Science is about facts, but specifically in the attempt at discovering them. science is the constant testing of ideas in the search for facts/knowledge/truth. No?
The premature attaching/making stuff up is normally done by nonscientists and shotty ones.
This is certainly my understanding, yes.
Sort of. But if science were about facts, then you wouldn’t be able to advance the state of knowledge by disproving those facts. A fact, by its nature, is universally and immutably true and not subject to disproof; something can’t be a fact one day and then a falsehood the next.
Science works on either hypotheses, which are things that may or may not be true, or theories, which are things that seem to work well enough but are open to disproof. Scientists rarely talk about ‘facts’, or ‘truth’. There are a few things that are accepted as so robust that they can be considered facts - eg., the speed of light - but they’re basically just fixed points which the whole Heath Robinson contraption of science can hang from.
There’s nothing wrong with making stuff up if you test it. A lot of scientific discoveries arose from someone making stuff up. Consider the idea of ‘the ether’: the reasoning was that, if electromagnetic waves are a kind of wave, then presumably they have to wave through something. Sounds reasonable. But basically someone just made that up because it sounds reasonable.
Where science comes in is that you can take a made-up idea and derive some predictions from it. For example, you should be able to ‘see’ the effects of the ether in certain ways. You can then test those predictions by experiment. If your predictions don’t hold up, then the thing-you-made-up has a big problem. It is either partially or entirely false, and you have to either modify it, or make up something new to explain the new observations. The Michaelson-Morley experiment is a classic of its kind because it showed, in a particularly elegant manner, that the ‘ether’ idea was false, or at least had a serious flaw.
People - including scientists - can get too attached to theories. Einstein famously ended up sidelined from the scientific community because he couldn’t discard the idea of a deterministic universe, even though the evidence showed that some physical phenomena can only be described in terms of probabilities.
If you really want to split the semantic hairs perhaps we can settle on science is about the search for scientific facts, as opposed to unjustified belief?
I’m not sure if it’s splitting hairs. The distinction between a fact and a theory is fundamental to the pursuit of science. I’d also argue that there’s no such thing as a ‘scientific fact’. There are facts, and there are non-facts. The ‘scientific’ bit doesn’t really add meaning.
I’d certainly agree that it’s a quest to demolish unjustified belief. It really irritates me that just saying the word “science!” these days is used as a (very effective) method of deflecting attacks on unjustified belief.
Sure, because not everything in science is a theory. That’s a fact (but not a scientific one). For example, gold has certain properties that scientists have discovered scientifically, and so they are discussed using scientific terms of reference, and are also used for further science; these properties are not opinions. Hence, there are scientific facts regarding the properties of gold.
There is philosophical disputation of this, I am sure. You are, of course, welcome to disagree, but I’m still of the opinion that science is interested in facts.
Great. If hadn’t already written the first bit, I’d stop here, but too late now!
OK, fair complaint. It is perhaps too easy and common these days for one to read a single news article about one research study and think one has gained some indisputable knowledge. A lot of people are definitely not very smart, let alone scientifically literate. We could flesh this out a lot with the COVID mask debate alone (where the CDC said no, then yes, now lay people still debate, as do scientists I imagine).
You know what’s really unscientific? A lot of psychology!
Yeah, it’s a prime example of science gone horribly wrong. Loads of people claiming “science says that masks work”, and another bunch of people claiming “science says that masks don’t work”. Nearly all of these people don’t realise that science can only say one of two things:
So when you ask Science a question, you have to make sure you ask it in such a way that those possible answers tell you something useful.
In this case, you have to first decide “What do you mean by ‘works’?”, and then formulate some no/maybe questions accordingly. There isn’t really any debate over the experimental results, at least in outline: disposable masks and non-medical masks don’t protect the individual, but they do have some modest effect on protecting other people. So then you have to ask “Why is this important?”, and this is where science stops providing answers and you have to make a judgement call. Is it reasonable to mandate mask-wearing? Some people might say yes and some might say no, but science can’t tell you the right thing to do, and people really aren’t debating the science. They’re debating their opinions of the implication of the science.
Another example I’m familiar with is the use of statins. “Statins work!”, insist the manufacturers. What do they mean by work? Well, they reduce cholesterol and LDL-C, quite dramatically. They have some papers that demonstrate it. So if that’s your goal, then yes, statins work. What they don’t appear to do is save lives, at least not outside of a very narrowly-defined subset of patients. And yet they are handed out like aspirin to vast swathes of the population. Someone, somewhere, has decided that reducing cholesterol in and of itself is an important clinical goal, and that goal is supported by science. But it’s not supported by common sense.
A lot of science, generally. It turns out that psychology has come in for a lot of finger-pointing here, and deservedly so. But poor-quality studies are rife in other subjects. My favourite target for ridicule is nutrition, which IMO is in a far worse state than psychology. A lot of it boils down to a failure of methodology: people trying to prove things, instead of trying to (as they should) disprove things. When they try to prove things that are contradicted by known facts (ie., principles of physiology or physics that are well-understood) it all gets really silly.
I was actually very impressed by the insistence of my university teachers on scientific rigour (despite having a mediocre reputation generally, my uni’s psychology department was/is held in fairly high regard). We did an entire module on bullshit-spotting; this was a small-group tutorial format where the prof. would give us a paper to scan through and we’d discuss methodological flaws, misuse of statistics, etc.
yeah, but the thread title though…
I took an entire course on bullshit production, they called it Qualitative Research II
#45?
This is, in fact (harhar), what i am saying. science is the pursuit, or discovery of facts. True science .is the discipline of proving everything wrong in the hopes that the end goal something cannot be proven wrong anymore and is thus accepted as a fact. Science doesnt mean that fact point has been reached.
Realistically, probably nothing can be an absolute fact as there can always be doubt about a certain thing. Again, thats whats fun about science, everyone is ignorant, regardless how experienced we may think we are. So for the time being we use replicable testing to be our good enough for now facts.
Any real scientist would agree there will always be at least a fraction of a doubt in any conclusion. And thats what drives us forward. Or, in other words, thats what drives scientific pursuit: the goal of figuring out facts whilst realising said end goal is nearly impossible.
This is where science and religion tend to .fork. science wants to prove something wrong and if it cant then we accept it as the best current answer (you are right in saying we mistake .this scenario as fact, i totally agree). Religion wants to do the opposite. Enter psychology in why humans may want to do so and fear the search of .knowledge so much. Take the long standing religious problem and extrapolate that to how our brains behave on the daily with everything. Even atheists. Then we can start shedding egos and let some scientific unbias prevail.
Another recent article of relevance to the thread
Does this mean a certain someone thinks I’m charming? It isn’t a word I would use to describe myself…
Because you hate yourself.
After some days staying away from these discussions I’m kinda surprised about the ongoing fight lol.
Also, “the peak woke” thread used to be fun when it was just a place where to show their nuttery, and not a discussion about left and right and shit. That’s why I don’t visit it anymore, because I wanted cheap fun and not thoughtful or stupid discussions about other things.
If nuts are your thing, I can recommend this thread
https://tw.forumosa.com/t/salty-nuts/204187
Haha, you got me with that one
Again #45