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). "

Comments

In lost the will to live ...

[amalcolm]

... half way through the summary

Re:In lost the will to live ...

[JMJimmy]

Religion and science can co-exist if people stopped attributing religious or anti-religious views to science. Science makes no claims about religion and they are not mutually exclusive. When atheists are asked "well, if you don't believe in religion what do you believe in" - they'll often erroneously say "science". Science is not a belief system though it may cause claims of religion to be called into question example: Jesus walking on water. To our current understanding of science this is not possible unaided. Maybe it was a hoax, maybe it was a divine being, maybe it wasn't a literal claim - science doesn't know, that's for people to examine or accept on faith (as part of a religion or otherwise).

Science needs to be separated from anti-religious ideology.

Re:In lost the will to live ...

[Gavrielkay]

"True atheist?"

I know quite a few atheists and am one myself. Most of us don't go around talking about it and are somewhat surprised to run into another one. If you're going to define a "sense of rightness" as "Deity" then I suppose that's your business, but it is not what I think anyone's common definition would be. I have a sense of rightness that derives from empathy. It doesn't take any notion of the supernatural or any deity to understand that if I can feel pain, then I can expect that my fellow humans can as well. If I feel that someone causing me pain is "bad" then it follows that causing others' pain is bad.

Surely you've heard of the Golden Rule? This requires zero belief in the supernatural or any sort of sacredness. It is my experience as an atheist that many theists are so attached to their world view that they simply can't help but ascribe it to others, even if they have to mangle the definitions of common words to do so.

Re:In lost the will to live ...

[Spugglefink]

I have a sense of rightness that derives from empathy.

The irony of my own atheism is that not believing I have a sky daddy on my side has left me inclined to turn the other cheek, to be kind to other people, and so on like that. I can't, in good conscience, just dump the fat 45 year old wife who bores me intellectually and sexually, and consumes ravenous quantities of my income in ways that are of no benefit to myself. I can't even put down this wretched old dog who will just stand there looking you in the eye while taking a shit in the living room, who has been limping along in poor health for years, but still has a happy enough life. The dog is 20 years old, the same as the marriage, and I've been waiting for both of them to die of natural causes for the longest time now. I can't bring myself to put either one out of my misery, even though the misery is considerable, and the only real consolation I have is that I'm doing the right thing in martyring myself this way. Somehow the idea of allowing my own happiness to be a priority is a concept that never made its way into my atheistic ethos.

In contrast, one of my best friends is a deeply religious true believer who can attest, with no irony at all, that "every word in the Bible is the literal truth." I've thrown the full weight of the Skeptic's Annotated Bible at him, and he has an answer, an explanation, a dodge, or an excuse for absolutely every last line item. I couldn't believe the things he does if I wanted to, but it certainly has led to a sharply contrasting life. I suppose I keep him around in order to live vicariously through him. When you have Sky Daddy on your side, you can do anything and call it moral. He used to own a brothel in Mexico, and he was involved in sex trafficking operations whereby rural farm girls were lured to the city under false pretenses, and forced to work off their debt in the brothel. He dumped his old fat wife for a fresh young third world farm girl who worships him like a king, and is genuinely happy to do so. That's the hell of it right there. I've talked to his wife plenty of times. I know quite a lot about misery and abuse, and I see none present in her. She's really happy, beautiful, and servile. The only time I've seen her unhappy was when my friend forgot to let her perform some minor service or other for him, and did it himself instead.

The contrast between our lives is amazing. We have the same job and work the same 70 hours a week. He gets worshiped as a king, and I get walked on by a fat woman and then come home to clean up dog shit every day. If I could just suspend my disbelief and embrace this goofy Sky Daddy stuff, then I could become a sociopath too, and as a sociopath, I could be happy to shoot the dog, divorce the wife, and get me one of those servile young slave women from abroad. What man wouldn't want to come home to dinner and a blowjob seven nights a week? Me, apparently. I'd rather let a fat woman walk all over me, spend all my money, and keep me on an eternal debt treadmill, because it's kind thing to do, and the kind thing is always the right thing. That's what my atheist mother taught me; a fat woman who did the same thing to my poor meek father.

Sigh.

The article isn't any better.

[Dr. Manhattan]

From TFA:

So let me explain what science actually is. Science is the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation. That's the science that gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet.

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.

Re:The article isn't any better.

[swillden]

From TFA:

So let me explain what science actually is. Science is the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation. That's the science that gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet.

No - engineering "gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet". Science gives us the theoretical (in the scientific sense) frameworks and tools that engineering can apply to do that. The author shows at least as much confusion as those he decries, and he does it from the start.

Yes. That quote describes the philosophy known as "empiricism", which asserts that the epistemological purpose and process of science is to derive methods for prediction, as opposed to creating explanations. The modern, Popperian and post-Popperian, understanding of science is that it is based on the philosophy of falsifiability, and is a process of conjecture and criticism, with the goal of creating expanations for how the world works. The explanations do enable prediction, but they're deeper than that, because rules of thumb that provide accurate predictions can exist without explanations of the underlying phenomena, and such rules of thumb are strictly less valuable and less useful than explanations. The most essential difference, though there are many, is that explanations explain their own "reach", making clear the set of phenomena to which they apply, while rules of thumb don't, regardless of their accuracy.

Also, some of the criticism takes the form of experiment, but not all, and in fact not even most. Most conjectured explanations are discarded after only a little analysis, because that's all it takes to show them to be inconsistent with what's already known, or to show them to be bad or shallow explanations for other reasons. Controlled experimentation, per se, isn't even necessary. This is a good thing because in some areas of science, for example, astrophysics, we don't have the ability to experiment on the objects of study. Yet we can still theorize, criticize, examine evidence and move gradually towards ever more accurate and deeper explanations.

The explanations provided by science are, as you say, what make engineering possible, but science is the process of creating ever-better explanations of the universe, not merely of producing reliable predictive rules.

Re:Philosophy of Science

[srobert]

That's exactly why I suggest that teaching about creationism IS appropriate for a science class. If I were a biology teacher (and my approach were permissible), when the subject of creationism inevitably came up in the class, rather than dismiss it with the arrogant assertion that "this is a science class, we'll not discuss your religion here", I would, instead, follow up with a discussion of Popper's criteria. Then I might request a short essay discussing how well evolutionary theory or creationism met the criteria for a scientific hypothesis.
That, in my opinion, is part of teaching science.

The article is more extreme than the summary

[Illserve]

I read the summary and thought that this article might be on to something, but on reading it I don't think the author really understands science at all.

Here are some excerpts that I find particularly disagreeable:

"Science is not the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It's a form of engineering "

Absolutely not. Science is indeed in pursuit of Truth. The author criticizes Aristotle's form of "research", quite rightly, but then throws the baby out with the bathwater when he says this.

"Because people don't understand that science is built on experimentation, they don't understand that studies in fields like psychology almost never prove anything, since only replicated experiment proves something and, humans being a very diverse lot, it is very hard to replicate any psychological experiment."

This is factually incorrect. There are many Psychological phenomena that can be reproduced reliably. The Stroop effect, the Simon effect, visual illusions..

"What distinguishes modern science from other forms of knowledge such as philosophy is that it explicitly forsakes abstract reasoning about the ultimate causes of things"

This is completely incorrect. A core goal of science is to understand the cause of things by developing abstracted understandings of them (i.e. theories).

I know nothing about this author, but from the article, I suspect that he is trying to reconcile his beliefs in science and religion by convincing himself that science cannot answer the big questions, it's just for making airplanes and computers. I could be wrong of course (--- very important scientific principle)

Re:AGW

[wytcld]

Yep, coorelation != causation.

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.

Science suffers when caught up in politics ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The whole article is just trolling

[flyingsquid]

The article is kind of dumb. It's some guy who isn't a scientist and who doesn't really understand the scientific method arrogantly bitching about how everybody else doesn't really understand the scientific method. He argues that science is "the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation", but that's a really narrow, limited way of viewing science, because historical processes aren't open to controlled experiments. Evolution, the history of the planet, the origins of the universe... you can't really run experiments to determine what happened, so by this rather narrow definition, paleontology, geology, and cosmology aren't really science at all. So do we reject the findings of Darwin, reject plate tectonics, reject hypotheses on the origins of the universe as unscientific?

I mean, it's not like you can run an experiment to determine if the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid... I mean, what would that involve? Creating planets and populating them with dinosaurs, Jurassic-Park style, and then bombarding them with asteroids? Even if it were possible, it wouldn't really prove anything except whether the mechanism is feasible, it wouldn't determine whether that was actually what happened or not. So you can't really use an experiment.

What you CAN do is make predictions based on that hypothesis, and then make observations to see if the predictions are borne out. For one, you should see evidence of asteroid impact, things like iridium, shock-deformed quartz, microtektites, an impact crater, maybe even a tiny fragment of the asteroid itself... and in fact, after 30 years of looking, every single one of those things showed up, so we're pretty confident there was a giant asteroid impact. For another, you predict that the extinctions coincide with that impact if the impact caused them. And when you look at really abundant microfossils, stuff like fossil plankton and pollen, you can trace the Cretaceous stuff right up to the iridium layer that is the debris field, and then these species vanish forever. So the observations of geology, geochemistry, and paleontology are all consistent with predictions. The same process is used to test other hypotheses about historical processes, such as continental drift, or natural selection, or the formation of the solar system.

That's the *actual* scientific method. It's testing hypotheses against observation. Controlled experiment may or may not come into it at all.

The article says science = experimental science

[presidenteloco]

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