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Thinking Scientifically

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26 pointstokenadult16 comments

I'll put this near "scientific extremism", a lot of science discoveries have as a trigger chance and intuition, even if we don't have a precise idea of how they works scientifically, probably trial and error is a good way to express it, but the trial sources can be non scientific while the validation is scientific.

Food for thought and brain crawling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_anarchism

This is a good book along the same lines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method

I'm always amazing by how many people like this are able to buy into their own bullshit. Not only is intuition important for coming up with scientific hypotheses, but it's essential for sound decision making. That is, when making good decisions you don't exactly what the science says, but rather you make the best guess you can based on the information available. And you use deductive logic to make sure that your ideas are logically consistent with what you already know to be true.

"buy into their own bullshit"? You're putting words into the author's mouth.

What has the author said about intuition? That it is unsuitable for answering scientific questions. The author hasn't said it's bad for decision-making, nor that it has no place in generating questions. Just that it is poor for providing rigorous answers

What the author actually said was:

"We simply cannot place enough confidence in intuition to accept it as a source of information."

In other words, the author is saying that not only is intuition not on par with scientific knowledge, but it isn't good for anything.

The author also says "Under a scientific framework, input from intuition, tradition, experience, common sense, experts, and logic might be incorporated during the construction of a preliminary hypothesis"

You're taking one sentence out of context of the entire article. He's talking about being a source of scientific information - it's pretty clear if you read the article as a whole.

I think you are taking the article out of context. At best intuition leads to a hypothesis. By itself it is definitely not a source of scientific knowledge. The author even explicitly states this:

>Under a scientific framework, input from intuition, tradition, experience, common sense, experts, and logic might be incorporated during the construction of a preliminary hypothesis

I would say that it's difficult to assert this in a scientific way. Or better: magic thinking, religion and other sources can be input as well and produce scientific outcomes.

The difference is between:

    My intuition is telling me this is true.

and

    My intuition is telling me this is true.  Let me test it.

What I wrote is that we can say the same thing with every source of information, even purely unscientific things like magic thinking, rituals, etc. That's the paradoxical thing about science. And also, there are a lot of things that you can't test and can't probe but they are true.

How's this for some ideological heresy?

> Humans are poor data gathering machines. We have numerous biases, cognitive flaws, and psychological errors that prevent our unguided minds from grasping reality in any accurate way.

What if we're not supposed to always be "data gathering?" What if I just want to do human things?

Sometimes (in my more depressive moods), I wonder about the ultimate utility of "grasping reality in the most accurate way possible." At those times, I feel more able to see things, and yet, am less happy. Studies confirm that happier people have a larger 'shield' against reality, maintaining cognitive biases that aren't necessarily true but abstract over the difficult realities. I'll be the first to say that a dark cloud is over my perceptions then, so they cannot always be trusted. But there's something to the notion that the more you know, the less happy you become. And it isn't that we should be happy all the time, but there's a balance that must be struck. I see people insisting on living this 100% logical life...as if they needed to make it perfectly defensible on Internet discussion boards, or something.

(I'm interested in talking about it from a purely worldview perspective, not from the viewpoint of 'human progress.')

The author makes the mistake of equivocating rationalizing with rationalism.

"For example, suppose that (1) watching a scary movie usually makes a person fearful or anxious, and that (2) being fearful or anxious usually causes the person’s heart rate to increase. Applying logic we would conclude, therefore, that watching a scary movie raises a person’s heart rate."

This is why we say things like "sufficient but not necessary" or other nice things like this.

The author is ambiguous in this example and logic requires rigor, not equivocation.

I have seen Rationalism mistaken for sound proof used in lot of arguments.Comfortably, ignoring that the validity of the conclusion is dependant on the validity of the premises. To be honest, logical reasoning is very useful in designing experiments, and multiple chains of logical reasoning is not my strongest point, but the refusal to define the conclusions beforehand is what makes me suspicious, when someone uses long chains of reasoning to convince me.

ok let me apply some "science" to this. where did 70% come from? it's a very convenient number as it gives just below 50% outcome, to "prove" that "more often than not" our assumptions are wrong.

let's bump this "guestimate" by 1%. and, whoa, now we "more often than not" are right.

don't get me wrong. science is good and all that. but our gut feeling got us through some really rough ride, so let's not write it off just yet...

The author doesn't write it off: "Gut-feelings and common sense are not enough; they may get us somewhere, but not always to the truth."

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