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Comment by arpa | Hacker News Reader

hmmm, how about "no". It really boils down to how you define science. If you define science as "published in peer reviewed journals" or "knee-deep in academia", the statement is correct. If, however, it's knowledge based on observation of phenomena (literally what science means), preferably with understanding why things happen (having a theory), it's so wrong, it's not even funny - it's a very dangerous standpoint, because the alternative to the scientific method is magic thinking and cargo cults.

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Engineering existed way before any kind of math or symbolic manipulation. It was a collection of heuristics.

Information theory came after people were already sending signals over the wire. Similarly, there were architectural feats before geometry or Newton’s laws were discovered.

was it not based on knowledge based on observation (science)? You don't need math and symbolic manipulation, not to mention information theory to do science, even if it helps immensely if you do use these tools!

> If, however, it's knowledge based on observation of phenomena (literally what science means)

There's only so much a naked eye can observe. Technology drives science by allowing us to observe more things.

means of observation do not matter if we're talking about abstract principles (of what scientia is).

But we're not talking about just abstract principles. By themselves, these abstract principles are just that - abstract. They only matter when applied to the concrete, when you use them to learn something new about reality.

Technology is how we extend the set of things to which these principles can be applied, and thus the set of things we can learn about our world.

in purely positivistic viewpoint you are probably right, however you seem to be taking inductive approach (use principles to learn) as opposed to the deductive one (use learnings to extract principles). I wouldn't actually dismiss any of them.

edit: re-read your comments again, and i see your point now. You are absolutely right.

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