Comment by telmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by telmo | Hacker News Reader

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> anti-science rethoric

As a lover of science and a scientific researcher (according to my payslips), I have a certain aversion towards this current "defense of science" furor. In my view, science needs no such defenders, and they do more harm than good.

Science is empiricism. That is it. It is the idea that a theory about how the world works must be put to the test through experimentation. And it is also the idea that all theories are forever subject to falsification. There is no space for arguments form authority, personal preferences about how nature should work nor dogma. But this is exactly how many contemporary "defenders of science" are treating science: as an authoritative source that must be trusted. This is why so many people make fun of flat earthers without actually knowing how to verify by themselves that the earth is round.

The deeper aspect of this pathology is the attempt to replace all philosophy with just science. This does a disservice not only to philosophy but also to science itself (which is both a product and an important object of study of philosophy).

For example: flat earthers, or people who promote homeopathy, or any other brand of bullshit, are certainly engaged in peseudo-science, but so are people who pretend that neural correlates provide us with any insight whatsoever into the hard problem of consciousness.

Philosophy does not contribute to the economy. It is not particularly useful in creating new gadgets. There are no philosophy startups, nor philosophy tech giants. But discarding philosophy is short-sighted, and it leads to the hell that we can all quite see coming from the corner of our eyes.

The article points at the fact that many "defenders of science" make the ontological commitment of materialism, assuming that this is implied by science, when it most definitely is not. But again, this realization requires education (or self-education) in topics that are currently discarded because they do not help you pay the mortgage.

> Science is empiricism. That is it. It is the idea that a theory about how the world works must be put to the test through experimentation. And it is also the idea that all theories are forever subject to falsification. There is no space for arguments form authority, personal preferences about how nature should work nor dogma.

Sounds great to me, can't think of a better way to go about learning things well enough that we can say we know them to an extent.

> But this is exactly how many contemporary "defenders of science" are treating science: as an authoritative source that must be trusted.

If not results from scientific methods, then what's the alternative that should be trusted? The part that's forgotten is that the body of scientific knowledge is constantly updated. They're merely the best answers we have at the moment, not final ones.

> Sounds great to me, can't think of a better way to go about learning things well enough that we can say we know them to an extent.

> If not results from scientific methods, then what's the alternative that should be trusted?

I am not saying that there is a better way to obtain scientific knowledge than through science, what I am saying is that there are other modes of knowledge. For example:

(1) Philosophy. This very discussion is of a philosophical nature. What is knowledge? What modes of knowledge are there? What is science? Why is science useful? What is usefulness? What are the limits of scientific knowledge, if they exist? None of these questions can be answered by application of the scientific method. In fact, the very idea of science is not a scientific theory.

(2) First person experience. Science is about things that can be verified in the third person (measurements), but there are things that can only be experienced in the first person (qualia). Science has nothing to say about e.g. my direct experience of the color red. And is my experience of red the same of yours? Another question that cannot be answered by science (and that maybe cannot be answered at all).

(3) Math. Mathematical proof is a way of obtaining knowledge that is not based on empiricism.

> The part that's forgotten is that the body of scientific knowledge is constantly updated. They're merely the best answers we have at the moment, not final ones.

Not forgotten at all, please re-read what I wrote originally.

I'm not exposed to "defenders of science", perhaps because I avoid political discussions, idk. I don't see any conflict with a scientific view + other views. Certainly thinking about quantum-scale physics leads down this path anyway.

Science is the domain of the known, tested, or hypothesized. Beyond that we have the 'negative spaces' that are these other domains. The boundaries between them shift and move with understanding. There will always be negative space as we can't have all the answers to all questions in any system. These are complementary and shouldn't be at odds with each other.

Where is this conflicting overlap that needs defense? Seems like semantics to me saying that some 'knowledge' isn't science, ok.

> Science is empiricism. That is it. It is the idea that a theory about how the world works must be put to the test through experimentation.

It used to be that. Now we have theories such as big bang theory, theory of tectonic plates, climate change modelling being seen as a part of science, even though they were never empirically tested (because it's impossible). Science has really changed since its origins back in Newton times, nowadays we accept much more indirect evidence (vs the consistent results of repeated experiments within the parameter space of the theory we used to rely on earlier) as good enough to accept the theory.

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