No. It's the scientific method - by which truth can be separated from crap.
- Be sceptical
- Believe the data
- Keep asking questions.
All the rest is just fluff. Most of the time you have experiments before hypothesis. Or an intuition that only match part of it. Or publish some food for though and it will only be proved to be false hundreds of years later. The whole "hypothesis -> experiment -> theory" miss so many things.
From the french wikipedia entry
Très souvent, le terme de « méthode » engage l'idée implicite de son unicité, tant auprès du grand public que de certains chercheurs, qui de surcroît la confondent parfois avec la seule méthode hypothético-déductive. L'étude des pratiques des chercheurs révèle cependant une si grande diversité de démarches et de disciplines scientifiques que l'idée d'une unité de la méthode est rendue très problématique.
Quick and bad translation :
Most of the time, the term "method" push the implicit idea of unicity, to some scientists but also to the public, who also reduce it to the solely "hypothetico-deductive" method. The study of scientists practices reveal a so big diverity of method and scientific fields that the idea of an unicity of the method is highly problematic.
What about the motto of the Royal Society: Nullius in verba; Take nobody's word for it.
Test it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechtsstaat
(Until now I didn't even know that this German word is also used in the English language.)
The "state of law" is a combination of the Golden rule (which works only within small groups) with some aspects of the scientific method (reproducible results and independence of the subject: If I do the same thing as somebody else, in the same circumstances, it should be equally okay. Or, if it is not okay, we both should face the same consequences).
"The Golden Rule (treat others as you would wish to be treated) has the same fatal flaw as future-is-like-the-past inductivism: it justifies anything and nothing, depending on what attributes of the other person you choose to imagine yourself having. And so, like induction, it only seems to yield some specific moral conclusion if you had already reached that conclusion by other means." - David Deutsch.
Here, "other means" is just the scientific method (conjecture, criticism) generalised to morality. So I'd say that the scientific method, (and a good epistemology in general), is a more valuable concept than the Golden Rule.
https://twitter.com/DavidDeutschOxf/status/25231910520029593...
This is particularly problematic because it assumes you know everything about the other person's situation.
"If I were acting like that, I would be thankful if someone hit me in the face to make me realize how rude I was being."
"If I were poor, I would be grateful for someone who took away my government handouts so I became self-sustaining."
"If I were rich, I wouldn't mind being taxed at 98%."
Etc
And just like there are people out there who disagree on what the golden rule means, so too are there people who disagree on the scientific method - I've lost count of the number of times that I've had to say here on HN that the scientific method extends beyond 'test the null hypothesis'.
> it justifies anything and nothing, depending on what attributes of the other person you choose to imagine yourself having.
Only if you apply it in a flawed or superficial manner. Heuving's example of "I'd like someone to punch me in the face" is a clear example of this. The scientific method has equally poor results if you apply it in a flawed or superficial manner.
In any case, regardless of opinion on which is better, they're both far more important to us as humans than atomic theory :)
"My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you."
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/879764-count-zero
If the problem domain isn't amenable to the crude reductionism puny human brains are capable of, then there are other ways of "dealing with it." (Other than applying a hydraulic press.) Science can help you be a good dog owner, but not all of the problem solving strategies and wisdom most dog owners will be the scientific method. The same goes for being a human being.
Having said that, I see two areas in science where we have serious issues.
1) In some sciences, strict application of scientific method is not possible in large scale, due to unhealthy influence from the outside.
The classic example from the middle age is the research on astronomy and physics being suppressed and/or heavily influenced by the church and political leaders.
Today, one of the best examples is research on economy. That is heavily influenced (and sometimes even paid) by various types of financially strong bodies. This leads to heavily biased results. Also, suddenly results become acceptable even though they are based on almost comically far-fetched assumptions.
2) In some sciences, the scientific method cannot be applied in all rigor, due to the nature of the topic of research.
For example, complex psychological tests cannot be done with a huge amount of people, because you won't find enough people doing so volutarily. Also, you can't simply repeat an experiment on the same human being, because are are influenced from and learned from the previous experiment, so will react differently than an "unused" human being.
[1] Some very popular multi-player games have a quite advanced economy, where the individual actions of each participant are recorded and can be analyzed. While this is not "real", it gives more detailed information about human economic interaction than all the mass surveillance in the "real word" right now. Also, the game developers have god-like powers in the virtual world, so they can run controlled experiments,. As far as I know, they already do so. And and if something goes really wrong, they still have the ultima ratio to reset everything to the state of a few hours or days ago. Or, they can re-interpret the last actions of the players in a more appropriate way. That may still make some players unhappy, but won't crash a real economy.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
"As with similar "laws" (e.g., Murphy's law), it is intended as a humorous adage rather than always being literally true."