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Comment by ki_ | Hacker News Reader

It's my opinion that a lot of science today is theoretical BS. I'm glad sometimes, someone is pointing it out. When i do it myself, i get bombarded with hate. Sigh. even when it's not science, when it's about programming (my profession). And the one thing i learned is: PEOPLE WILL NOT CHANGE THEIR MIND. You can even come with proof and people wont change. They will just ignore u after you've proven it, and keep saying you're wrong. Of course, not everyone is like this, but most of the time it's the "experts" who are like this. Probably because they feel like their entire self image is under attack. Anyway.. life is life, people are people, we live in a society. Frustrating as it is, just remember to enjoy life from time to time, that's what's truly important.

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I think you get bombarded with hate because of the larger problem of extreme polarization on social media. All subtlety is lost, you are associated with the one anti-science group, opposed to the one pro-science group.

It's kind of mixture of online and real-life experiences. In real-life you dont get the hate, but only because they know, it would be extremely rude. But they have other things, eg. make jokes about you to others.

When you open a conversation with as sweeping a statement as the one you presented in your first sentence, you realistically only have about a minute or two to persuade the person you are addressing that you will be able to justify it.

People do change their mind, but almost never because of adversarial debate. So, "come with proof" seldom works.

Unfortunately, you (and I) also never change our minds because of adversarial debate. It's easy to tell other people "you should change your mind", but it's hard to think "I should change my mind".

In my opinion :) it should be a badge of pride to be willing (and demonstrably able) to change ones mind about important matters.

> Probably because they feel like their entire self image is under attack.

In science it's also their grant funding and reputation, that is at stake.

> It's my opinion that a lot of science today is theoretical BS

Well, at least in computer science (ML) it's not what I see. It's very much empirically driven and with a heavy engineering vibe. A little bit more science would often help imho, but papers without strong result are hard to publish, even if they improve our understanding of something. It sometimes feels a bit like a large corporate research lab, which is only a small part of science. We do not only create, we want to understand!

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