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Comment by StanislavPetrov | Hacker News Reader

>And science, as a whole, only gets better at explaining phenomena, I'm not aware of anything that's had to be walked back

Ignaz Semmelweis, Rosemary Kennedy, Galileo and countless others would like to have a chat.

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About what? Yes, they were opposed in their time, but their findings eventually became the accepted facts. When I said "walk backwards", I meant exactly that - we haven't been washing our hands for a 170 years and had to say "actually, scientific evidence has shown that we were completely wrong, the people who considered Semmelweiz a loonie were actually right."

Science has a definite tendency to go forwards, not backwards. Because scientists like to replicate results, and tend to reject things that don't properly explain the observed facts. Unlike statements of faith from, well, actual faiths, as opposed to "scientism".

Your model needs a definition of what is a "«finding»", destined to become an «accepted fact», and a "«have[-]been» idea", for which «scientific evidence [will] show[] that we were completely wrong». Because they are not easily distinguishable.

Others have recommended Kuhn; I am partial for Imre Lakatos, and recommend the reading of at least the transcripts of his lessons at the London School of Economics.

Edit: I do not know what meaning you intend to be giving to 'scientism', but partisan cheering is not sport, nor science, nor religion.

Just for the sake of argument, I can name some an entire field of science that was invalidated in light of genetic & neuroscience evidence: phrenology. At the time, it was the newest advancement in the gleaming era of scientific Enlightenment. It just happened to justify colonial policies of that time. Now, a couple hundred years later, we're walking back on a widely supported but misguided "scientific" field.

Terrain theory, which was originally dismissed entirely when germ theory won, has been making a major comeback in the past decade or so under new names, such as the "gut microbiome".

Miasma theory as well, when it was originally proved wrong, has held back understanding of viral spread - experts stay away from aerosol spread and prefer droplet spread as much as possible because it's too similar to miasma.

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