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Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us
Lanxon writes "An in-depth feature in Wired explores the reason science may be failing us. Quoting: 'For too long, we've pretended that the old problem of causality can be cured by our shiny new knowledge. If only we devote more resources to research or dissect the system at a more fundamental level or search for ever more subtle correlations, we can discover how it all works. But a cause is not a fact, and it never will be; the things we can see will always be bracketed by what we cannot. And this is why, even when we know everything about everything, we'll still be telling stories about why it happened. It's mystery all the way down.'"
The scientific method is a simple, well-tested, approach to empirical study of a subject. The scientific method is as complete as it needs to be. However, if the method is not applied rigorously, the results will not be reliable.
"Truth" is not part of the scientific method, and has a very ambiguous meaning. Furthermore, capitalizing the letter T in truth suggests interest in something other than science.
If you don't do reductionist science, it is hard (but possible) to receive funding since everyone is trained in anti-systems (reductionist) theory.
Wait. Really? There are entire fields that do nothing but systems theory. The names shift. Cybernetics. Systems theory. Control systems. Complex networks. Cyberphysical systems. There are lots of people doing work in precisely the areas you suggest. Take a look at the NSF's "Broad Agency Announcements." There is funding.
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I do find it a bit amazing that science works at all. In machine learning, there are notions of the complexity of learning, and one of the basic ideas is that, as the class of models you are willing to consider grows, the amount of data you need to be sure, with reasonable statistical significance, which of those models describes it, grows very rapidly -- so rapidly that it is a miracle that we have apparently learned anything at all. See "VC dimension," "Rademacher complexity," etc.
The best explanation I can come up with is that the class of physical theories the human mind can conceive is actually quite limited (or, our priors are very good), and that it is evolution, over millions of years, that has gathered the necessary data to build a brain capable of conceiving of only the right theories, and that the role of conscious experimentation is only to narrow things down within this already-restricted set.
Because if the human mind is not much more limited than we like to think, then I do not know how we know anything.