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Comment by mithr | Hacker News Reader

I think this is kind of a reductive, attention-grabbing headline. The real intention is "stop equating 'the scientific process' with 'the entire body of knowledge that has ever been produced by people calling themselves scientists'".

The body of knowledge produced by scientists includes real truths, but also a lot of work produced by people without good methodology, and a lot of things that were thought to be correct at the time but were later disproved. And as the author mentioned, none of this is exempt from whatever society-level base assumptions were thought to be indisputable at the time.

For all that, the scientific process, while imperfect in many ways, is still the best way the human race has so far discovered to learn and advance. You could say that the pursuit of science is, by definition, the pursuit of truth.

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>is still the best way the human race has so far discovered to learn and advance

The way I see it - it's really successful in some domains and is worse than useless in others - because it rides on credibility it acquired in the domains it is effective in, it creates false confidence in results it produces in domains it doesn't fit.

In which domains do you believe it's ineffective?

What alternative methods do you suggest for the "domains it doesn't fit"?

The obvious answer would a philosophical approach. And an example of a domain it doesn't fit would be ethics.

When I studied philosophy, we applied scientific methodology to understand complex topics, categorising them, and evaluating them against each other. The theories of moral philosophy are under scrutiny in a way very similar to the (other) natural sciences.

That works to inform discussion. Having access to the modern knowledge of how the nervous system powers muscle movements helps elevate discussions around the intent to act and the deterministic natures of that intent well beyond what folks digesting the topic in the 1500s could comprehend. But there's a really hard limit with how far it can get you.

Provable things often point us toward certain answers - but provable science has historically shown us that it isn't afraid to pull the rug out from under us and throw a curveball. Physics is highly deterministic and ordered - extremely so - under you get subatomic - then everything goes out the window.

Philosophy obviously needs to not go directly against things we have a high confidence in - but there's still a lot of grey area in there especially where the philosophy of motion and ethics are involved.

I think it can very well fit ethics.

A lot of ethics argues that acting in such and such "ethical" way will result is some outcome, like more happiness, less harm to the environment, less harm to workers, less injustice, etc.

It would be great to test those assertions empirically as well. If it is true, devise an experiment, implement your ethical framework, measure outcomes, validate it, prove that it does improve on your claimed metrics.

Just to be clear, there is a place for thinking through first principles in science, that's part of the hypothesis phase. In that phase you can use inductive and abductive reasoning to guide yourself to a likely hypothesis. But science will want you to go further and test the hypothesis, to ascertain more strongly that it is a likely hypothesis.

The only part which isn't really applicable to science is deductive reasoning, because it relies on assuming truths and perfect formal logical rules of derivation. These can hold within a total imaginary setting, mathematics does this all the time for example, and so does a lot of philosophy, but when applied practically (which is where science comes in), you need to show that those assumptions hold in the real world and its current setting, and that the deduction rules do as well, and that brings you back to inductive and abductive reasoning, because you no longer control the range of the domain, it is now dictated by reality or our perception of it.

One helpful thing would be to separate the hard sciences from the soft sciences. Calculating the mass of a hydrogen atom is fundamentally different than determining which factors and how much of each are required to diagnose ADHD. The latter is very important and it deserves an important category that clearly distinguishes it from the former in the common language.

I'm not suggesting any, I'm saying it's better to make decisions knowing that you don't know than acting like you can model the system.

I don't really have a problem with people doing this kind of research either, I'm bothered when they try to use these models to prescribe behavior.

> it creates false confidence in results it produces in domains it doesn't fit

I don't think that's correct, people simply love to extrapolate beyond the evidence. You do a study where you take 6 grad student and tell them to push a button that sends electricity (supposedly) to a subject. You measure their behavior in that context. Okay, you've got a pretty small sample of something.

Now here comes the non-scientific part, a professor looking for fame and glory, a bunch of news site looking for clicks and views, and you get an article: "Science proves that people are willing to hurt others on command if told it is for an experiment."

See, the thing is that science is about slowly acquiring more knowledge and understanding and updating our mental models and understanding of things as more information shows up.

Here the experiment wasn't useless, it tells us one small extra bit of info we didn't have before. Doing experiments, testing hypothesis, those are still valuable. Extrapolating the result of those to mean more than they demonstrate is just a follow up hypothesis that then itself needs an experiment, etc.

Oh I mean, you can say "its body of knowledge" instead of "truth" but the punchy headline still works. Indeed, be careful calling it "body of knowledge" -- this can imply a level of truth, and this is what the article is attempting to dissuade you from: the scare-quote-unquote "science" is standing in for science's body-of-narrative, which we should not mistake for truth.

As a physicist the headline has an air of truth but this interpretation does not go far enough. Science is not even "about" the narratives it generated! Go to a science museum with your little one. There's no science on display. There's technology, sometimes discussions of what was done, very rarely you even get to peek inside how it was done. Even that isn't science, but it gets closer.

What you miss is setting the child up for certain expectations only for them to be subverted. The process of starting to develop a test that would really discriminate between two options so that you can ensure your guesses are on the right track. The process of sticking with a problem for months. The process of doing something an absurdly hard way that you know works but will be very very tedious, then looking at the final solution and finding out why that solution would have "made sense all along," then using what you know to find a simpler way to do it.

The kid never comes out of a science museum with new heuristics to use to evaluate how they fool themselves and what might be done about it. They hardly even will come out with new technologies to see the world from a different perspective.

So the narratives that were generated by science were substituted for science itself, just as much as when you watch Sabine Hossenfelder you don't learn how to solve the Schrodinger equation. Nothing wrong with her work, mind, pop-science just is this way. People are interested on what the latest theory is because that's something that you can recite at a dinner-party. To learn actual science would require more than the 3-minutes standing in front of an exhibit that feels "natural" at a science museum, more than a 10-minute YouTube video. What is at stake is no less than a conversion from the passive to the active attitude.

Stop equating Science [active, transformative, bubbling, at-hand] with Truth [passive, informative, cold and still, inaccessible], indeed.

The article seems to be wrong, though, and is strongly colored by the author's views about her own discipline. Many STEM fields have amassed a large body of knowledge, and there has been a qualitative shift in the 20th Century that needs to be taken into account. Philosophical criticisms tend to be narrowly focused on the fact that theories are superseded, forgetting that many of those older theories constitute a vast body of knowledge and continue to do so. Newtonian mechanics is a typical example. It's not wrong at all, just more limited than previously thought (not suitable for very small or very fast "objects").

With all the fancy criticisms and reminders that science is about the method, being skeptical, etc., people sometimes forget that the results of scientific progress are often tangible and there has been an undeniable increase in knowledge which has accelerated during past century. It's ironic to hear from people how science is not about knowledge while relying in daily life on phones, airplanes, nuclear power, new types of batteries, new construction materials, satelites, minimal invasive surgery, and so on and so forth.

Your point about the museum is interesting... but I think you may be slightly missing the point of a museum :)

An art museum isn't about teaching kids about the process behind making art -- the brush strokes, the dedication, the frustrations, the frequent failures, the occasional successes. It's about showing "this is what some artists that we consider 'great' have produced". Similarly, science museums are about showing some stuff that we've learned using (very broadly) science. So high-level overviews of engines, and tesla coils, and pop-science illustrations of how some math principles work, are all perfectly within the goals. I think that optimistically, a kid might come out of a science museum thinking "look at all the cool things that science has led to -- maybe if I'm a scientist, I can contribute to something like that one day too!", and that could be a different perspective than they otherwise would've had. They can learn what it actually means to "do science" later on in life.

And I think your point about "body of knowledge" implying "level of truth" is also interesting, but I take perhaps the opposite view. The scientific process does produce what we consider truth -- it's just that a deeper understanding of it is that anything we understand today comes with a degree of uncertainty, even if that degree is pretty small. But this is a perspective that's hard for a lot of people to grasp, and this article was written for a pop-science audience, which doesn't generally have a solid understanding of this principle ("What do you mean, we can't really be sure? I know lots of things for sure. Science is stupid."). Given this caveat, I think it's actually dangerous to say to this audience "the scientific body of knowledge is never truth", because while this is technically true, it leads the pop-science reader to think "huh, well in that case, my totally unfounded opinion is just as good".

> You could say that the pursuit of science is, by definition, the pursuit of truth.

I don't disagree, but it has to also be pointed out that this does not imply that science is the only way to the truth, or that truth can only be reached strictly by science.

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