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Comment by CTmystery | Hacker News Reader

> Science is the only and ultimate final authority

Junk science led to the American eugenics movement that included forced sterilization of 64k Americans in the early 1900s.

I love science, but calling it the only and ultimate authoritity leaves a lot of room to create a world we don't want to live in. This happens because scientists disagree themselves on almost everything. Recognizing the difference in science as an ideal versus science put in practice makes me not want to agree with your statement.

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Utilizing data to continuous refine one's model of the world is the ultimate final authority.

Some people call it science, some call it the scientific method, etc.

Sure, it's a great method for understanding causal relationships in the world. It's also a method that humans invented, and it's not proven that some future invented method could not provide as much insight into the world as the scientific method. Calling it the ultimate authority and saying that "here literally can not be a higher authority than it by definition" is hard to defend IMO. Science gets its authority from consensus, right now we all agree that science should be granted authority! But it is clearly lacking as an all encompassing tool for understanding: How does the scientific method teach morality? It's not clear that it even can.

And some other people call it delusion, hubris, flawed epistemology, ironic, etc.

That it's the ultimate authority doesn't mean you should always believe it. It's just the best we've got. It's the best thing about science is that it's explicit about the bounds of what we know and don't know.

You don't ask a scientist what you should do, you ask a scientist what they think is true, and what the options are and what their estimated outcomes are. It's always you yourself who make the decision.

Regardless if there was junk science in the early 1900s (don't know much about it but wouldn't be surprised), it was people who decided to sterilize people. Just as it's people who decide to kill people for Jesus Christ or Allah or whatever excuse they come up with.

Even if the science were true, and some subset of Americans is less intelligent or more violent or whatever, it still wouldn't change the fact that now we've decided that eugenics is unethical. We embrace diversity because that's what aligns to our values. Maybe if we're in the middle of famine and war our values will shift again. The authority of science has nothing to do with it.

Perhaps we disagree on the definition of 'the authority of science'. Also FWIW I am not at all religious, in case you think I'm trying to restore scripture to it's rightful place of authority over science. I am just intrigued by this statement that science is the ultimate authority by definition, and that nothing could ever supplant it.

So science as I view/understand it, is the effort to extract knowledge from the observable universe through experiments, observations and logic. If I compare science to religion, this is where I see the difference: In the church you have the clergy, who preach their understanding of the religion, and you have the basis of the religion, usually a book. To the religious the book or some idea from the book is the foundation, and the clergy are the guides. Similarly in science you have the scientists who do the actual science, and the foundation is observations of the universe. The faith I have and my dogma, is in believing the scientists, that is the part where I can have doubt and where I might be corrected in my beliefs, and the foundation is the actual universe which as far as I have been able to tell is consistent with itself so far. It's a bit of a cop out, because any time someone says "oh but these scientists were wrong", then I will go "ok yeah but those were junk science" and move on with my merry life.

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