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Comment by mizzack | Hacker News Reader

Science exists in a perpetual state of being supported or challenged by evidence. If the clergy ("credible expert", Nature) make it impossible to challenge the orthodoxy ("established science") then it _is_ dogma.

By being a "believer" in science as you've laid it out, you aren't believing in science as a process, but science as an institution.

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>Science exists in a perpetual state of being supported or challenged by evidence

One problem with that. Some sciences, particularly soft or social sciences cross broadly into culture and "ways of life". There are certain things today that cannot be questioned without getting shouted down or deplatformed. So challenging the current widely held scientific facts can be career ending.

That's why there are quite a few people who don't consider some of such fields sciences. I have half a heart to agree with that stance. That's not to say those fields don't have value, but science is the process of building reproduceable, falsifiable evidence. If you can't do that, then you aren't practicing science.

There's clearly some cache to calling your field a science, because we see it so often. They'll even emulate Sciencey Things to maintain the illusion, but like you say, they don't produce testable, falsifiable models. Political Science is a perfect example of a study that's very far from a real science.

Actual science will accept when it's been proven wrong. Much of we have these days isn't that. And that includes many folks working in what would be considered the hard sciences.

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