If I feel that someone causing me pain is "bad" then it follows that causing others' pain is bad.
Surely you've heard of the Golden Rule? This requires zero belief in the supernatural or any sort of sacredness. It is my experience as an atheist that many theists are so attached to their world view that they simply can't help but ascribe it to others, even if they have to mangle the definitions of common words to do so.
Re:In lost the will to live ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a sense of rightness that derives from empathy.
The irony of my own atheism is that not believing I have a sky daddy on my side has left me inclined to turn the other cheek, to be kind to other people, and so on like that. I can't, in good conscience, just dump the fat 45 year old wife who bores me intellectually and sexually, and consumes ravenous quantities of my income in ways that are of no benefit to myself. I can't even put down this wretched old dog who will just stand there looking you in the eye while taking a shit in the living room, who has been limping along in poor health for years, but still has a happy enough life. The dog is 20 years old, the same as the marriage, and I've been waiting for both of them to die of natural causes for the longest time now. I can't bring myself to put either one out of my misery, even though the misery is considerable, and the only real consolation I have is that I'm doing the right thing in martyring myself this way. Somehow the idea of allowing my own happiness to be a priority is a concept that never made its way into my atheistic ethos.
In contrast, one of my best friends is a deeply religious true believer who can attest, with no irony at all, that "every word in the Bible is the literal truth." I've thrown the full weight of the Skeptic's Annotated Bible at him, and he has an answer, an explanation, a dodge, or an excuse for absolutely every last line item. I couldn't believe the things he does if I wanted to, but it certainly has led to a sharply contrasting life. I suppose I keep him around in order to live vicariously through him. When you have Sky Daddy on your side, you can do anything and call it moral. He used to own a brothel in Mexico, and he was involved in sex trafficking operations whereby rural farm girls were lured to the city under false pretenses, and forced to work off their debt in the brothel. He dumped his old fat wife for a fresh young third world farm girl who worships him like a king, and is genuinely happy to do so. That's the hell of it right there. I've talked to his wife plenty of times. I know quite a lot about misery and abuse, and I see none present in her. She's really happy, beautiful, and servile. The only time I've seen her unhappy was when my friend forgot to let her perform some minor service or other for him, and did it himself instead.
The contrast between our lives is amazing. We have the same job and work the same 70 hours a week. He gets worshiped as a king, and I get walked on by a fat woman and then come home to clean up dog shit every day. If I could just suspend my disbelief and embrace this goofy Sky Daddy stuff, then I could become a sociopath too, and as a sociopath, I could be happy to shoot the dog, divorce the wife, and get me one of those servile young slave women from abroad. What man wouldn't want to come home to dinner and a blowjob seven nights a week? Me, apparently. I'd rather let a fat woman walk all over me, spend all my money, and keep me on an eternal debt treadmill, because it's kind thing to do, and the kind thing is always the right thing. That's what my atheist mother taught me; a fat woman who did the same thing to my poor meek father.
Sigh.
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Ultimately, there are really only three approaches to safety: treat others like you wish to be treated and hope that they reciprocate, wall yourself in and protect yourself from any situation where you would have to put trust in others, or kill everybody else before they kill you. The second approach might work, but isolation is a horrible experience for most people. The third approach, when viewed rationally, leads to ever-escalating violence. This leaves you with only one sensible option.
Re:In lost the will to live ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Approach #1 obviously makes a lot of sense in small, tribal societies. If you don't work for the good of the group, they'll kick you out and survival on your own in pre-civilization days is very difficult if not impossible. However, #2 is quite doable these days. All you have to do is work a job for money, and use that money to pay for your living expenses. Then, for personal relationships, you can treat people poorly and take advantage of them for your own personal gain. There's countless sociopaths who do just that every day, and it seems to work well for them. They're even running all our large companies and our government.
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Except that it doesn't explain why you should follow it. Most people seem to use "karma" (or "what comes around goes around") as a not-quite-as-supernatural-as-an-omnipotent-God reason for following the Golden Rule.
Wouldn't an indoctrination by society of an expectation for others to follow the rules be a suitable enough reason for one to follow that same rule?
In other words, society is perpetuated through an evolved sense of peace. To follow the "Golden Rule" is to benefit society. Society is not a God, it is a social construct with the power to self-enforce the rule, if need be.
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Re:In lost the will to live ... (Score:4, Insightful)
For three fairly obvious reasons:
1) If I cause pain to others, or believe that this is justifiable, then others quite likely will treat me the same
2) If everyone lived according to the ideals of "care about is your own personal survival and comfort, and nothing else.", society would collapse.
3) It causes me pain to cause pain to others or to see others suffer. That's part of what empathy is.
Notice that none of these justifications require any sort of supernatural cause. The idea that a supernatural entity must involved in order for people to behave with common decency scares me.
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Why is causing pain to others bad? Why do you care about what other people feel?
Quid pro quo. I care about them and don't cause them pain; and in return, they care about me and don't cause me pain. It's also called the social contract.
You may argue, "prisoner's dilemma" style, that an individual can then gain an advantage by breaking the social contract, and indeed some people do that. Bruce Schneier wrote a whole book [schneier.com] about that topic. But as it turns out, most people don't break the social contract, due to 1) intense social conditioning (religious or otherwise) and/or 2) the threat o
Re:Excuse me?...excuse me?... (Score:4, Insightful)
It can be the perfect setting for morality plays.
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He wants to bang Uhura, same as everyone else.
TFS BS detector alert (Score:3)
Religion concerns mythology -- things people make up out of whole cloth. Faith, belief, credulous acceptance without backing facts, consensually demonstrable evidence, or testability -- not knowledge.
Science does indeed concern itself with the ultimate cause(s) of things; what TFS fails to understand is that just because there is no answer *yet*, that doesn't mean that there won't be, or that there
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If you made this argument, mockery is more than you deserved.
So: religion and science could coexist if people weren't so stupid as to not understand what science is? And: religion concerns the ultimate causes of things by definition?
Re:In lost the will to live ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Religion and science can co-exist if people stopped attributing religious or anti-religious views to science. Science makes no claims about religion and they are not mutually exclusive. When atheists are asked "well, if you don't believe in religion what do you believe in" - they'll often erroneously say "science". Science is not a belief system though it may cause claims of religion to be called into question example: Jesus walking on water. To our current understanding of science this is not possible unaided. Maybe it was a hoax, maybe it was a divine being, maybe it wasn't a literal claim - science doesn't know, that's for people to examine or accept on faith (as part of a religion or otherwise).
Science needs to be separated from anti-religious ideology.
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Proper Science is hard. (Score:3, Interesting)
If it was easy, everyone would do it, and we would have done it a lot earlier than we did.
Science represents one of the greatest achievements of mankind. It requires the brightest of our highly-evolved brains. People of average intelligence who's lives are filled with mundane day-to-day concerns simply cannot get their heads around proper Science. They don't have the time, the resources, nor the brain power to gain that understanding. It is impossible. But such people are the majority and so their beli
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Have you met a lot of scientists? Many of them are amazing at jargon and obfuscation, but suck at most everything else. Many of them are very narrow and deep, making their work as obscure as it is hard. So yes, the cutting edge of science is hard, but that is only a fraction of what science is all about.
A lot of everyday science is NOT hard, it is just training yourself to approach the world with curiosity and with critical thinking (asking why, and being open to new answers). Kids are perfect candidate
Re:Proper Science is hard. (Score:5, Informative)
Scientist here - by geekoid's definition at least.
Scientists use jargon for the same reason sailors do - to efficiently communicate a very specific concept. In a sailing vessel at sea in a storm, you really don't want to take a minute to explain that you mean the green-white striped rope that connects the beam to the hull - you say mainsheet*.
Now, there is a lot of nonsense going on in science, with ridiculous performance metrics, a discouragement of actually innovative high-risk research, a sometimes religious worship of established names and theory; and a lot of stuff gets published not because it is particularly innovative, enlightening or even robust, but because it uses the right buzz words and cites the right people. However, that does not make science as an endeavour less wortyh - it's a bit like** how democracy is a good idea even if a lot of politicians (the ones in high places, at least) are dodgy.
* if my English sailing jargon is correct - not a native speaker
** my next analogy will be about cars, I promise
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No kidding.
While there are some good points (certainly on the relation between politics & science, and how political & policy decisions get made using questionable science as grounds)
A lot of this article/rant is just terrible 0_o.
Certainly the religion part is just unbelievable. The statistical wizardry & magic is obviously preposterous, but the religious affairs are obviously beyond the realms of science, and are no obstacle in the quest for truth and understanding.
Re:In lost the will to live ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Alright, screw mod points this time. This is a discussion that needs more voices.
This is an article about the definition of science. The fundamental point is incredibly sound, and explains a lot about anti-scientific culture by explaining something about pro-scientific culture: even the people who are pro-science don't really know what science is. Science is not the pursuit of truth. Science is, as he says repeatedly, "the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation". Nothing more, nothing less.
Statistics is a dangerous thing that can prove anything. For example, running accepted statistics on the human population of Earth and population expansion rates (or the height of Twitter timelines [xkcd.com]) leads to the result that the human species will likely go extinct in about 800 years [wikipedia.org]. And most people will never understand how that result happened, whether it seems to make sense or not. Do you know what magic is? It's not fireballs and heal spells. Magic at its most basic is trying to affect the outcome of the future with some action you don't really understand. If I were to turn my cap before pitching a baseball, believing that doing otherwise may jinx the pitch, that would be magic. It is also perfectly meaningful for me to say that because I do not understand exactly what an LED is, or how it is made, from my perspective it is made of and from magic.
As to whether "religious affairs are obviously beyond the realms of science, and are no obstacle in the quest for truth and understanding": real science, by definition, is outside the realm of religion. But the so-called "science" being criticized in the article is not. Science and religion are separate because science does not deal with Truth, and therefore no religious Truths are at risk. Even if we were to talk about something contentious like evolution, "science" does not tell us that evolution is True. Science tells us that we can ask the question, "Assuming that evolution is true, this other idea should also be true; let us find out". Asking that question has led scientists to predict practical applications [wikipedia.org] (though not nearly as many as the laws of Physics and Chemistry).
The worst thing I am reading in these comments is basically "I don't understand the summary". If this is you, you are part of the problem. You think you know what science is, and this article is confusing because you're wrong and can't even recognize what you're wrong about. If you don't understand, you need to stop talking about science until you do. You are damaging the cause for science by treating it like a belief system, so just stop. The more that people like you claim that God is made obsolete by science, the more that everyone else thinks that science is just like another religion.
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The worst thing I am reading in these comments is basically "I don't understand the summary". If this is you, you are part of the problem. You think you know what science is, and this article is confusing because you're wrong and can't even recognize what you're wrong about. If you don't understand, you need to stop talking about science until you do. You are damaging the cause for science by treating it like a belief system, so just stop. The more that people like you claim that God is made obsolete by science, the more that everyone else thinks that science is just like another religion.
Ever so much: this!
I meet people frequently who believe firmly in evolution, but don't understand why it's a good model. They take in on faith, because it's what the wise men told them. They don't understand why frequently-made creationist claims are wrong. They have some vaguely-remembered examples of evolution that are actually false. C'mon, it's all there in the talk.origins FAQ, just takes a few hours of your time to make your belief in evolution founded in science, not in faith.
But no one cares. I
Science suffers when caught up in politics ... (Score:5, Informative)
religious affairs are obviously beyond the realms of science, and are no obstacle in the quest for truth and understanding.
i think some scientists disagree. like for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... [wikipedia.org]
The pope who had Galileo prosecuted was *also* the bishop who defended him when he first pushed for heliocentrism years earlier. This pope also asked Galileo to write on heliocentrism. What then happened is that in these writing Galileo mocked the pope. His prosecution had far more to do with politics than science. Much like climate change today, one political faction decided to use it as justification for their political/economic agenda, another faction decided to attack the science to undermine the justification for the political/economic agenda. There was no inherent hatred of the concept, it was merely attacked to undermine something else. Then and now, science gets caught up in politics and suffers.
Bishops of this same church are also responsible for promoting and popularizing the western tradition of the scientific method during the middle ages.
Today this same church states that scientific discovery can not be in conflict with faith, that such discoveries describe how God's universe works. This includes everything from cosmology to human evolution. With respect to evolution where science and this church depart is that the church considers the origin of man to be when the soul was imparted, not when the biological form was created. With respect to the creation of the biological form they consider the biblical genesis to be figurative language not literal.
Also with respect to cosmology, the currently accepted theory of the origin of the universe, the Big Bang theory. It was originally put forward by a priest teaching at university of this church.
The article isn't any better. (Score:5, Informative)
No - engineering "gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet". Science gives us the theoretical (in the scientific sense) frameworks and tools that engineering can apply to do that. The author shows at least as much confusion as those he decries, and he does it from the start.
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Reminds me of that old joke/cliche:
"In theory there isn't any difference between Theory and Practice.
In practice, there is."
* Science = Theory
* Engineering = Application
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Engineering and science are linked, at least. Science could be described as a sort of "engineering of our understanding". It's improved through a lot of trial and error, and we pick a solution that "works" in providing predictive results.
Also, engineering is generally performed with some level of scientific understanding. The first airplane may have been a bit stumbled-upon, built without understanding exactly all of how it worked. However, the Wright brothers were working within a certain level of sci
Re:The article isn't any better. (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA:
No - engineering "gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet". Science gives us the theoretical (in the scientific sense) frameworks and tools that engineering can apply to do that. The author shows at least as much confusion as those he decries, and he does it from the start.
Yes. That quote describes the philosophy known as "empiricism", which asserts that the epistemological purpose and process of science is to derive methods for prediction, as opposed to creating explanations. The modern, Popperian and post-Popperian, understanding of science is that it is based on the philosophy of falsifiability, and is a process of conjecture and criticism, with the goal of creating expanations for how the world works. The explanations do enable prediction, but they're deeper than that, because rules of thumb that provide accurate predictions can exist without explanations of the underlying phenomena, and such rules of thumb are strictly less valuable and less useful than explanations. The most essential difference, though there are many, is that explanations explain their own "reach", making clear the set of phenomena to which they apply, while rules of thumb don't, regardless of their accuracy.
Also, some of the criticism takes the form of experiment, but not all, and in fact not even most. Most conjectured explanations are discarded after only a little analysis, because that's all it takes to show them to be inconsistent with what's already known, or to show them to be bad or shallow explanations for other reasons. Controlled experimentation, per se, isn't even necessary. This is a good thing because in some areas of science, for example, astrophysics, we don't have the ability to experiment on the objects of study. Yet we can still theorize, criticize, examine evidence and move gradually towards ever more accurate and deeper explanations.
The explanations provided by science are, as you say, what make engineering possible, but science is the process of creating ever-better explanations of the universe, not merely of producing reliable predictive rules.
Nope. (Score:3)
Nope. In the words of someone Slashdot readers should respect, Alan Cox: "Engineering does not require science. Science helps a lot but people built perfectly good brick walls long before they knew why cement works."
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While the lack of knowledge of science might seem to an inhibitor, in this case it was unknowingly a brilliant stroke of luck. By over engineering the house the builder assured its survival under all but the most extreme weather conditions.
Since, at that time, trying to rebuild a house was a long and tedious process (compared to today), the over engineering served to protect the investment. Spend a little extra now instead of a lot more later.
Engineers versus Craftsmen. (Score:3)
That is not engineering. That is craftsmanship.
Master shipwrights built naval vessels for centuries while knowing little of nautical engineering. Engineers are the guys who design things using science, not the guys who create something with their own two hands. Those are artisans and craftsmen. Some engineers are craftsmen, but many if not most have clean nails.
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I use to live in a 100+ year old house. The structure was ridiculously over done. 12x12 logs holing up the roof, The bricks were 5 layers deep. In essence it was engineered by someone without strong science knowledge. He just figured more is better. So it was over engineered because of lack of knowledge of the science.
Or just maybe the designer wanted to build a structure that would withstand a 100-year storm and 300 year's worth of general weather and usage. Just because (most USA) homes are built of stuff that'll fall apart in less than 50 years doesn't mean that's the right way to do things.
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I use to live in a 100+ year old house. The structure was ridiculously over done. 12x12 logs holing up the roof, The bricks were 5 layers deep. In essence it was engineered by someone without strong science knowledge. He just figured more is better
Seems to me that someone engineered it to last 100+ years.
As for bricks... 100+years ago there were no air conditioning devices to keep the heat out in the summer and most heating was done by burning wood or coal inside the house in the winter.
Such thick walls would sure come in handy for those circumstances.
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Alright, screw mod points this time. This is a discussion that needs more voices.
The worst thing I am reading in these comments is basically "I don't understand the summary". If this is you, you are part of the problem. You think you know what science is, and this article is confusing because you're wrong and can't even recognize what you're wrong about. If you don't understand, you need to stop talking about science until you do. You are damaging the cause for science by treating it like a belief system, s
The whole article is just trolling (Score:3, Insightful)
The article is just as bad or perhaps worse than the summary. Most of the summary is just taking snippets out of the article, and some of the more egregious ones that I bothered to check aren't taking anything out of context. And there is plenty of worse content that the summary has left out.
thinking science has made God irrelevant, even though, by definition, religion concerns the ultimate causes of things and, again, by definition, science cannot tell you about them
This particular line of reasoning is the first one I checked on hoping it was just embellishment by the submitter. But it was there. The article loses absolutely all credibility in this one sentence. Science is more tha
Re:The whole article is just trolling (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The whole article is just trolling (Score:4, Insightful)
"Why?" is still a valid question;
No, it's not. The question "why" in this case presuposes some kind of purpose, without any reason to believe that such a purpose exists. Just because you can phrase something in the form of a question doesn't mean that your "question" makes any sense.
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Moreover the Big Bang is just the current limit of measurement. There's no specific reason to think that won't be revised, and several efforts have been made to extend the predictive model to a "pre" Big Bang epoch (for all the meaning that has when time itself is compacted down to infinity - of course, part of it is showing that that isn't quite what happened).
Science establishes the limits of things in-so-far as they can be presently measured by reproducible means.
Re:The whole article is just trolling (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, it's not like you can run an experiment to determine if the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid... I mean, what would that involve? Creating planets and populating them with dinosaurs, Jurassic-Park style, and then bombarding them with asteroids? Even if it were possible, it wouldn't really prove anything except whether the mechanism is feasible, it wouldn't determine whether that was actually what happened or not. So you can't really use an experiment.
What you CAN do is make predictions based on that hypothesis, and then make observations to see if the predictions are borne out. For one, you should see evidence of asteroid impact, things like iridium, shock-deformed quartz, microtektites, an impact crater, maybe even a tiny fragment of the asteroid itself... and in fact, after 30 years of looking, every single one of those things showed up, so we're pretty confident there was a giant asteroid impact. For another, you predict that the extinctions coincide with that impact if the impact caused them. And when you look at really abundant microfossils, stuff like fossil plankton and pollen, you can trace the Cretaceous stuff right up to the iridium layer that is the debris field, and then these species vanish forever. So the observations of geology, geochemistry, and paleontology are all consistent with predictions. The same process is used to test other hypotheses about historical processes, such as continental drift, or natural selection, or the formation of the solar system.
That's the *actual* scientific method. It's testing hypotheses against observation. Controlled experiment may or may not come into it at all.
Re: The whole article is just trolling (Score:3)
He argues that science is "the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation", but that's a really narrow, limited way of viewing science, because historical processes aren't open to controlled experiments. Evolution, the history of the planet, the origins of the universe... you can't really run experiments to determine what happened, so by this rather narrow definition, paleontology, geology, and cosmology aren't really science at all. So do we reject the findings of Darwin, reject plate tectonics, reject hypotheses on the origins of the universe as unscientific?
(Aside: Due to the Slashdot "lameness filter", I am required to replace all further instances of the world "controlled" with "disciplined")
Disciplined observation is a form of disciplined experimentation. Before Darwin could draw meaningful scientific conclusions about the origin of species, he had to make careful, fastidious observations of a place where he could be reasonably sure something hadn't inconsistently interfered with nature for a very long time. No people lived on the Galapagos Islands, and the
Re:The whole article is just trolling (Score:4, Informative)
Which "AGW denying bit" would that be? It can't be the part about observation because it hasn't gotten any warmer for the past 18 years, so there would be no warming to be observed.
When one activist website tell you that the earth is warming, and another activist website tells you that the earth isn't warming, it's a good idea to check the actual scientific data to determine which activist website is getting the facts wrong. Here's an 18 year graph. [woodfortrees.org] The earth has in fact been warming over the last 18 years.
Here's the 50 year graph. [woodfortrees.org] That's a neat website that lets you generate graphs over any date range. If you want to play with it, just be sure to update the year-values for both series 1 (the red graph) and series 2 (the green graph).
There was also an unexpected surge in heat being pulled from the atmosphere into the deep ocean. This has recently pulled a vast amount of heat off of the typical graphs of surface-level atmospheric temperature. This is why air-temperature-graphs gives a false impression of somewhat slower warming the last few years.
Air is extremely low density. Very little of the global heat resides in the atmosphere, and what does show up in the air is extremely variable as heat shifts between the air and the land&sea. In fact the atmosphere only accounts for 2% of global heat content. The land surface temperatures are about 8%. The massive oceans account for 90% of the planet's heat content. Here's a graph of ocean heat over the last 50-odd years. [noaa.gov] The vast majority of heat ultimately goes into the oceans. That graph shows that there has been absolutely no slowing in the rate of global heat increase. Global warming hasn't paused. Global warming hasn't stopped. Global warming hasn't slowed.
There doesn't exist ONE scientific body of national or international standing that still denies man-made global warming. The last national or international scientific body to dissent was, comically, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists back in 2007. Yep, even the oil geologists stopped denying it seven years ago.
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Trolling? Or just crap? (Score:3)
Here's the full quote from that partial in the summary:
He's wrong. The problem is that the concept of "God" is un-falsifiable. So you can always tack "because God wanted it that way" onto anything.
And then it gets worse:
Re: (Score:3)
Please explain how science can explain its own existence,
Science can easily explain its own existence. Science exists because it is the only process of understanding the world in a way that can provide useful results. Or at least the only way we have found so far.
or why any given set of scientific axioms exist in the specific manner that they do?
They exist in the way that they do because that is where the evidence leads us. And basic human psychology shows any attempt to place desire or intent onto a scientific axiom is just anthropomorphism.
The article says science = experimental science (Score:5, Insightful)
Whereas science needs both hypothesis generation and experimental validation/repudiation of hypotheses.
Hypothesis generation sometimes has to go out there, and invent new concepts that have so far only been thought about, not yet tested.
So to summarize, science needs both creative conceptualization (ontology formation) and experimentation (validation or repudiation of the ontology and/or hypothesis).
These need to go on in circular reinforcement. (Spiral development model).
Experimentation without re-conceptualization will eventually run dry, because it will get stuck in a local-maximum paradigm, and people won't know what new things/aspects to test any more.
Remember, relativity was discovered in a thought experiment by Einstein. Is a thought experiment a real experiment in the article author's view? I doubt it.
Einstein, from the outside, was doing "magic". Speculating about the larger truth.
Relativity was an example of theory creating a completely new set of concepts that were way ahead of the ability to carry out experiments that could validate or repudiate them. It was a well-formed theory, in that it clearly suggested new kinds of experiments that could test it, but it was pure non-experimental theorizing nonetheless.
Darwin also, most likely, happened on his key theoretical insight about natural selection (the simple core of it), by thinking about the generalization of many observations, and having a theoretical insight.
Experimentation has its essential place in science, no doubt (keeps the theorists honest and humble), but it is only half of the game. The other half is innovative philosophy, carefully practiced, in the mind.
Exper
So educational! (Score:2, Funny)
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Doing experiments on something does not require physical presence. And most of what we think we "know" has not been proven yet in a scientific manner. It's likely provable, but could be completely misunderstood and only the observable effects are common between what we think we know and what is provable.
Re:So educational! (Score:4, Insightful)
Excellent trolling, refute the summary of an article about poor understanding of the meaning of science with a Popperian negative-proof [wikipedia.org] masquerading as a strawman. Either you are a grand-master of hyperbole, or you don't bother to read to comprehension before declaring something invalid. Irony, since that's pretty much exactly the OP - many humans really love to declare themselves aligned with SCIENCE! Yet few are actually consistently able to operate scientifically.
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Summary is Troll Rant (Score:5, Insightful)
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To paraphrase.
"It's just the pursuit of truth, which math, peer review, and jargon have no bearing on! But my deity is totally acceptable to science. Because reasons."
Standards and practices that help identify and formalize truth hit people with set dogmas kinda hard*. It makes it hard for you to inject your "capital T Truth" into genuine findings.
*Yes yes, I have dogmas too, but I'd like to believe they're amenable to change, with enough evidence and reason.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Summary is Troll Rant (Score:4, Insightful)
They said, "here's an article about how science works, let me interject my unrelated opinions about how mainstream science is totally oppressing my opinions."
It's a markedly common sentiment, and only varies on what particular crazy beliefs are being rejected by those institutions. And no, I'm not just mocking global warming denialism, or creationism. You also see the same argument from alt-med, time-cube-lite theories, or "racial realists".
Re: (Score:3)
RTFA. Mr. Gobry is (shortly) criticizing the attempt to "scientifically" predict the effects of specific climate change policies only as an example of a public policy debate that has the word "science" thrown around a lot even though nobody has done any real "science" on the proposals. He also criticizes Aristotle [wikipedia.org], Richard Dawkins [wikipedia.org], Jerry Coyne [wikipedia.org], Neil DeGrasse Tyson [wikipedia.org], Jenny McCarthy [wikipedia.org], the Brookings Institution [wikipedia.org], and Ezra Klein [wikipedia.org].
Mr. Gobry does not discuss opinions of his which are disputed by mainstream science. H
GP is an attempt to censor and bias (Score:4, Interesting)
As much as it may hurt _your_ beliefs, GP raises a point that many other "scientifically" minded people have been raising for some time. We can rarely have rational debate about numerous topics, which means that some of our "science" is really just bias. They even provide an example, which I think is a great one.
Science has not answered the question of whether or not the Universe requires something in order to exist. Philosophy has attempted to answer that question for over two thousand years, and any honest Philosopher will tell you the same thing. "There is no proof, but it's a rational conclusion to believe that something did cause the Universe to exist. At least as rational as the thought that a Universe could spring up out of nowhere from nothing."
Many atheists can't, or refuse to, separate Religion from the Philosophical question regarding the origin of the Universe. The second argument from the same or similar set of atheists is a claim "the question does not matter". The former does not follow the Socratic Method or Scientific Method. The latter is about as unscientific as you can get, discouraging investigation and discovery (No, it's not about _you_ it's about discouraging others from pursuing the question). In reality, this one question is an exceptional question for training the mind to think critically, debate, and begin to question ethics and morals.
The question regarding the origin of the Universe is just one question where bias takes charge and science is put in the background. Vaccines, GMO foods, and Global Warming are other areas that are so entrenched with bias that it is nearly impossible to debate any of these topics rationally.
Anyone that dares to challenge the status quo is attacked and ostracized. If they have arguments that are really good, they are ignored and black listed from media. Society has gone through many phases just like this one previously, as a true Philosophy I study everything including History.
I can almost assure you that this post will be censored by people with mod points, and I will receive plenty of attacks (most likely from the anonymous cowards). Not because this post is offensive, in fact I was very cautious in wording, but because it challenges the status quo.
Re:GP is an attempt to censor and bias (Score:5, Insightful)
to believe that there is a "Philosophical question regarding the origin of the Universe." Is, in itself, a religion.
The question will matter the moment you can tell us why there is a reason for the origin of the universe we currently live in.
"There is no proof, but it's a rational conclusion to believe that something did cause the Universe to exist. "
I philosopher probably would say that, but that would be an another example of why they are useless hanger ons to the historical coat tails of science.
Yes, there is proof. We are walking around in it. And yes, atheists do understand the something caused it. But there is a lot of evidence showing it was a natural something, and zero evidence it was a bi-product of intent.
"The question regarding the origin of the Universe is just one question where bias takes charge and science is put in the background."
False. there is a lot of sciecne regarding the origin of the universe. What we have is a bunch os people who get their panties in a bunch when it's pointed out there is zero evidence to support theire belief.
Lets see:
"Vaccines"
The science is well know. The vast majority of public debate isn't about anything debatable. It's one side making things up and the other using science. i.e. expermint, data, ect.
"GMO foods"
ON one side we ahve science, and verification from every major scientific health group in the world, that it is safe. On the other side you got FUD.
" Global Warming"
ON side has science, prediction, proof, the other side has people screaming nonsense.
Science and bias isn't why we can't have a rational debate.
How would you have a rational debate with someone who claims 2+2 = 5. No natter how many time you showed them it equals 4, they refuse to change? What do you do when the blame the status quo for not accepting his theory?
"Anyone that dares to challenge the status quo is attacked and ostracized."
False. challenge the status quo without good data is "attacked and ostracized." If you statement was true, science and out body of scientific knowledge wouldn't change, but it does change. Every day.
I am replying because it is wrong. Being wrong is not 'challenging the status quo' it's simple just wrong.
Re:Summary is Troll Rant (Score:5, Insightful)
Science is the pursuit of the subset of truth that makes predictions about the real world. Yet this simple definition seems to be lost on so many people. The worst offenders are the ones who think science is the pursuit of Truth in general, or about being right, or about explanations.
As an example, consider "Creation Science", whose objective is to explain, not predict, information about biology. And because such explanation is, in the eyes of the public, a decently good explanation, people accept it. And hardly anyone calls them out for failing to make predictions, and thus not even being science. It's like if you have two weathermen, one predicts every day whether it will rain or not, and the other collects a list of every time the first weatherman made a mistake. The second one may be right all the time, but he's still useless. Thus "creation scientists" do not focus on the mathematics of sediments and sorting of dead things, or the impact a population bottleneck will have on current genetics, or their own mathematical predictions concerning radiometric dating, but rather on explanations for these, all of which shows that they themselves don't even believe what they're pretending to support.
As for science and religion, consider this: many Christians will tell you that the core of Christianity is faith in God. And then they'll turn around and try to "prove" God's existence, demonstrating that they believe testing God is superior to having faith in God. But if the world with God and the world without God are indistinguishable from each other, only then can you say believing in God is an act of faith. Else you could scientifically test for God's existence, and then where would faith be?
Re:Summary is Troll Rant (Score:4, Interesting)
Alright, screw mod points this time. This is a discussion that needs more voices.
This is an article about the definition of science. The fundamental point is incredibly sound, and explains a lot about anti-scientific culture by explaining something about pro-scientific culture: even the people who are pro-science don't really know what science is. Science is not the pursuit of truth. Science is, as he says repeatedly, "the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation". Nothing more, nothing less.
Granted, the rest of the article is a bit redundant to that point and wanders into unrelated territory. But at no point does Mr. Gobry actually rant about any of them. It may make you and I uncomfortable to see climate science ever mentioned unfavorably, but that's only because it's so hard to convince others to get their heads out of the sand that we don't (think) we need to give them more arguments against us. Sort of like how the many people who want stronger health care reform have to support the corporation-favoring Affordable Care Act because to not do so would be to support those who want to go back to the dark ages when sick children were refused coverage and people could easily end up with insurance policies that didn't cover the kind of catastrophe they were buying insurance to protect them from.
But specifically, he is (shortly) criticizing the attempt to "scientifically" predict the effects of specific policies only as an example of a public policy debate that has the word "science" thrown around a lot even though nobody has done any real "science" on the proposals. He is (shortly) criticizing Neil DeGrasse Tyson for promoting predictions made by science as indicative of a higher truth, the truth for which science supposedly strives. He also criticizes Aristotle [wikipedia.org], Richard Dawkins [wikipedia.org], Jerry Coyne [wikipedia.org], Jenny McCarthy [wikipedia.org], the Brookings Institution [wikipedia.org], and Ezra Klein [wikipedia.org].
The worst thing I am reading in these comments is basically "I don't understand the summary". If this is you, you are part of the problem. You think you know what science is, and this article is confusing because you're wrong and can't even recognize what you're wrong about. If you don't understand, you need to stop talking about science until you do. You are damaging the cause for science by treating it like a belief system, so just stop. The more that people like you claim that God is made obsolete by science, the more that everyone else thinks that science is just like another religion.
We like to feel smart (Score:4, Insightful)
We fell most smart when we are seen "liking" smart things. Hence the idiotic, pseudo-intellectual "I Fucking Love Science" Facebook posts that flood my feed with juvenile memes and puns. Liking smart people like Niel deGrass Tyson does not make you smart. Taking sides on a scientific controversy you do not fully understand does not make you smart (even if you happen to chose the factually correct side). These things are simply part of the cargo cult science has become.
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Just to argue the flip side, isn't it better if people like memes/people based on real science instead of hearing people say "I love watching So-and-so communicate with the dead. They're really talented"? It might be a small step, but at least it's a small step in the right direction.
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But from the perspective of the lay speaker, there is no functional difference. Ignorance is cloaked in the illusion of holding secret knowledge. This becomes most dangerous when this "secret knowledge" is fetishized (I don't know if that's a real word, but it gets my point across) and we start burning heretics.
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That's funny because Tyson is one of those people that spews this "Science equals Truth" nonsense. I want to throw things whenever I see someone on Facebook repost his nonsense.
Science is today's best guess.
"Truth" is for people that like to spend all day in church.
Re:We like to feel smart (Score:4, Insightful)
Watch his worshipful reboot of Cosmos, and you'll see plenty of it. Hero worship does not belong in a science class, even though that was the purpose of establishing Newton (and others) as an authority for the modern science movement (authority was a requirement for any field of study to be taken seriously in universities at the time.) This is where the concept of "scientific laws" comes from. The antiquated need for authority to please 19th century universities.
And why people who don't understand science, and that the whole "law" thing is mostly an anachronism, spout that, say evolution, is "just a theory." It's all a theory, and some of them are very well developed! There are no laws in science. None. It's baggage from the birth pains of the 19th century.
Science is ultimately anti-authoritarian, anti-heroic, or it doesn't work. Turning a "scientific genius" into a superman is right out. Science has no heroes, and hero worship has no place in science. Respect for the elegance of a theoretical framework is the closest we should come.
Philosophy of Science (Score:3)
It really irks me that we teach more about the objects of Scientific investigation in school (Biology, Physics, etc) then the actual philosophy of Science itself. Sure, there is usually about an hour in HS that covers basic Scientific approach but then it gets left by the wayside.
Schools should be spending more time discussing and learning the philosophy of Science itself.
Just my 2 cents.
Re:Philosophy of Science (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly why I suggest that teaching about creationism IS appropriate for a science class. If I were a biology teacher (and my approach were permissible), when the subject of creationism inevitably came up in the class, rather than dismiss it with the arrogant assertion that "this is a science class, we'll not discuss your religion here", I would, instead, follow up with a discussion of Popper's criteria. Then I might request a short essay discussing how well evolutionary theory or creationism met the criteria for a scientific hypothesis.
That, in my opinion, is part of teaching science.
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That's what labs are for. In chemistry lab, in physics lab in high school and college we absolutely asked questions, formed hypotheses, designed and performed experiments, recorded the results, analyzed them (including error bars and appropriate significant figures) and drew conclusions.
But yes, for the most part, people who didn't pay much attention or have no real scientific education who Like Neil DeGrasse Tyson quotes on FaceBook see science as a body of knowledge that is queried.
Botched understanding of science? (Score:3)
Re:Botched understanding of science? (Score:4, Interesting)
Science is the means by which we know what is true
Almost. Science is the way by which we find things which are false.
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Almost. Science is the way by which we find things which are false.
Almost. Science is the way by which we find out things that may be true and things that cannot be true.
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Comment removed (Score:3)
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So why does the universe exist? Science tells us why (read an astrophysics text book) and it has very good reasoning and experimentation to back it up. Religions tell us 1000's of other answers which do not resemble either the scientific reason nor each other... so which one am I supposed to trust?
Even if all we had was a computer model that told us perhaps this is "why" the universe exists at all today, it's better than any religious answer I've ever heard. Religion is a business trying to safeguard a coll
Re: (Score:3)
For example, I have blind faith that God exists, and the mere existence of *something* spawning from absolutely nothing (however many layers deep in a multi-dimentional abstract) came into being. Why did it happen? It's a philosophical question that science can't touch.
God is not an answer. It just adds the same questions we have about the universe to god. Why does god exist? How did god come into existence?
The only difference is that we have a chance of answering the "how" for the universe, but not for a god. So by adding a god hypothesis, we are left with more unanswerable questions, not fewer.
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You keep answering 'why' questions with 'how' answers. "Why are we here?" is a completely different question from 'How did we come to be here?"
Now, from the context of your post you do give an answer the 'why' question. "There is no reason other than random happenstance." I'm not sure that disagrees with the parents statement that 'why' is a philosophical question.
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um... doesn't hardness hold an inverse relationship with density? and fire being pretty damn... not dense, would make its hardness pretty not.
how hard is ice? how hard is ice cream? how hard is melty ice cream? how hard is water? how hard is water vapor? and you've got the continuum.
just because you've never asked the question before, and the answer is stupid and pointless, doesn't mean it makes no sense.
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To do so is like arguing about the hardness of fire. It makes no sense.
If you can't make sense of the hardness of fire, maybe you should stick to religion. They have lower standards.
Definition of religion (Score:2)
by definition, religion concerns the ultimate causes of things
By which definition? Because it's most certainly none given by religious people. Otherwise there wouldn't be any Religion vs Science debate.
There would be little to discuss if Religion said "Ok, evolution is real, but its ultimate cause is angels.".
Science is... (Score:4, Interesting)
...the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment, and Bayesian inference.
Science is not a "method". Feyrabend was more nearly right than he realized when he said the cardinal rule of science is, "Anything goes": we can use any clever tricks that pass the tests to change the posterior plausibility of an idea, and they do not have to adhere to some philosopher's notions of method.
Science is a discipline, and like any other discipline has to be practiced to get good at it. Methods in science are like katas in fighting disciplines: valuable training devices, but not anything like sufficient to win a real fight.
Furthermore, as a discipline, science does not explain anything and has no content: the sciences (biology, physics, geology...) do, but not the overarching discipline of science itself.
The discipline of science can be practiced by anyone, although history has shown that education can help (try inventing any fighting discipline on your own and you'll see how much better off you'd be learning from someone else.) The scope of science is unlimited, and it is the only way of creating knowledge. It is not "scientism" to practice the discipline of science when testing ideas about human behaviour or society: it is just science.
Because science is Bayesian, it does not produce certainty. Bayes' rule cannot generate a plausibility of 0 or 1 for any proposition, and it identifies anyone who assigns a plausibility of 0 or 1 as being in a state of sin... err... error.
A proposition that has 0 or 1 plausibility cannot have its plausibility changed by further applications of Bayes rule, so it is beyond correction, opaque to any further evidence, cut off from the world it claims to apply to.
The technical term for a belief held in such an erroneous fashion is "faith".
What's the legitimate topic here? (Score:3)
To whom here is this not obvious nonsense? In systems of geometry we have axioms "by definition." So if you're doing a problem in Euclidian terms, parallel lines don't meet in space. But if you're doing the problem in real, relativistic space rather than an Euclidian idealization, lines that start out parallel locally, and each continue absolutely straight, sometimes do.
Science is not any single geometry, and so has no fundamental set of definitional axioms. There are descriptions of the scientific method, by Popper and others, that generalize about falsifiability and so on. But even those don't exhaust the space of possible science, let alone establish axioms for it. The branch of physics called "cosmology" very properly, and fruitfullly, is concerned with the origin of the universe; and there is a branch of biology concerned with the origin of life. There is no axiom accepted by science that forbids scientific inquiry into origin questions.
The co-opting is particularly offensive (Score:3)
When they try to use the scientific method to prove intelligent design, global warming is a hoax, or that vaccines cause autism. My favorite "Big Pharma" conspiracy (as offered up by cracked.com), is that:
Big Pharma has secretly funded Jenny McCarthy to create the anti-vax movement because they make pennies on vaccines, but thousands on treating people that get the actual disease.
WTF? (Score:2)
WTF is this drivel?
This reads like a thinly veiled plug for religion.
Hell the article contains the word "philistines". Seriously, what the hell is this crap?
The article is more extreme than the summary (Score:5, Informative)
I read the summary and thought that this article might be on to something, but on reading it I don't think the author really understands science at all.
Here are some excerpts that I find particularly disagreeable:
"Science is not the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It's a form of engineering "
Absolutely not. Science is indeed in pursuit of Truth. The author criticizes Aristotle's form of "research", quite rightly, but then throws the baby out with the bathwater when he says this.
"Because people don't understand that science is built on experimentation, they don't understand that studies in fields like psychology almost never prove anything, since only replicated experiment proves something and, humans being a very diverse lot, it is very hard to replicate any psychological experiment."
This is factually incorrect. There are many Psychological phenomena that can be reproduced reliably. The Stroop effect, the Simon effect, visual illusions..
"What distinguishes modern science from other forms of knowledge such as philosophy is that it explicitly forsakes abstract reasoning about the ultimate causes of things"
This is completely incorrect. A core goal of science is to understand the cause of things by developing abstracted understandings of them (i.e. theories).
I know nothing about this author, but from the article, I suspect that he is trying to reconcile his beliefs in science and religion by convincing himself that science cannot answer the big questions, it's just for making airplanes and computers. I could be wrong of course (--- very important scientific principle)
Re: (Score:2)
No, science is not the pursuit of Truth, that would be philosophy down the hall.
You are definitely part of the problem.
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No, science is not the pursuit of Truth, that would be philosophy down the hall.
Actually, science is the pursuit of Truth. Unfortunately, what we get from that pursuit is not Truth, but a useful approximation that works well enough for practical use within the limits defined by the parameters of the experiments. When your use moves outside those limits, the approximations may or may not hold, and experimentation to discover why this happens let us extend those approximations further.
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Well he is on to something and has a good point.
There is a real problem with the public's perception of science. From a sociological point of view, it very much does resemble a priestly cast like religion.
Let me give you a rather mundane example. Transit is a big issue in my home town of Toronto. Now there is a very real debate to be had here in terms of subways, rapid bus, LRT, regional rail...
But there is a certain class of citizenry that takes it's beliefs from the people who 'claim' science by stating t
suffice it to say (Score:2)
All too often (Score:2)
I agree completely. Many people have lost the idea that science is not a "point of view" (with its own beliefs and ideology) but a "process" which allows one to arrive at possible answers after investigation and examination of related evidence.
I remember my physics teacher used to tell us "How many people here know what 'gravity' is?" All hands would raise up. He would laugh. Then he would say, in his best "fake surprise" face: "Wow! I must be the only physics professor in the world who has a whole class th
Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
The piece is mumbo-jumbo. Yes, Bacon eschewed the "Aristotelian" search for final causes. Does that mean that Baconian science doesn't try to determine the truth? Of course not.
The history of philosophy/history of science done in this piece is clap trap. He says that Galileo used experiment, whereas Aristotle did not. And that's why Aristotle thought that "heavier objects should fall faster than light ones". Supposedly. The problem: Aristotle didn't use "abstract reasoning" to come to that incorrect conclusion. He just didn't control his variables adequately. Not controlling variables adequately can happen to the very best of experimentalists.
So how does this argument run? Scientific knowledge is knowledge about specific empirical propositions. Therefore, scientific knowledge is not "true" knowledge. Therefore, science is not the pursuit of capital-T Truth? That's a terrible argument. This seems like just a case of begging the question from the author where he has an unargued "definition" of what "Truth" is. Why anyone else is beholden to this definition, of course, is a mystery.
I highly doubt Bacon ever said this. Of course, there is no citation to check. I think the author has confused Bacon's model of Bensalem, where he has the houses of specialists hide their operation from others, so that the others don't come to conclusions based on partial understandings, before the work of the specialists is completed.
Who made these "definitions"? No one in sight.
Oh I see, Dawkins, a great evolutionary biologist, is a philistine. The evidence? I guess because the author disagrees with Dawkins about God. No argument is given.
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Fuck
samzenpus
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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News for ya, in America, everyone's opinion is worth something and is ultimately expressed through the ballot box. Science doesn't get to say "Do this, for I have obtained a 95% confidence level!"
Contrary to what you may think, you don't get to decide on what's facts.
The laws of nature are not decided by vote or fiat, but we learn about them from experimentation.
Even when a state introduces a bill that pi is exactly 3.2 [purdue.edu], nature stubbornly refuses to cooperate.
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Oh yeah, no one has ever established a causative mechanism for how CO2 might trap heat. Real genius insight there.
Re:AGW (Score:5, Insightful)
Correlation is necessary but not sufficient to scientific proof of causation. To prove causation you need to have a theoretical model allowing you to construct experiements which, with variables controlled for, produce fresh demonstrations of the posited effect. There have been laboratory experiments demonstrating the "greenhouse" effect of CO2 levels since the late 1800s.
Correlation + theory + well-designed experiments + confirming results = causation
Science often starts with observed correlations. But not always. Sometime the theory comes first. It's only on putting all the parts together that science can speak with confidence about causation. If we use the "corelation != causation" slogan as if it refutes all science which follows from observation of correlations, we entirely miss the point.