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How Our Botched Understanding of "Science" Ruins Everything
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). "
... half way through the summary
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
I guess all we know about the sun is not scientific because we didn't do experiments on the sun and another star that is approximately equal....
Lets leave the crazy rants to the comment section.
Fuck
Especially the "High Priests" we keep hearing about on Slashdot..."YOuuuuuuuuu are not a climate Scientists, so shut up. Your opinion is worthless".
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!"
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.
"even though, by definition, religion concerns the ultimate causes of things and, again, by definition, science cannot tell you about them"
Yes, religion has certainly taught us as much about the origins of the universe as science /s
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.
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 beliefs will have a significant impact on policy.
Rather than lament this statistical necessity, perhaps we should celebrate the fact that anyone at all can do proper Science, that as a result of our stumbling efforts our technological levels continue to rise, and that all of this suggests a brighter future where even more people will have an even better understanding of proper Science.
And yes, monkees really do fly out of Madonna's butt. Something that looks like monkees. Cept Davey. He dead.
The only people who seem to be saying this stuff are themselves anti-science. We see in Texas (and other parts of the developing world) that school boards are trying to take out the critical thinking part of science education (the Texas GOP included a statement against teaching critical thinking in their platform a few years back) and make it all about indoctrination -- these are the results of Science and not to be questioned, unless they go against our campaign donors (see their stances on climate change, evolution, etc.), because teaching people to wonder about how we got these results might lead them to wonder why they believe the Bible (or vote for us).
Certainly, there is a challenge in science education that, because it is difficult to measure critical thinking, our standardized tests measure how much of the body of knowledge students have memorized, and the common anti-pattern of "teaching to the test" leads to a skimping on the "how", but a proper science education (which I have been fortunate enough to receive) is as much about the history and development of the field as it is about the body of knowledge we've accumulated.
Actually, that sounds like Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion." He is the high priest liberating Science from the blasphemy of Religion so it can be free to pursue Truth, isn't he?
True, bot correlation does not not equal causation either. It is very likely CO2 concentrations are causing global warming. We don't have another planet to test on, but we know CO2 is a green house gas through experimentation. It is not now required to do so on a planetary scale, we've already proved they trap gasses. The authors interpretation of science might require you to test this on a planetary scale, but that is ridiculous.
The only person with a botched understanding of science is the author. Science is the means by which we know what is true, and most definitely cover origins of things.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Getting this out of the way.
Science is the understanding of how the universe works. Faith, holds the supposition of why the universe exists both in its genesis and current state. The two don't overlap, and I personally find it rather funny when people try and debate a comparison to the two. To do so is like arguing about the hardness of fire. It makes no sense.
Life is not for the lazy.
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.".
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.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
People like to disagree with the results of Science constantly.
One major area that always sees absolute hatred and vile thoughts for is anything even remotely to do with race, and it is fucking annoying.
God forbid (should that be science forbid?) we figure out there is certain factors that makes a certain race more likely to develop X, and to figure out ways to prevent that by using the other races that don't have that issue.
God forbid we figure out there are certain races that are less likely to produce a healthy baby if race-mixing is the thing that created said baby. (just like how certain dogs cannot breed with each other, and some can but with problems)
Race research isn't fucking racist.
Others also tend to be related to food sciences.
Some people still refuse to admit salt isn't the (one) cause of high blood pressure. EVEN DOCTORS. IT IS A PROVEN FACT. IT IS EVEN OBSERVED TO BE WRONG. I've known people to practically inhale salt by the bucket load (ME included!) and have perfectly fine health, yet there are others who take even the slightest bit of salt and are about 10 kinds of dying.
Some people are finally coming to agreement that there is a huge underlying condition, most likely even several, that leads to salts relationship to high blood pressure. Salt worsens some of these conditions. But it isn't the cause. Not even slightly.
Don't you just love society?
The best path to the understanding of science is by reading the actual words of the greats. IMHO there is no more clearer and logical refutation of Aristotle than Galileo's own words:
"Shut yourself up with some friend in the main cabin below decks on some large ship, and have with you there some flies, butterflies, and other small flying animals. Have a large bowl of water with some fish in it; hang up a bottle that empties drop by drop into a wide vessel beneath it. With the ship standing still, observe carefully how the little animals fly with equal speed to all sides of the cabin. The fish swim indifferently in all directions; the drops fall into the vessel beneath; and, in throwing something to your friend, you need throw it no more strongly in one direction than another, the distances being equal; jumping with your feet together, you pass equal spaces in every direction. When you have observed all these things carefully (though doubtless when the ship is standing still everything must happen in this way), have the ship proceed with any speed you like, so long as the motion is uniform and not fluctuating this way and that. You will discover not the least change in all the effects named, nor could you tell from any of them whether the ship was moving or standing still. In jumping, you will pass on the floor the same spaces as before, nor will you make larger jumps toward the stern than toward the prow even though the ship is moving quite rapidly, despite the fact that during the time that you are in the air the floor under you will be going in a direction opposite to your jump. In throwing something to your companion, you will need no more force to get it to him whether he is in the direction of the bow or the stern, with yourself situated opposite...."
Not the emphasis on careful observation. Despite the simple language there is very deep physics here.
Oh yeah, no one has ever established a causative mechanism for how CO2 might trap heat. Real genius insight there.
...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".
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
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.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The Philosophy of Science is a BS.
Schools do need to go through the why things are done the way they are and how the scientific method applies to a given study or experiment. And I think that's what you're getting at.
But that isn't the philosophy of science. Philosophy of science gets into all sorts of metaphysical hogwash.
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)
Science is a methodology bent on correcting itself; Anything you like can go in the front of the process.. a hunch, an observation, a bit of math, some statistics suggesting a previously unknown pattern, etc. The process, done correctly anyways, will whittle away at it until the truth remains. As NDT suggested, science is not a noun, but a verb.
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.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
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 that knows what gravity is." Half the hands would go down, lots of disturbed faces. "How did I get so lucky to have so many students that know something that no other man in the world knows?" More hands would go down. Puzzled faces everywhere. "So, which one of you would like to explain to me what gravity 'is'?" No hands would remain up. You could hear the crickets. Everyone was just looking at him.
His point was that while we may know the "effects" of gravity, and how objects behave while under the influence of gravity (we have great math to describe it), we have no actual clue what gravity "is". (We merely describe it by what it "does".) He used this point to make sure we understood the difference between "observation of behavior" and "definition of reality". If we run ahead and define our "reality" by its "behavior" we are missing the point altogether. He was a great professor, and a really funny teacher. Later that day he got us all again on "How many people here know what 'light' is?" :-)
I see that all to often when people begin to follow the cult of science, and theories are taken as "laws", and hence definitions of reality, which is altogether backwards. If you then forget that these "laws' were intended to describe observed phenomena, and not define the observed phenomena, then you have come full circle and reversed the definitions you were originally seeking. And if you have observed with faulty instruments, measuring things that you did not understand, and arrived at incorrect conclusions, then you are doubly mistaken.
I don't go too much into discussions of "science" anymore. I've had enough people get violently angry because I would not blindly agree with all that "science" says is right and good in the world, nor would agree to any conclusions without seeing the evidence for myself.
I reserve the right right think for myself.
The problem is we live on a warring planet. Governments will use the latest and most lethal sciences for defense, and aggressive warring nations use it for atrocities committed against their neighbors and those they deem enemies. Peaceful uses of modern science that could make the planet a safer more enjoyable place to stay have to take the back seat.
I started out thinking he was far right, bludgeoning the people who think they know science but are really just too stupid to know better because they're not really geniuses - Fox lives on making fun of the "intellectuals." Then he claims that true science is hard and that people are just animals that can't get past their lack of understanding of basic probability, which puts him soundly on the left end of MSNBC. Then he wraps up by seeming to dismiss everything and everyone for not being good enough in his personal world/religious/scientific view, which could really put him in either the far right or far left.
I think he's mostly a pedant and a language troll, so I guess he fits right in here at /.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
OK, as I understand it, and I stand to be corrected, Science (big S) is our attempt to understand hence take some semblance of control over our environment (not just talking climate change, I mean everything from the consistency of concrete to the purity of our drinking water to switching off genes that turn corn purple), using "truths" that are subject to basic rules (Newtonian physics, etc) and open to adjustment upon exposure of the truth to new evidence, while religion holds that truths are self evident and need no further explanation ("miracles") and that any new evidence, no matter how pervasive, is anomalous to the religious truth (AKA "dogma"), to be resisted and ridiculed at all costs (although Christian Science makes a show of adapting dogma to hold in the face of evidence, it's actually the other way round: evidence supporting the dogmatic view is chosen and shown, evidence against it is ignored and suppressed).
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
This subject appears to be controversial.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I'm not going to go on a full rant, because this is something that people here on Slashdot have gotten very angry with me for in the past, but I very much agree with the author of this article.
I would say it this way: People make the mistake of talking about "science" as "a body of knowledge that is certain, due to having passed through a set of processes." But science is not the body of knowledge, "science" is the process. It's actually not the whole process even-- the processes of peer review and developing consensus within the community are not scientific. They're social/political processes that we've developed to help us judge whether someone else's scientific process was valid.
And science does not provide all kinds of knowledge. It doesn't deal with "truth", or even really "fact". It doesn't deal in particulars. Science can't tell us what happened in a particular historical instance, but only helps us develop general causal interpretations of material processes. For example, medical science's aim is not to tell you that your granfather developed cancer because of smoking. The aim is to develop the general idea that "smoking causes cancer" into a theory that provides improved predictive capabilities.
And science does not provide certain knowledge. It just provides (hopefully) improved interpretations. Hopefully the interpretations will continue to improve, but science doesn't have the capability to tell you that an interpretation is "correct", even if there is such a thing.
I would not, however, agree with this:
Aristotelian "science" was a major setback for all of human civilization. For Aristotle, science started with empirical investigation and then used theoretical speculation to decide what things are caused by. What we now know as the "scientific revolution" was a repudiation of Aristotle...
That's a pretty poor understanding of what happened. It's pretty clear from reading Aristotle that he in fact did perform experiments of various kinds, but his focus was broad enough to include topics that we would now split between "scientific" and "philosophic" realms. A lot of our heritage of science and logic can be traced back to Aristotle. The problem was that, for a few hundred years, scholars were inclined to take Aristotle's writings dogmatically, as though they were religious texts.
For example, Aristotle does say that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects-- which is, to some extent, true. Drop a rock, and drop a sheet of paper, and the rock may very well hit the ground first. So Aristotle accepts this without testing extensively, but there's no real evidence he intended that to be the be-all-and-end-all explanation. I don't recall any passages saying, "don't study things for yourself, just take my word for it all" It was just the best understanding that he could offer, as an individual man studying almost every subject rather than focusing on one or two intensely.
People took that understanding as authoritative. They didn't study it for themselves. And then after several hundred years, due to social changes that enabled greater scientific investigation, people started finding that not everything Aristotle said was true. When they suggested Aristotle might not be correct, they were met with a stubborn refusal to entertain new theories, which lead to a backlash against Aristotle.
So yes, there was a backlash against Aristotle during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Some scholars/authors (e.g. Bacon) talk about how stupid they think Aristotle is, but if you pay attention to their thinking, it's also very clear that they're informed by Aristotle. Rather than dismissing Aristotle and starting from scratch, as they claim, they're taking Aristotelian ideas and methods as a starting point, and expanding/refining/fixing/improving them.
Saying that Aristotle is "a major setback for all of human civilization" is a bit like saying that, "Shakespeare was a huge setback for the English language. I find his writing impossible to understand. Thank god no modern writers follow his example."
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.
One might think that Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" might at least be touched on in these articles on science, but alas. Ah well, back to botched understandings.
Just say'n
you end up with "established science" that claims, if we don't give all our money and lower our standard of living, and force third world countries to continue to wallow in poverty and filth, the world is going to end.
if you dare to disagree, you are an unenlightened denier, and hate babies.
You should throw out your talking points, they're a little dated. You need the fresher ones that purport to counter the current findings, that it is likely to be cheap, or even free, to address global warming. You need to do that, because the masters you serve for free, who may not reap the profits, want you to continue, despite the fact that it's not in your own interest.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/opinion/paul-krugman-could-fighting-global-warming-be-cheap-and-free.html
Science starts from a position of saying you know nothing and works towards knowledge based on a small set of well thought out principles. Science understands that there are things you know, things you don't know and things you cannot know.
Religion starts from a position of claiming to know everything and works towards eradicating anything that contradicts that position.
Religion is a cult of destruction, science is a cult of creation.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
you could always try to prove that CO2 doesn't trap heat. the experiment is described on youtube. go ahead.
What does God need with a Starship?
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
Nails it.
It can be the perfect setting for morality plays.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
"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 and instead tests empirical theories through controlled investigation."
This is utter drivel. (Unless, perhaps, ones narrows the definitions of ultimate causes in a ridiculous way.) Scientists reason about ultimate causes, and proximate causes, and causes that just happened to be wandering down the street at that time all the time. This is a major part of hypothesis generation. Science isn't about randomly going around doing a bunch of experiments - well, okay, it's somewhat about that too, if you count high throughput techniques as random, but even then its random inside of controlled parameters. It's about taking all the understanding you think you've gleaned from your observation and your high minded reasoning and what you talked about at the pub and that thing that occurred to you in the shower - all of it - and turning it into a testable hypothesis. Y'know, one that can actually be wrong.
And then testing it.
It's not about foresaking abstract reasoning in the least. It's just about checking in with reality from time to time, as well.
To travel with*
*for some values of God (I.e., not the one with arbitrarily imposed omnipresence/omnipotence/omniscience).
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
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.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I think good explanation what science is gave us Karl Popper.
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 than capable of contemplating the cause of anything. It may not be good at anthropomorphizing natural phenomena and giving it intent (like wondering why the universe was created), but that is simply because scientific reasoning easily dismisses such thought as not only irrelevant but ultimately incorrect.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
That article was complete garbage. Just a mess. I'd really had my hopes up...
absolutely no part of it requries giving up all your money or your standard of living, nor does it acll for forcing third world countries to wallow in filth.
its not because you disagree that you are ignorant.
its because of hte ignorant and moronic things you say that you are ignorant.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
... how about starting a blog where you try to make science more accessible to lay people.
You have never, even once, encountered any scientist saying anything that even resembles this.
Strawman arguments are lies.
I know you're being funny, but it's also correct. We know nearly zero things about the sun for the exact reason you state. Until we can actually go there and perform proper controlled experiements, everything we think we "know" about the sun is pure conjecture. For all we know, literally, the sun may not even be there. It could very well be a mirage of some sort due to a principle of the universe that we haven't discovered yet.
One of the problems I have with most definitions of Science is the emphasis on making hypothesis and then testing them. The real power of science is when you make predictions that are natural products of your theory. In fact, not all science is made equal in this respect. When you look at some phenomenon, come up with a theory that matches the phenomenon, test it by observing further phenomenon of the same type, and then publish your result you are doing "weak" science. When you look at some phenomenon, come up with a theory for it and with the theory make predictions about something you never thought about before and those predictions turn out to be true, that is "strong" science. This is especially true if the predictions cross into other areas of science specialization. If you read up on the history of evolutionary theory, you will see that there are multiple "strong" science moments in its history involving crossovers into geology, physics, DNA, chemistry, medicine, physiology, and anatomy (and probably many more). That is what makes evolution not just a science, but a strong science.
answers is nonsense. We don't know, can't know, what answers science will provide, nor can we know ahead of time which questions it will answer. Just because science has not advanced to, will never advance to, the point where everything has been explained, we are not excused from pursuing knowledge within the scientific method. Religion is faith...organized in a dogmatic and doctrinal system, and to some extent, is required to exist outside of rational, honest, intellectual argument . Science is, in part, changing your mind when observation and experiment dictate that you were wrong. I am not aware of any religionist who has express a willingness to change their mind about the existence of supernatural forces causing stuff to happen. Nonsense
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
Science is prediction. Nothing more. It assumes and requires predictability and it follows that any agent or process that can thwart predictability can thwart science. All of which sounds like some kind of creationist's prologue, but here's the thing: The difference between a prophet and a madman is not as significant as the fact that you can't reliably tell them apart. As such, science, with it's independently verifiable results, is the only apparently reliable tool we possess with which to interpret our surroundings. And if it turns out that science wasn't reliable after all, then we had nothing useful to begin with.
That said, this debate will not soon be resolved because evolution only has weak traction on problems that don't impair procreation. IOW you don't need to understand the world in order to live in it, which is fortunate for all concerned.
Basically a preamble to some kind of pro-creation pitch.
Sigh.
I hit the brick wall where the summary plunged into "thinking science has made God irrelevant."
Oh, silly summary. God remains a relevant fictional character. You know, like that girl from the Twilight books.
When you say "correlation != causation", it's often a shortcut to explaining that it's not concrete that A causes B. Most people say erroneous things (violent videogames cause violence in real life), and the refutation is "correlation != causation."
I can empathize that using the phrase can be misconstrued as "missing the point", particularly by low-information types, but we need that phrase to tell the policymakers who make $$$ off of spurious conclusions and fearmongering to get bent. (so to speak.)
1. Science is the pursuit of Truth (with a capital "T"), which is the philosophical concept that there is some "right" answer. We can see Truth as a limiting factor. We tend to approach Truth over time, but science does not allow us to know or believe we have achieved it. Rather, science believes it has achieved a working model of Truth, which is good enough until something better comes along.
2. If you can figure out a way to do physics without 14 years of mathematics education or biochemistry without using arcane jargon, please inform us because it would truly be a wonder.
3. Almost every major scientific achievement was done, in some part, by using "high school math", and it absolutely is science. There are limitations to what can be concluded by statistical correlation and if the public does not understand that, it is because the media needs to hire better science writers.
4. Scientific knowledge can inform public policy and, to some degree, can also test public policy. For instance, we used science to figure out that CFC's were damaging the Earth's Ozone layer. We used science to predict what kind of long-term damage it would cause, and science to determine public policies that could lead to a more desirable outcome. Then we used science to confirm that the public policies were achieving the desired effect.
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...
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.
I totally agree, but just wanted to add the 'confirming results' part is usually done through peer-review & hopefully additional confirmation experiments. This last step I believe needs more attention.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
I think the mental patient that wrote that summary got sort of close to my feelings on this issue. What he hopefully meant to say was that engineering, product development, technology, etc are real things. Science is not real things. It's theories. Over the lats 500 years, about 99% of science was found to be incorrect. Yet, today people think we're so darn smart that everything is now magically correct...and then they find out that photons can crystallize. It's like everyone has no hindsight whatsoever and they keep presenting strongly-supported scientific theory as fact.
Besides screwing with laws and government funding, the worst part is that scientists keep operating this way and when they're proven wrong, their career is over. You can't just say "this is the absolute new truth we discovered" and then be wrong and keep getting grants and jobs. All they need is a "we're pretty certain but lack solid evidence but this is the best guess at this time so we'll operate under this assumption until it is proven wrong" type of attitude and science would be much better.
Yet more "Science is just a Religion" bollocks.
Ho hum.
Makes me not care I block ads here...
I agree, I just want to add that I believe the last part of the scientific process, confirming results, needs more attention. We should have more confirming experiments when possible. For example, why did it take so long to discover male researchers were effecting lab rats? http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04...
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
If you limit yourself to defining "modern atheism" as being whatever it is you claim is hopelessly christian, then you'd be right. However, you'd be missing out 90%+ of atheism alive today.
Just because atheists only get trotted out to counter a christian oddball claim doesn't mean atheism only cares about christian dogmas.
It just means that where you live you hear and see a sea of christian dogma and therefore any counter will appear to be obsessed with christian dogma too.
It just claims "Because" and you'd better not disbelieve them.
Of course, religion that brings religion into disrepute are called non religions (see ISIS: claimed not to be a religion, yet there os ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE between the validity of ISIS' claims of religious largesse and, for example, the Archbishop of Cantebury) so that religion gets off scott free. It's just "fake religion" that makes people do bad things, not dogma and faith over thought.
Religion doesn't say why, it merely claims an answer and insists that asking for proof is not allowed.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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.
I have to assume that the ending semi-colon should be replaced with full-on colon, possibly spread wide for emphasis.
Draw a bright line.
On one side, write, "religion," on the other side, "science."
Make sure they don't cross-contaminate.
I have to think of everything.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I think the religious part is really a red herring.... it's really more about the hard science vs. psychology, and the black/white politicization of science. Not unlike the parts of Antifragile where he criticizes the 'Soviet-Harvard complex' for 'teaching birds how to fly' - basically, group makes sweeping assumptions about how the world works, goes through a 'scientific process' with the form but not the substance that validates their claims, and then uses that invalid but sciency-looking result as absolute truth to do societal engineering on a broad scale.
Why does the sun glow? It is answered in the how it glows.
Just parroting "why?" doesn't make a question.
"Why does a duck?"
Is not a question.
"Why are my socks on my feet (and DON'T tell me how they got there, TELL ME WHY)"
Is what you've just done. Why is the how not also they why? Because that leaves nothing for religion to do?
to spread around...
What the heck? Being against the scientific method? The reason it's called science is because it's based on the scientific method?
Ignoring God? What god? When religious people can bring a testable hypothesis about god, only then we can pay attention.
Magic? What magic? Everything in Science can be traced back to its origins with proof. If we don't have it yet, no hand waving, no excuses but the honest answer: We don't know, we're working on it.
If you look at both popular writings and scientific journals from the 18th and 19th century you will see tons of fluff, opinion and wrong results. The sliver of truth perseveres will become next century's science.
I have been granted moderator points today - and I'm stuck on this article. Going through the comments here I don't know which ones meet the definition of Trolls, Flame, Insightful, or Funny. I could mark everything here as offtopic - or all of the above. Then again - maybe I should go back to the original article and mark it as Flamebait - at least that would better explain the flavor of the comments posted here.
An opinion posing as an actual conclusion. Halfway through I wondered if this was from a sister Onion site.
Maybe the summary should have said, "I found an Opinion piece about science...."
Have at it.
Am I the only one who didn't understand the summary at all? I just seemed like a bunch of fragments and comma splices thrown together.
How do you explain the fact that, Mercury the planet closest to the sun, is not as hot as Venus, which has a thick carbon dioxide laden atmosphere?
by definition, religion concerns the ultimate causes of things and, again, by definition, science cannot tell you about them
... but religion can?
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.
with SCIENCE.
You ignorant fool, go away before I drop science on you a second time!
In religion, the ultimate cause of things is always god or gods. The conclusion is already set in stone, and theists are trying to find ways to validate the conclusion.
"by definition, science cannot tell you about them", yes it can, and does. The ultimate cause of things are interactions of matter with the four forces of nature, gravitation, electromagnetism, weak and strong force. I'm sorry if that answer is not satisfying to some, because it does not make you a special created purposeful snowflake. Or, in the words of Fight Club, "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all a part of the same compost pile.—Tyler Durden"
What is the cause of matter and those four forces of nature? We don't know yet, but that does not mean we will never know. But we have the best method to discover it, and that best method is so far the scientific method. The scientific method is observation, testing and creating of models with explanatory and predictive powers.
"philistines like Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne thinking science has made God irrelevant" - way to go with ad-hominim attacks.
God is an idea to explain natural penomena, because God is postulated by religion as the ultimate cause of things. Science explains things better and more accurate, and hence it does make God obsolete.
"You might think of science advocate, cultural illiterate, mendacious anti-Catholic propagandist, and possible serial fabulist Neil DeGrasse Tyson" - more with the ad-hominim attacks.
"Actually, he doesn't just dismiss it. He goes much further — to argue that undergraduates should actively avoid studying philosophy at all. Because, apparently, asking too many questions "can really mess you up.""
That makes Tyson a pragmatist and not a philistine. And I agree with Tyson. Philosophie is ultimatelly useless, and it's just a waste of time. In science the ultimate arbiter of what is true and what is false is nature, and not philosophical arguments.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Aristotelian "science" was a major setback for all of human civilization.
Seriously, what the hell? A major setback from what? From superstition? Did we have anything better before Aristotelian science? That many of Aristotle's predictions turned out to be false (heavier objects fall faster) is not an indictment on his work or body of knowledge. Without Aristotle and the likes of him during their time, we wouldn't have science as we know today.
Seriously, the author might have a point, but that point is purely accidental. He has no clue what he is talking about.
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
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
This is why we do science: "Dass ich erkenne was die Welt Im Innersten zusammenhält" To apprehend the inner workings of the universe.
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)...
How dare those academics use math, specialized jargon, and peer-review! Witchcraft, I tell thee, witchcraft!! (Quick hint for whatever PR firm submitted this: science is extremely complex and extremely specialized these days. Sorry if your marketing degree didn't prepare you for anything better than spreading FUD.)
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).
Yah, we only have one earth at the moment, so it's sort of hard to directly test the effects of (1) implementing or (2) NOT implementing a carbon excise tax on the next 100 years of climate change. Science can't do that. Of course, neither can lobbyists or SIG's or true believers or anyone else.
What science can do (for a sincere policymaker) is provide the firmest foundation of knowledge to work with. And science quite confidently tells us a lot of things we don't want to hear (like "all this carbon is going to make the environment go wack, do something about it" or "your ass is getting fat on all that sugar and processed foods", or "life arose thru such-and-such set of processes and not ex post nihlo, sorry if that challenges your theology LOL").
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
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."
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Question it, be my guest, gather facts diligently and reach a conclusion based on the facts. There are people to do that, overwhelmingly they conclude that AGW is real. As you say, life is not for the lazy...
Nullius in verba
I made it almost halfway through the summary, but it's too much bullshit for me. Is there anything worth reading in the article, or is it just as bad?
Is that pork or Kevin related science?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
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:
Normally I'd say that that was trolling. Why toss irrelevant insults into a discussion? But I think it is an attempt to bolster an argument that he knows cannot stand on its own.
And then he COMPLETELY skips over how Tyson believes that science is "like magic". He makes that insulting statement and then fails to support it.
He thinks that Economics is a science. That's how wrong he is.
Please look up the definition of "bombastic".
TFA could be a great example of trolling or Poe's Law or such. But I think it is just crap writing from someone who does not understand the subject.
the author shows by his very writing of the article just how bad science education is in the u.s. that is, he himself is a victim of the very low standards and the lack of teaching and emphasis on philosophy of science. the author should be ashamed and embarassed for being a shining example of everything that is wrong and antiquated with science education in america. his philosophy belongs to the pre-socratics; the sophists. there is nothing new in what he is saying, it is embarrassingly old. and embarrasingly banal.
if the article proves anything it's by way of example: the author is an excellent example of the people that our education system has left behind.
common to Creationists, precisely because it throws out geology, palentology and cosmology, because they conflict with the collected superstitions of preliterate bronze age shepherds that they cling to. Ken Ham's infamous "Where you there?" refrain for countering any history behind that directly observed by someone and subsequently written down is a prime example.
I once saw a movie that had "science" in its name, and they showed a couple of guys attaching some wires to a doll and it made a real woman. Then they did it to a copy of Time magazine and made a nuclear missile appear. I blame people's skewed perception of science on Hollyweird. And don't even get me started on the crimes against science CSI has perpetrated.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
We have plenty of anti-science people, but most of our 'pro-science' people are really pro-magic (and therefore anti-science).
Everybody is afraid of being wrong.
To scientists, being right means everything. It's their livelihood. So no wonder it's such a touchy issue being right (special, different or even more correct).
He wants to bang Uhura, same as everyone else.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It is hard to take many of these posts seriously due to gross misspellings... and then when I look past them I find way too many logical flaws. I don't want to be a hater, but please think a little harder before you respond. "In lost the will to live", wtf?
I know this post wont change anything... except act as troll bate, but please try.
The most compact description of science I've seen is "the process of finding the simplest model(s) that explains observations".
The model is typically math or algorithms, but is not necessarily limited to those (although life is usually easier if you do.)
The model may not necessarily reflect underlying reality, but until we have more data we cannot tell if it does or not. For example, epicycles and regression can produce "matching" models to an extent of certain physical phenomena, but further observations often end up showing they are limited, such as with 3-body orbits. (Epicycles and regression can offer prediction ability under a fixed set of circumstances, at least, which can still make a useful tool.)
If the global warming deniers can produce a model that is accurate (explains the past and continues to predict the future) that is of equal or lessor complexity than the human-caused global warming models, then they may have a leg to stand on. So far, they just criticize existing models without proposing a complete alternative.
We don't have to argue over who is the most biased or bribed; let the models do the speaking.
As far as the general public understanding the models, well, that's a trickier one. Complexity is complexity.
Table-ized A.I.
God is and always has been irrelevant, just like the infinitiy of other things that do not actually exist.
So all the lab test proving that CO2 absorbs IR wavelength in a predictable way are wrong?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"Falsifiable."
If there's no way to prove your idea wrong, it's not science.
I think this is by far the most pervasive misunderstanding of science that the general public hold.
> "Anything goes"
> it is the only way of creating knowledge
You know, the birth of the scientific method lay in the thought that "a rational God would create a rational universe that obeyed laws that could be understood by humans" of all things. They started practicing that and things went on from there.
I hit the brick wall where the summary plunged into "thinking science has made God irrelevant."
Oh, silly summary. God remains a relevant fictional character. You know, like that girl from the Twilight books.
I dunno, I think the Greeks & Romans did better fiction. The Xtian God is a bit overpowered.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
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 can't be. We've really only been seriously at this with more than stone knives and bearskins for a hundred years or so. Directly because of science, we already know a great deal more than religion ever managed to determine in thousands of years over thousands of varieties of made-up ideas and almost unimaginable depths and expressions of faith.
The penultimate cause of things is indeed 100% in science's domain and, if indeed there is an answer that can be expressed in the physics humans can understand, the odds are at least decent that we'll figure it out. Using science. Not religion.
There's very little point, or sense, in giving religion credit it has not earned, nor in ceding to it whole chunks of reality it has shown absolutely no ability to pull back the curtains from.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
give him a fucking medal
lose != loose
that we accord the same amount or respect/credibility to people with a High School education, that we do to somebody who has a PhD, because we are afraid of hurting people’s feelings, about their lack of education.
Noticed how I got modded "flamebait" and the parent "troll". Yeah, we've been vindicated! I rest my case.
Life is not for the lazy.
I heard the jury is still out on science
If you could create an experiment that runs indefinitely for eternity maybe. At best the scientific method can approach proving a hypothesis. It can never actually prove it. It only takes one experiment to prove a theory wrong. There fore at best the scientific method lets you know what the lemma or behavior you are testing approaches currently (as in right now when you just ran that test) and that may not hold true 2 seconds from now or tomorrow.
Unfortunately the Internet amplifies the voices of the least intelligent and most strident.
It's a problem you atheists get to share with us theists.
The meme that women earn 80 cents to a man's $ is in more states than Texas
Yes, with the throngs of the useful idiots indoctrinated by screwels in a vast Cloward-Piven-Alinsky strategy, these idiot tools who know nothing worship Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson and other frauds to get their programming and group-thinking in properly dumbed down NEWSPEAK.
tsakon reports
Agreed, the article overplays its conclusions, much in the way the press typically overplays the conclusions of every piece of science that is published. Science does come up with rules about how the world behaves through experiment. Then, those rules are used to actually make predictions. The whole point is that any of those predictions are valid. You could say that any of these predictions implies an experiment, and it does. However, we still use the predictions as if they are true until a prediction does fail. Generally, it is the press that misuses science. New science is all trial and error. Predictions are made and then tested. The press often publishes the hypothesis as if it has been validated. A potentially valid scientific theory is one that has made a prediction and the prediction has come true. If it repeatedly comes true, then the theory is considered to be a working theory of how things work. Economics and psychology both tend to deal with humans and are studying human designed systems. The rules for these systems are not written into stone, as we think the rules of physics are, but studying them can still lead to valid theories. They just have more limits, since it is hard to quantify where the theories are valid. An economic theory that works in one country may not apply in a different time or place where the society involved is different in some important way. The same is true of psychology studies. However, that is no different in any fundamental way than studying how fire and explosives work and then moving into a zero gravity environment and finding that the rules are different. The original work is valid and useful for making predictions. People rarely list all the assumptions needed to make any theory truly valid. Many are only discovered by finding counter examples and figuring out why the counter examples occur.
:) I think we probably have a slight over-representation... why entire groups of religious folks shun the devilry of the glowing boxes. I mean, the amish alone.
Okay, this time I was being sarcastic.
:) I think we probably have a slight over-representation... why entire groups of religious folks shun the devilry of the glowing boxes. I mean, the amish alone.
Because the faith of some people is so weak that the only way they can endure is to shun or even repel anything that might challenge their beliefs.
Or, alternatively, because the place is a vast wasteland not worth visiting.
Science done in a vacuum means they have no point to prove going into the study. Corporately sponsored science means you need to find something positive for your sponsors product or they're not going to keep funding you. It doesn't matter how minor it is positive, as long as something positive, you're fine. I once saw Lucky Charms marketed as a health food because of the oat pieces. Oats are good for your heart, so by extension they said Lucky Charms is a health food. Its like saying,"Nuclear waste is good for your face because it gives it that healthy glow."
Even if they don't sponsor the science, the marketteers can scan science articles for the most minor thing that is good about their product and they go,"Science proves our product is superior!"
I'm all for science, but the way it is used now is disingenuous. Every day you hear about a new "super" food that will reduce your cancer risk.
God spoke to me
The god botherers have really been flailing about lately. First the idiotic Star Trek post and now this. Guys, this is not helping your position.
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
It is a method that may be used in a pursuit of a truth. In fact that is just a quote taken from every religion on the planet.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Why Kuhn as opposed to any number of "theory of Science" folks who proposed a coherent theory?
"by definition, religion concerns the ultimate causes of things and, again, by definition, science cannot tell you about them"
That is not the definition of religion. It's a common trope that scientists try to "wall off" religion with some kind of very small, trivial extent, such that they can go about their work without being bothered or engaging in conflict/contention (I tend to refer to this rhetorical move as "Gouldianism"). But neither religious people, nor scholars of religion, agree with that.
"There are numerous definitions of religion and only a few are stated here. The typical dictionary definition of religion refers to a "belief in, or the worship of, a god or gods"[22] or the "service and worship of God or the supernatural".[23] However, writers and scholars have expanded upon the "belief in god" definitions as insufficient to capture the diversity of religious thought and experience... Peter Mandaville and Paul James define religion as "a relatively-bounded system of beliefs, symbols and practices that addresses the nature of existence, and in which communion with others and Otherness is lived as if it both takes in and spiritually transcends socially-grounded ontologies of time, space, embodiment and knowing".[24]... Edward Burnett Tylor defined religion as "the belief in spiritual beings".[25] He argued, back in 1871, that narrowing the definition to mean the belief in a supreme deity or judgment after death or idolatry and so on, would exclude many peoples from the category of religious, and thus "has the fault of identifying religion rather with particular developments than with the deeper motive which underlies them"... The anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined religion as a "system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic."[26]..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion#Definitions
Someone who gets wrong something so complicated and far-ranging as that fills be with disbelief that the rest of their argument has any value.
IANRBIHAPD (I am not religious but I have a philosophy degree)
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
False. Religion does not "concern" the ultimate causes of things, it does not "seek" to explain them. It shoves a fabricated explanation thousands of years old in your faces and precludes any possibility whatsoever that what a human being wrote down on those pages isn't a primary source written by God itself as it did the things which allegedly created the universe in which we live. People who claim to be religious scientists are wrong by default because they are exclusive ideologies. Religion explains all things with convenient creation myths and moral stories - not research.
Causation is a scientific notion - not a religious one, not when it comes to origin.
As far as being anti-science, we aren't an anti-science society. We're just a pro-religion society. People are perfectly fine with science as long as it doesn't violate their co-opted, fake standards like stem cell research or cloning; the only other time people aren't okay with science is when it is wasting money on Mars missions and space stations that could be otherwise used to definitely solve real world problems like homelessness and starvation and disease. I love space, I support space, and almost all other scientific pursuits (but not robots), but even as an "engineer" with a "science" degree (programming), I have my priorities straight and can see why people would rather seek tangible progress than comfort in research which might not mean a damn thing for 200 years.
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
Unfortunately, many people (on both sides) seem to think science means "trust the experts". This is the gist of the fine article.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Wasn't Aristotle the guy who came up with Logic? And he's bad? I don't understand.
"Laws differ from scientific theories in that they do not posit a mechanism or explanation of phenomena: they are merely distillations of the results of repeated observation. As such, a law is limited in applicability to circumstances resembling those already observed, and may be found false when extrapolated. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
" Science has no heroes,"
False. It absolutely does have scientific heros.
" and hero worship has no place in science. "
Sure it does. In fact, it can be a way to get people interested in science.
If you replace hero with demagoguery, then I would agree.
I have heros in science, becasue they did great things and in some case, change what they did because the data showed them they where wrong.
He talks about is person experience with Carl Sagan. Briefly.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
the author shows by his very writing of the article just how bad science education is in the u.s. that is, he himself is a victim of the very low standards and the lack of teaching and emphasis on philosophy of science
That's actually kind of funny. The author is apparently French, lives in Paris, and was educated at the école des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Paris.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
You know when it's trolling click bait when you see:
An anonymous reader writes
...at the top of a /. summary.
I think the most concise explanation I ever read was one attributed to some Arab guy who was credited with inventing science (but afterwards, I never was able to verify he said anything of the sort or that anyone really believed he "invented" science, so I won't repeat that part). Anyway, his supposed belief was that man was prone to mistakes, and so if man wanted to know what was true, he'd better not rely just upon himself, but find some way to ask the gods, and thus he decided to test his ideas with experiments, in order to allow the universe itself to tell him which ideas are correct and which are not, rather than to simply do as was common at the time and rely upon his own judgment and simply ask "how much sense does this make?"
That's precisely why evolution is science whereas creationism is not. Both began with a human and an idea of how the world came to be the way it is. One idea was tested against the universe to allow it to tell us if the idea was correct. The other idea was simply declared to be correct, and indeed, every time someone finds evidence against it, someone simply says "well, God/Satan made that false evidence to fool you."
Science is simply people deciding that they don't want to fool themselves.
Unfortunately, for a lot of people, science is just another religion, where truth is just what the scientists say it is. The best example of this is global warming. I'll admit that I too believe a lot of shit scientists say that I'm unable to test myself, but only when I believe they're using the scientific method. ...and that's why I don't believe in global warming. They've been making predictions for decades which haven't held up to reality, instead they just make new predictions and forget about the incorrect predictions of the past, yet everyone of the "science religion" believes that the failed predictions don't matter, because they're scientists and so they're obviously correct no matter what. The universe has told them time and time again that their predictions are false, and so to believe them just because they happen to be scientists is to just believe on faith. We only have truth when when can put our theories to test against the universe and it verifies that we are correct.
What does Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry mean with his writing at The Week?
No wonder people equate science with mysticism.
I wonder how many people here actually read the article. Many comments seem to think it was arguing against the use of science; however it is specifically arguing against the misuse of the word "science" as a replacement for the word "magic".
the semi-structured application of curiosity.The details of the methodology is quite secondary, as long as it's executed honestly. It need not be theoretical. Much of biology and sociology, etc are still quite observational, just as a little kid watching watch flow down a ditch or wondering how a butterfly flies. At some point in our understanding of things, a shift occurs from observational to theoretical, but curiosity remains the driver.
The shift to engineering occurs when we move from curiosity driven to application driven and sometimes the boundary is very diffuse.
And in terms of the methodology, the parent's comment about science as Bayesian is excellent and provides a strict test for when something is not scientific.
"Why?" is still a valid question
If you want answer to "why", go take a philosophy class!
It's really hard to argue with this. I mean, if we're talking about America as a whole, and I give up all my money and Al Gore takes it, then America still has all the money - I just don't have mine anymore. Fighting "global warming" is costing *us* nothing! Man, sign my ass up!
Another example of correlation not being equal to causation: the scientists may affect rats, but it's unlikely that scientists cause rats.
Yeah, the verb "effect" means "to cause". You could, for example, effectively effect effects. Way to go, English!
The cynical part of me enjoys how in Spanish, "efectivo" means both "effective" and "money". Money is the most effective thing I know of. My study coming out next month will scientifically prove that the Universe [a] was created in order to enhance shareholder value, and [b] is evil.
Ugh. That guy. I'm not sure I would trust Paul Krugman on the economics of global warming any more than I would take my talking points from Fox News.
An atheist in a christion environment will adapt 'christian good' as good.
An atheist in a buddhist environment will adapt 'buddhistic good' as good.
And if you finally would drop putting your self crafted/imagined labels on atheists, by e.g. accepting that the lack of religion is no religion then you would perhaps have time to figure: the 'good' is universal ... there is no real distinction between 'christian good' or 'buddhistic good' the distinction is in your view on them!
The only problem with your thesis is that you forgot that there are two sides to a coin
We will never know what "good" is if we never experience the "bad" - and life, as in everything else in the universe, "bad" has overwhelmed "good" so much so that we can't help ourselves but to choose the "good" as "good"
In other words, the Atheist who was brought up in a Christian surrounding will not only treat the "Christian Good" as "good" but also because that individual knew (perhaps through personal experiences) what "bad" (Christian or otherwise), is and how "bad" can manifest itself
As an auxiliary note, you listed two religion, Christianity and Buddhism. How about Islam? Is there any good for a religion in which cutting off people's head is deemed "good"?
This explanation may be helpful to some in explaining a common approach to science:
A scientist has an idea about reality, which she carefully states as a theory. She performs experiments in an effort to DISPROVE her theory. After many experiments, if the theory isn't disproven, she publishes her theory and others will attempt to DISPROVE the theory. If it survives all these tests, it begins to gain respect and may someday be accepted as fact by educated people.
A non-scientist has an idea about reality, and without ever making a defining statement of the idea, proceeds to look for proof that it is true. Contrary evidence will probably be ignored.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Well, you're not required to listen to fact based arguments, or to someone who has correctly predicted much of what has (and has not: like runaway inflation) occurred.
But that's generally the way I go.
This bit I found problematic:
While it is a fact that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads, all else equal, to higher atmospheric temperatures, the idea that we can predict the impact of global warming — and anti-global warming policies! — 100 years from now is sheer lunacy. But because it is done using math by people with tenure, we are told it is "science" even though by definition it is impossible to run an experiment on the year 2114.
Yet if science is about determining reliable predictive rules through experiment, then if we have experimentally shown the reliability and validity of those rules, we do not need to experiment on the year 2114 in order to make predictions. We just apply our reliable rules and they will give us predictions which are reliable to however much those rules are.
Day One: "What is Science?" Spend the next 16 weeks reading, writing and debating that very question. Correct answer - nobody knows. Best answer: Learning how to ask a question where the answer matters.
Using science to evaluate a design? Sure. But the design itself is... wait for it... engineering. Of course engineers can do science, and scientist can engineer. Heck, musicians can be scientists, and vice versa. But that doesn't mean that engineering is science.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Who the fuck decided to post this religionist rant on /. ????
work in progress
"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".
A single semester intro to philosophy is enough to muddy the waters on what's meant by "Truth" (capital T). No religion needs to be involved.
Seriously, does science really care if we live in the matrix or not? Provided what we can observe is absolutely consistent, science can suss out the rules of the world but it doesn't purport to answer if what we observe is "Real" or not.
A scientist has an idea about reality [...]
A non-scientist has an idea about reality [...]
You helpfully describe two different approaches to tackling ideas about reality, but I'm not sure it is a good idea to personify it in this way. It is better to look at how people behave in specific situations rather than apply one or other characteristic to everything an individual does. Any individual scientist will make some theories and attempt to disprove them but they will also accept other theories without proof.
I have a science degree so I probably count as a scientist but I don't apply the scientific method to everything I do. This is partly because I am too lazy to use it for everything, partly because I know the danger of "overthinking" things and partly because there are things in my life for which the scientific method simply does not apply because they are not measurable or repeatable.
You have a tremendous advantage though - you write beautifully. Your novel will sell well - just get some religious sociopath to market it.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Usually treat religion as science. Seriously. all the folks who call science a religion somehow tend to be fundamentalists that use observation and conclusions towards religion.. they treat the Bible like a scientific manual, even though they poo poo science. And all science is, is conclusions based on observation and repeatable experiments.
Why does every discussion about science have to turn into a discussion about religion? Especially so when the discussion is led by self-proclaimed atheists who are so willing to let everybody know that they don't need God, a religion, or anything they consider "unscientific" (even though a lot of their reasoning is illogical and unscientific itself) to live their lives? Shouldn't you guys be the first ones to drop it, forget about it, and move on to a discussion that is relevant for intelligent people above the age of 18? Ad hominem, yes, but for the force of the argument it's worth it: Only recently enlightened 18-year old assholes have to parade around screaming "I'm an Atheist! Hooray! Long live everything that doesn't resemble religion!). Why not just forget about religion? Let us just have a good fruitful discussion about science. I too believe science and religion are incompatible, they are just kinda different things, and someone can be a religious scientist, that is his right, but when discussing science itself....leave out religion! It doesn't help the conversation, it doesn't help science, and it definitely doesn't help people who read posts on the internet which they have already decided their opinion on.
Scratching religion --- This guy has a terrible understanding of the scientific revolution. And Francis Bacon was a kind of revolutionary, but definitely not the world's greatest intellectual. His organization of science has been thrown out for a good hundred years. Aristotle was not an "intellectual" but a philosopher, and for a thousand years, with a capital P. Francis Bacon's idea of science is a perfect example of why we are raping the earth: Nature is a woman who must be beaten to expose her secrets. (No joke, Bacon's language! Albeit, not verbatim.) Science was seen as a mastery of the universe, as a kind of method that will reveal every secret of the universe. Nothing is more epistemologically unsound. Feminists would also have a field day with this gentleman's article. So would Kuhnian critics.
Maybe, before people write articles about the philosophy of science, they ought to take a class or at the very least read a couple books about the philosophy of science? A single semester of philosophy of science can allow anyone to see this article (while having a good intention) is very unsound.
While true, this is pretty useless complaining. I think I heard some baristas having this same conversation last week at Starbucks. So how's that screenplay coming along?
It feels like /. has tired of the cut and paste global warming/climate change/global cooling/whatever threads - that were guarantee to bring in 600+ posts in a day to this new feels like the same thing topic, which also seems to bring in the same 600+ postings a day - as the writeup is questioning statistical models...
I refuse to play the cut and paste game as so many of these folks simply have no desire to discuss, they only want to ram their religion, er science, down my throat and the second I disagree with even the smallest point, or point out something that I believe is not being done well, I get attacked as an evil non-believer, er. denier.
If we all stop responding to these clickbait stories maybe we can get back to tech topics?
Murphy was an optimist
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Oh, in France they call that "Charcuterie"
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Not any more.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
gday meustrus , you took the words out of my mouth , i totally agree , and as another poster stated you wrote it much better ! i would like to add that our very everyday languige adds to the problem , consider " the earth goes AROUND the sun " when in fact the orbit is not a circle ! " what goes up MUST come down " when we have sent things that will leave our solar system , and i assume by that logic the things we left on the moon will fall back to earth ! in school i learned that our solar system has 9 planets , now it seems we have 8 , as a matter of fact most things i was tought have changed . i know people who are convinced that TIME is a manmade thing , when i replyed with " thats strange i have never seen a baby turn into an adult instatainiuosly , or as seed grow into a tree in zero time " i was told that i miss the point . then there was the bloke who told me that it is AIRPRESSURE that keeps our feet on the ground ! when i told my TEACHER that 1 litre of water weighs " at a certain temp " i kg he took a glass bottle put a ltr water into it , did not tare the bottle , put it on a scale and told me i was wrong , and there is the prove ! then most people only know half answers , water boils at a 100 deg C ( it does but at seelevel ) i have checked the boiling point at 2000 metres , needless to say it was lower . i have even had to try to explain to a uni educated manager why it took me longer to take things at first 100 feet , then 300 feet , he wanted to know why it was taking me longer ! after half an hour trying to explain , he said " i have heard what you are saying , but i still want to know why it's taking you so long !! all these people though they where intelegent !
the power of men in charge of words over men in charge of machines surpasses all wondering S WEIL
"Values, life meanings, purposes, and qualities slip through science like a sea slips through the nets of fishermen. Yet man swims in this sea, so he cannot exclude it from his purview. This is what was meant when we noted earlier that a scientific world view is in principle impossible. Taken in its entirety, the world is not as science says it is; it is as science, philosophy, religion, the arts, and everyday speech say it is. Not science but the sum of man's symbol systems, of which science is but one, is the measure of things.
With science itself, there can be no quarrel. Scientism is another matter. Whereas science is positive, contenting itself with reporting what it discovers, scientism is negative. It goes beyond the actual findings of science to deny that other approaches to knowledge are valid and other truths true. In doing so it deserts science in favor of metaphysics-- bad metaphysics as it happens, for as contention that there are no truths save those of science is not itself a scientific truth, in affirming it scientism contradicts itself. It also carries marks of a religion-- a secular religion, resulting from overextrapolation from science, that has seldom numbered great scientists among its votaries."
Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World's Religions
if the people who stopped the iceage had only known that their actions will start global warming would they still have done it ?? and the iceage before that , and so on ! i know that polushion is a bad thing , as for co2 , at present we are more than 7,000,000,000, people on earth ! each of us exhale co2 , has anyone calculated how much co2 we humans create ? the worst part of this is that nobody is doing anything about that ( the production of co2 by our bodies ) , just as nobody is doing anything about the methane produced by cattle , ect ! the point i am trying to make is that a lot of people seem to consern themself with bits and pieces , instead of looking at the compleat picture ! for instance all of a sudden we must buy little bottles of water made out of plastic , thus leading to mointans of plastic bottles !! what is the reason that stopped milk in glass bottles , they can be used time after time ( i used to work at a milk bottling plant , we washed the glass bottles then refill them ) the amount of soap used was small ! lastly recycling paper , how many people take into consideration the heavy metals in the ink , hands up all those who do know that !
the power of men in charge of words over men in charge of machines surpasses all wondering S WEIL
to suit yet another agenda. http://www.jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Further_Reading_files/Diamond%201987_1.pdf may have some value (etymology if nothing else).
The ultimate example of this kind of holier than thou science is General Relativity. And behind general relativities mathematical hedge is a simple stupid secret - the theory fails totally at FTL speeds. General Relativity depends on a rule that defines a totally unstable FTL space and effectively rules out the existence of a large or old universe. In short behind its perfection at STL speeds general relativity is utter rubbish.
The real question is why. Military conspiracy theory? (at the paranoid heart of the cold war) Stupidity? Too many drugs? (...) or simply a joke to test the intelligence of other scientists?
No-one will probably ever read this post ... mutter..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
A well articulated critique of our current condition. I have been thinking along these lines for quite a while, but haven't phrased it quite so well.
My thinking started down this path when speaking to an astute lecturer at my university. He mentioned that if any scientist found a glass of water in a room that had been left there for a day it would be impossible for him to know what state the water was in when it arrived; was it chilled, room temperature, or hot? It could have been frozen or just out of a boiling kettle!
A person who studied behaviour would probably come to a better conclusion than someone who studied the hard sciences; and even then it would be little more than an educated guess.
If we have so little insight into that glass of water, what makes us so certain that we can know anything that happened a thousand, or even worse, a million years ago. As Feynman states in his lectures on the methodology of science: you guess, do an experiment and if the theory disagrees with the experiment it is wrong. If it agrees it could be right, so think of another experiment. Any other way is not scientific method.
Note: the one thing Feynman did not say was that if it agreed with experiment then it was right! That is precisely because science can't! The best science can tell you is that the theory hasn't been proven wrong yet.
Along the way some theories have stood up long enough for us to do something useful with them, and this is what I think science is really there for - for allowing us to do something useful.
If you think about this concept long enough you can come to the conclusion that if we had different theories we could have different technology. We have quantum theory which has produced the computer age, but what if we had field theories instead? Perhaps we would have ended up with "anti-grav" cars flying through the air like many science fiction writers have predicted. The thing is, we just haven't had good enough guesses in that area that have stood up to experiment...
Science is easy. Everybody does it every day. Babies are doing science when they are crying in different ways, and noticing which of these get them more milk. Evolution is science, in which the hypothesis are generated by random mutation, and the test of 'truth' is survival.
The thing that is moving us forward is memory. Remembering what worked, and what didn't. Evolution gets to write the truth in DNA. We write it down with journals.
We are writing memory down in a way that probably represents the truth, so others can depend on it, and thus 'stand on the shoulders of giants'. We are publishing those results so that more of us can start at a point that will move the frontier forward.
That is why things like manipulating science textbooks to reflect religious belief ticks me off. Or, editing climate reports because your buddies in the oil industry don't like them. It perverts the process of remembering the truth.
Note that whether god exists is immaterial to this endeavor. If she exists, she is rooting us on, hoping we'll understand more of the world, to her credit. If she doesn't exist, well, we get new iPhones and cars that don't crash and an internet that lets us keep remembering what worked and maybe quantum computers that can simulate worlds, so we can be the gods.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain