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Comment by z3phyr | Hacker News Reader

> How do you decide something is scientific?

Science is a method of making a claim, testing it with vivid experiments, testing it more, recording observations, wait for other people to test the claim with their own experiments, and if the tests happen to agree with the claims, it becomes a consensus.

You can participate in the scientific verification of a claim by

1) By testing it yourself using proper scientific method and proper lab equipment. President requisite is education.

2) If you can't afford that, then wait for scientific community to test that. If there is a consensus of statistical certainty from the various scientific institutions you trust, then you can choose to form your facts around those.

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So how does the scientific community decide which are the theories that is worth spending time on to prove them and which are not ? Are there personal biases ? How do we know choosing theory X over theory Y to prove will advance Science and humanity ? Is it just the budget available to prove theory X over theory Y the criterion?

>So how does the scientific community decide which are the theories that is worth spending time on to prove them and which are not?

Four primary variables: 1) Collective interest of the researchers in the topic of attack 2) Collective interest of the financiers of research on some application of the topic of attack 3) Funding for research 4) The effective tools for experiments are already invented and available (example, a microscope)

So it is possible that we could have pursued(time and money) on things that do not turn out to be impactful or left out working on those that could have had a major impact.

Yes. But it does not matter.

We do not do science for some high level goal of "Benefit for humanity". I love stars, I like astronomy, and when I study the stars, I do not think about how my study would impact humanity. I just study them because I find them interesting. (Studying star systems do not actually have much impact on humanity in general, mostly).

Attempting to qualify science only limits it.

That probably explains why we didn't put money in an anti viral drug which would have saved lives during a pandemic. Our goals if you look from a humanity or global perspective are misplaced

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