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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). "
lol - I have to say though I feel rather vindicated. In the http://science.slashdot.org/st... discussion I was making this argument (though probably not as well) and got mocked for it.
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!
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)
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.
Scientist here - by geekoid's definition at least.
Scientists use jargon for the same reason sailors do - to efficiently communicate a very specific concept. In a sailing vessel at sea in a storm, you really don't want to take a minute to explain that you mean the green-white striped rope that connects the beam to the hull - you say mainsheet*.
Now, there is a lot of nonsense going on in science, with ridiculous performance metrics, a discouragement of actually innovative high-risk research, a sometimes religious worship of established names and theory; and a lot of stuff gets published not because it is particularly innovative, enlightening or even robust, but because it uses the right buzz words and cites the right people. However, that does not make science as an endeavour less wortyh - it's a bit like** how democracy is a good idea even if a lot of politicians (the ones in high places, at least) are dodgy.
* if my English sailing jargon is correct - not a native speaker
** my next analogy will be about cars, I promise
Which "AGW denying bit" would that be? It can't be the part about observation because it hasn't gotten any warmer for the past 18 years, so there would be no warming to be observed.
When one activist website tell you that the earth is warming, and another activist website tells you that the earth isn't warming, it's a good idea to check the actual scientific data to determine which activist website is getting the facts wrong. Here's an 18 year graph. The earth has in fact been warming over the last 18 years.
Here's the 50 year graph. That's a neat website that lets you generate graphs over any date range. If you want to play with it, just be sure to update the year-values for both series 1 (the red graph) and series 2 (the green graph).
There was also an unexpected surge in heat being pulled from the atmosphere into the deep ocean. This has recently pulled a vast amount of heat off of the typical graphs of surface-level atmospheric temperature. This is why air-temperature-graphs gives a false impression of somewhat slower warming the last few years.
Air is extremely low density. Very little of the global heat resides in the atmosphere, and what does show up in the air is extremely variable as heat shifts between the air and the land&sea. In fact the atmosphere only accounts for 2% of global heat content. The land surface temperatures are about 8%. The massive oceans account for 90% of the planet's heat content. Here's a graph of ocean heat over the last 50-odd years. The vast majority of heat ultimately goes into the oceans. That graph shows that there has been absolutely no slowing in the rate of global heat increase. Global warming hasn't paused. Global warming hasn't stopped. Global warming hasn't slowed.
There doesn't exist ONE scientific body of national or international standing that still denies man-made global warming. The last national or international scientific body to dissent was, comically, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists back in 2007. Yep, even the oil geologists stopped denying it seven years ago.
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