Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

I'm a practicing biomedical researcher.

When people in my daily life do the "X ... for SCIENCE!" thing, or i see "science: it works, bitches" bumper stickers, or the like, I'm always a little sad.

I try to remind myself that the map isn't the terrain, and that humans are guaranteed to build little cargo cults just to form a hermeneutic and handle the world, but it's still disappointing to see the form of a thing being, frankly, worshipped, instead of the thing itself being used productively. The scientific process is (to abuse a phrase a little more) a wonderful servant , but a terrible master.

Hell, even Indiana Jones comes up sometimes: "Archaeology is the search for fact, not Truth. If it's Truth you're interested in, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall."

I know that scientific fields are not even close to being alone in this, it's just a sobering reminder to keep myself on my toes. Feynman's point in "Cargo Cult Science" (1974)[0] remains very true: it is really super hard to avoid bullshitting yourself, even if you're aware that that's a thing that can happen and you try to prevent it.

[0]: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3043/1/CargoCult.pdf

This is what always gets me. People claim to love science but don't listen to it or have a basic understanding of the actual process. We can see it with hot topic issues like the current covid crisis or global warming. People take the easy positions and say because of that that they understand the science. But in reality science is extremely nuanced[0]. It isn't so much the lack of nuance that makes these people harmful, it is that they are adamant that they are well researched.

We make the jokes with anti vax people that just because a baby came out of you doesn't mean a PhD did. Yet, I don't think how many people realize how harmful it is to oversimplify these topics. We can't solve these big complex problems if we make them politicized and just pretend that there is a singular and simple solution to everything. And that everyone that deviates slightly from the accepted dogma is a heretic[1] (which ironically tends to include a significant number of scientists in the field of concern).

[0] As an example, there are many, even here, that think we just need solar and wind and we'll solve global warming.

[1] I say that these are armchair scientists armed with a baseball bat.

>> "Archaeology is the search for fact, not Truth."

I've always hated that quote. If it were true, archaeology papers would be nothing more than photographs of things people found. As soon as the archaeologist points to something and says "tool" or "weapon", then opinion, interpretation and "truth" are part of the equation.

So much of archaeology has been thrown away as junk science. The artifacts on which that science was based have not been tossed, we have just reinterpret them. We no longer interpret dinosaur bones as evidence of mythical dragons any more than we see the Grand Canyon as evidence of Noah's flood.

To play the devil, how is history scientific? I mean as far as we know theres only one history. And parts of it are not known to us. But in absence of recorded accounts (and even in the face of them), aren’t we bound to interpretation? Science measures the tangible. History isn’t.

I’ve watched Rashomon and you won’t fool me: there’s n! histories where n is ~ population.

I'm reminded of Motel of the Mysteries, which has been posted on here before, in which a future archaeologist stumbling across the remains of a late twentieth century motel concludes that everything from the television to the toilet must have had some kind of religious significance.

I took the usage of "truth" in that quote to mean a philosophical truth, which I understand to be rather different from the way you are using that word.

In consideration, I just discovered this article, which I haven't read completely but seems to at least partially address this:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/

no, i mean capital-T philosophy truth too. Empirical, capital-s Science isn’t specially well-equipped to investigate it, and the philosophy of science is long and interesting reading.

You don't seem to grasp "science" is just another word for "figuring out how the universe works".

Imagine we all lived on a smaller planet and are star was going to blow up real soon now(tm) the only way we could save ourselves from extinction would be through science.

There's no other "method" of truth seeking and technological advancement to develop technologies to become space-faring race.

We can't believe the bible to mars. A better idea may be that the human brain is flawed in ways that human beings are unaware of because they are not scientifically informed enough about their own mind and its limitations and constantly think nonsense through no fault of their own.

The whole phenomenone seems to be a large-scale manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect, where the most bullish people are often the ones who have only the most superficial knowledge of science.

Cargo Cult is the most apt description. It amazes me how blind and uncritical even highly "educated" people can be, outside their narrow areas of specialization.

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