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Comment by 08-15 | Hacker News Reader

> ecology, epidemiology, cultural anthropology, cognitive > psychology, biochemistry, macroeconomics, computer science, > and geology? Why do they all get to be called science?

They do?! Well, then the term "science" clearly means nothing anymore.

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On the contrary, it does mean something. It just doesn't mean "looks like physics," which is actually a really strange science. Add musicology and history to that list, too.

So, what does it mean?

As far as I understand, science means to have at least one theory with some explanatory power, to test that theory by experiment, and, crucially, to discard the theory if it is invalidated by experiment. That quite obviously does not apply to many of those listed.

> Add musicology and history to that list, too.

History?! Well... nope, it isn't. I might change my mind if you (or anyone) can come with a definition of "science" that includes history and doesn't also include astrology, though.

I wrote a book about it. :) See elsewhere in the comments.

The framework is a little more than a theory. The basic unit is some kind of trial (experiment, observation), which is an attempt to adequately approximate an idealized trial. Whether that approximation is adequate is a matter of reasonable practice in a given time and setting. Trials produce values of some kind of primitive notion: a velocity, a drawing of a typical dandelion. Then you construct a formal system (a theory) that recapitulates the values of primitive notions that emerge from trials.

History and musicology certainly fit this.

So do astrology and bioinformatics.

Let's look at (a particular application of) bioinformatics. I sequence the DNA of a bunch of humans and a neanderthal. I apply some statistics and proclaim that humans and neanderthals admixed. Later, I sequence more humans and another neanderthal. Applying the same statistics, things look a bit messy now. So I proclaim that there were two admixture events, but I also change the estimated amount of admixture and pretend that this is still consistent with the first claim. Years later, another genome, another admixture event, more hand waving excuses for the numbers that don't seem to fit the big picture.

Is that science? Some kind of trial is there. It is appropriate given time and setting. Some kind of value (a p-value) is produced. Even the theory is there, even though calling it "formal" is a stretch. So this is science? I don't think so.

Yes, there's more to it, otherwise I would have written a blog post and not a book.

'Based on this map that i found in the tomb, I pose the theory, that the holy grail was burried on the spot marked with x' 'Let us test your theory by digging there' 'We found it! Yeah! Science bitch!'

Seriously how is history not a scientific field for you?

Fictional archaeology isn't history, is it?

Anyway, there are no experiments in history, therefore any "theory" is untestable. History is... I'm missing a word here, but historians are scholars, not scientists.

Note that the best evidence for many things comes from naturally occurring cases that look like experiments. The link between smoking and lung cancer is most definitively shown by twin studies, for example, which are purely observational.

There are no experiments in astronomy either.

Thank you for making my point.

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