Capitalism Rules, Socialism and Communism Suck Thread

[MadMojoMonkey]

WRONG

Science = reality & truth. Not what some artificially credentialed human beings *think* is reality and truth.

Adorable.

Where to start? OK.

You see, nanners, science isn't actually about truth or facts. This is a popular misconception, so I'm not surprised if you heard that from other people, but those people aren't scientists, or they are scientists who want you to think that what they do is more than it really is.

Science is really about knowledge and repeatability. Science is about predicting the outcome of something before it happens, like predicting the future a little bit. Whether or not the scientific model we use to make a prediction is "true," we don't know. We never have, may never at all. We only know if the prediction was "good enough" for our purposes.

The history of science is to disprove all the things we thought once were true. The things we think are true today will surely be shown to be not quite true by later scientists. It's easy to think that if a new scientific finding is better than the old one, that the new one is true, but that's not the case. It's probably (but not certainly) more true, but not necessarily capital T True.
For example, Newton figured out a bunch of stuff about gravity. Everyone thought it was true. Until Einstein came along and showed that Newton's gravity didn't really tell the whole story. Then everyone knew that Newton's gravity was not true. It's still workably close to the truth, but not the truth. Surely someday, some other scientist will show that even Einstein's gravity is close to the truth, but not exactly the truth.
That's what's happens in science. It's not so much about what is true, as it is about our best guesses so far.


Where does science come from, and why do scientists think it's a good way to find knowledge?
That's a long story, too. Let's try to boil it down.

The idea that science is a means to get knowledge comes from the philosophical study of epistemology - the study of how we, whose experiences may or may not be subjective, can determine the difference between knowledge and opinion. That field, as all philosophical fields, is based upon the agreement of the experts in the field, or by consensus.
The "Truths" of philosophical ideas must be subjectively accepted by people to be considered true. There's no way to collect data to prove it, so each person has to decide. A group of people decides they're educated and smart enough to figure it out and come to an agreement, or consensus, about it. In this case, the "it" is the question "What is knowledge and how shall we acquire it?"

An answer to that question goes something like this:
There's no personal basis to determine reality from hallucination. We posit (an unproven assertion) that if enough "reliable" witnesses agree on an observation, we consider that observation real. Everything about that is consensus.
Oh boy, that sounds very dangerous! Who is a reliable witness? What if reliable people hallucinate? What if reliable witnesses lie? What if a person guesses a truth and seems reliable, but is not?
That sounds like all this talk about "finding knowledge" is really just an elitist group deciding what is a fact, doesn't it?
I think it does, and I'm a scientist.

We definitely need a way to prevent ourselves from being fooled by some elitist group that probably wants to fool us or worse, have fooled themselves and want me to believe their foolery. (or even to be fooled by something we ourselves thought in the past)
That is the root of the scientific method. We need a way to combat the flaws in this "knowledge" acquiring method.

Uh oh... the method is about acquiring knowledge. How can we combat the flaws in finding knowledge without suffering the flaws of distrusting what it knowledge in the first place. We're facing a circular argument. Now you see why there's an entire field of philosophy that studies this question. It's very hard to not think yourself in circles once you question what is knowledge and how do you know when you have it.

So to build the scientific method, we take a risky step. We accept the flaws in this consensus based model and - risky - make another group to come to another consensus about how to handle the problems with relying on consensus. This sounds like a bad move. Still. I'm a reluctant supporter. The result feels good to me, but c'mon... circular logic. Whether or not it feels good should have no bearing on our determination. Argh.

This new group does an OK job, though. They say, "We can't trust people. People are not reliable witnesses. We need something else. We need to trust data, not people. We need to distrust the people who create the data, and to scrutinize their methods. Only when we cannot disprove their methods, do we begrudgingly accept their data. Once we accept the data, though, we embrace it whole-heartedly. Until and unless the methods are shown to be faulty, the data cannot be refuted. Not because of the scientists who created the methods, but because of the methods themselves.

But still... all this talk of "we" is just hiding more consensus. More agreement from other "reliable witnesses." Remember, we never solved that problem, we just put a bandaid on it.

So you see... it's a popular misconception that science is about creating true statements. Scientific Laws are not really "true" in the sense that, "I think nanners acts like a petulant teenager." is true. Ironic, right? Subjective statements can be true, but objective statements can't. You can "know" yourself, but you can never fully, 100% trust the consensus.

Now run along and check if Stevey has another controversial video for you to watch.

500 years ago, would I be derided as a flat-earth denier?

IDK, but Eratosthenes (c.276 - 195 BC) may have been.
500 years
lol


Run along, now.