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Comment by firefoxd | Hacker News Reader

When I was growing up, things seemed pretty much settled. We knew where the first humans came from, we knew when and where agriculture started, we even had 9 planets in our solar system.

This was the truths scientists had discovered and it was unquestionable. It was printed in books to last forever.

But you grow up, and you realize that these things are malleable. It's more like as of 1998, Lucy is the oldest human remains we discovered, using x method.

I'm not saying it's a conspiracy or anything, but I think we should leave a little wiggle room in the way we make these statements from now on.

Though I haven't read a history or science book from a school curriculum in years so I can't say if that's already what is being done.

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University is where you learn that almost everything in school books is over simplified, out of date, or (periodically) just plain wrong.

One of the benefits of having researchers teaching is that they have a better understanding of both the content and dynamics of their field. This is far different from primary and secondary schools, where teachers are usually teaching outside of their discipline. Even a high school physics teacher with a science degree is likely to be a biologist or a chemist by training.

Of course, there are a multitude of other differences with university educations. For example: governments don't set the curriculum, which is hugely beneficial for fields like history. (Governments have a nasty desire to set the historical narrative.)

Yeah, absolute statements like "the science is settled" are rather unscientific. Good science must acknowledge the limits of our knowledge, and leave the door open to being proven wrong.

Every point of knowledge has a degree of certainty or uncertainty around it. It certainly isn't a point that is taught well enough in education.

"The science is settled that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old" is a perfectly fair statement, for instance.

Science never settles anything, it's why it's such a successful idea. "Current evidence says the world is about 13.8 billion years old" is the way I would word that. With your method, a later revision says science was wrong, when it just didn't have enough evidence.

It makes a difference whether you're speaking pragmatically or philosophically. Since we live in a practical universe, there are facts of science that are so well established that there is no reason to doubt them. And many facts that aren't as well established.

I know in this practical universe, Newton's laws of physics and Einstein's views of quantum physics were both at one point "facts" but later shown to be mere approximations and both of them worth being doubted. There's no point to having science if all we are going to do is assume everything that comes out of the process as the gospel.

> There's no point to having science if all we are going to do is assume everything that comes out of the process as the gospel.

As far as I can tell, nobody in this thread is even remotely suggesting that.

If I didn't think the parent I was replying to was suggesting exactly that, then I wouldn't have made the reply I did.

Using your pragmatic language provides almost no benefit, and it opens the door to people doubting science as it has been wrong before.

The known universe was 13.7 billion years old until a couple years ago. Either way, we're still talking +/- tens of millions of years with 68% confidence. At 95%, the interval is something closer to a billion years. Unless they've tightened it up since I last read about it when the 13.8 figure came out...

Good science relies on tested data- and this tested data stays the same. The rules derived from it, may become more detailed - or in some cases even completely overthrown with a new ruleset, which will provide a reference frame that can produce such data. Best example for science is the Newton Physics, which allowed for pretty close calculations on planetary movements. The data gathered stayed the same, but the unexplained edge-cases and small deviations, where better explained by Einsteins theory.

It's like that point in school where you're quite good at algebra but haven't been introduced to calculus yet, and for the last time ever, you're fully confident that you understand all of mathematics.

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