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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Yes, thank you. I really wish scientists (and the general public) learned more about the fundamentals of their field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science

Actually I wonder whether Karl Popper is considered very important by philosophers of science. I have had arguments with people who claim that Feyerabend has a better "approach" to science.

On the other hand, practicing scientists consider Popper's falsification one of the great unifying themes guiding scientific research.

Though perhaps not as well-known, Popper's approach towards falsification of probabilistic claims is also a great read.

Feyerabend isn't so much a "better approach" as a lack of an approach. He does a good job trying to get past the numerous problems of Popper's work, but in doing so largely just reverses it without adding anything useful.

The way I read it, it really dates back to Hume and the problem of induction. Until we have a Final Theory to hand, we never really know anything. That is a statement of epistemology. But science can't proceed on that basis: people make decisions on where to focus their efforts, and not all hypotheses are equally worth considering. That is a statement of scientific pragmatism, and those two fields don't overlap as much as we'd like them to.

Feyerabend is easily read as continuing to conflate the two: "Hey, all knowledge is provisional, so you might as well study astrology." Maybe that's useful from an epistemological standpoint, but it's not helpful for grants committees to think that way. Nor is it helpful for epistemological anarchists to insist that grants committees never really know and therefore really should fund astrology. The question of how scientists actually work is an important one, but it's a separate question from what TRVTH actually is -- even though scientists would like to believe otherwise. They're not as close as they think.

> Feyerabend is easily read as continuing to conflate the two: "Hey, all knowledge is provisional, so you might as well study astrology." Maybe that's useful from an epistemological standpoint, but it's not helpful for grants committees to think that way.

It isn't helpful for anyone and we have very concrete examples of that to hand: Anti-vaxxers love to point out stuff like Vioxx, but never say a damn thing about all the drugs and therapies which are helpful, do much more good than harm, and which are "proven" to work for all practical intents and purposes. Being unwilling to attack stuff like anti-vaccine nonsense head-on because of some abstract epistemological nonsense kills people. There's no upside to that.

Saying "Nothing is absolutely certain, therefore it is absolutely certain that we know nothing" is bad enough. Actually believing it is dangerous in direct proportion to how much of a hand you have in shaping policy. The bus driver might believe in utter epistemological nihilism, but they'd better not veer into oncoming traffic just the same.

It's generally harmless for philosophers to believe stuff, since they don't drive buses, and they generally get their vaccinations regardless of the epistemological status of their effectiveness. For that matter, they continue to eat food, despite the uncertainty whether they're really holding a peanut butter sandwich and not, say, the average temperature of the asteroid Ceres.

They get to be anarchic, as long as you can't prove otherwise -- and "prove" in the mathematical sense, not the scientific one. All it costs you is paper, pencils, and the price of a trash can. (Which they never use.) If you shut down the line of reasoning just because other people are incredibly, dangerously stupid, you're going to have to shut down pretty much everything.

We discussed popper in some classes I took, the main theme for that for like an explanation yes it needs to be falsifiable, but also sometimes science is just "look I made a thing!" Or "look I found a thing!" And it's less relevant there. The unanimous belief accross different classes in the sciences I took was that yes, when we think about science we look at it from the perspective of falsification, but when we actually do science, we usually think of it as exploration until we have something we think falsifies the status quo or needs rigorous data collection to reject the mill. Nobody is really running an RNA sequencing experiment to evaluate the impacts of a drug on the rna transcriptome with falsification in mind (even if in a sense the null of "nothing changes" is what you're trying to falsify"). Psychologically it's just seen as some exploration to see what happens.

>Nobody is really running an RNA sequencing experiment to evaluate the impacts of a drug on the rna transcriptome with falsification in mind (even if in a sense the null of "nothing changes" is what you're trying to falsify"). Psychologically it's just seen as some exploration to see what happens.

Isn't this, along with and maybe encouraging p-hacking, a major cause of the non-reproducability crisis? Scientists hunting out supporting evidence instead of showing their theories don't easily break?

It likely is, but this is also an outgrowth of the "explorer" sort of mindset where people juts see themselves as diving into the unknown to see what they find. It's not malicious, but it could contribute to p hacking for sure

The explorer mindset is how scientists discovered penicillin, x-rays, and vulcanized rubber. Science isn't as cut and dry as the scientific method suggests.

I'd say to the extent that this behavior contributes to the reproducibility crisis, it has more to do with not backing that exploration with rigorous experimentation.

But more to the point, I'd argue that the lack of funding and publish-or-perish atmosphere has more to do with it. Academics don't necessarily publish because the results are noteworthy, but because they have to, regardless of the robustness of their methodology.

That's absolutely true as well, and in my reply above I wasn't contesting that, just contemplating what the poster above that mentioned about p hacking, how maybe this mindset makes it easier as a justification? But yeah we should never just discard the importance of exploration for the sake of it, it's how we also got crucial technologies like current PCR tools - some guy just really wanted to see what was up with those Yellowstone bacteria and found all sorts of heat stable compounds. That rigorous follow-up is super important though as you stated

While the history of science emerges from and has an ongoing productive dialogue with that of philosophy, the humanities dept. status panic confection of "philosophy of science" has very little to do with this.

I'm not sure what "status panic confection" is supposed to mean. Nor does philosophy generally fall under humanities departments.

The philosophy of science is an established field that is hundreds of years old and includes pretty serious thinkers like Kant, Popper, Kuhn, and quite a few others. Ignore it at your own peril.

https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=philosop...

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