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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Whilst the underlying case is true, I feel what is missing is where scientism has been beneficial net overall. Arguably, vaccination is a good case: the statistics of benefit are huge. the personal experiental outcome tends to negative feedback only: So, underling belief in the statistics of decent testing is important and has a community upside.

Or, the truly remarkable advances in materials physics especially in VLSI. actual applications of quantum effects initially misunderstood but actually now designed in (sometimes?)

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The physics behind modern VLSI was known to something like 8 sigmas of certainty before it was designed into devices. A lot of medical science, on the other hand, comes from one study with a p-value of 0.05 that didn't replicate when another lab tried it.

Science is having confidence in the former. Scientism is having confidence in the latter.

Thats a very good take on things. A nice simple way of putting it.

It's worth pointing out that the standards for evidence in particle physics are so high because they have to be: particle physics experiments create so much data that you can find a huge number of correlations with high confidence without much difficulty. Biology and medical science are completely unlike that: there is comparitively very little data to draw any conclusions from so standards of evidence are necessarily low, and yet still useful (that said, the lower standards also allow a lot of junk to appear which is difficult to filter from the rest if you are not very familiar with the subject).

I think we should point out that part of that 8-sigma confidence I am quoting isn't just the initial experiment (which may have had as little as 3-4 sigma confidence intervals for quantum tunneling), but also that there are further experiments that re-confirm quantum tunneling by relying on it to observe some other effect.

That is something that is also lacking in the social sciences, medical science, and even some parts of modern physics: experiments that confirm other results by taking those results as fact and finding new effects.

Experience isn't only first-hand though; those studies count. The correct comparison is what experts say vs what actually happens. For example, various proponents of local realism before experimental confirmation of Bell's Theorem.

I do think it's stated a bit strongly though, I'd prefer s/ignorance/fallibility/ for similar reasons to what you're articulating: I grant a higher prior probability to a statement given by a (relevant!) expert. Of course that's relative to the statement itself: an expert might get nonsense from log(-10) to log(-9) but that's still not holding any water.

The problem would be it's the 'argument by appeal to authority' fallacy. True science must always be open to test. The thing is we're on derivative downstream consequences of the science. They come with some caveats to "question everything"

But "we don't know how anaesthesia works really" is a big problem. All we've got is observational science (which Feynman hated and analogised to stamp collecting) that "it works"

You can cherry pick any religion for good that it has achieved

Your key point is that scientism, rei-ification of science is borderline belief-system behaviour, at the very least. Your pejorative language says you think its pushed well into the space. Fair enough.

What I am doing is saying "baby/bathwater" time. Public communications depends on not legitimating anti-vaxx (for example) but if it depends on belief system behaviour rather than being able to apply objective science outcomes to demonstrate the "why" -it's got problems.

What you are arguing for is a pro-establishment stance, it is not a pro-science stance. By conflating the two you devalue science, you are muddying the bath water and poisoning the baby, making science politics and destroying its credibility.

If you remove nuance from public communications to avoid legitimizing "anti-vaxx" rhetoric, a proposition that I find anti-democratic and self-defeating given that it assumes the public is too dumb to hear nuance, then you cannot use science as a shield because science is nuanced.

I would absolutely prefer what you want. I am unsure in a post truth world how to make it work. Perhaps my view is the other side of the blatant anti scientific posture of the Koch funded right: no amount of reasoned nuance about AGW will stop a coal mine owner claiming its nasa funded lies and no amount of reasoned nuanced argument will make the coal mine worker want to believe science, over his paymasters lies.

Not that leftists haven't promulgated antiscienfific crap before now, lysenkoism comes to mind. It's just not the current problem.

> that it assumes the public is too dumb to hear nuance

It is! It empirically is! Don't assume it, test it!

While composing this comment, did you consider that the dimension of time is implicit (and hidden from perception) in the version of "is" that you are using here?

Also hidden: sub-perceptual heuristics. And culture. And surely many other things beyond my knowledge.

The hard problem of consciousness is so poorly understood by science, I wonder if that is why it is simply ~ignored in conversations like this, where it is so fundamentally important.

Utilitarianistic approaches are really bad... Scientism falls flat on its face, since it's a self refuting philosophy(!).

It's truth cannot be demonstrated according to its own principles, (i.e. hard sciences are the best / superiour or even only source of genuine knowledge of the world). The truth of scientism is philosophical in nature and not the result of a scientific experiment.

We shouldn't adhere to untruth just because it "serves" our ends in some ways or another.*

By the way, how do you arrive at your value judgements of "good" and "bad", "serving" something vs. the opposite? How do you determine "the benefits" in a relativistic worldview, most modern people, as well as you seem to adhere to (see "post truth world").

For whom was it "net beneficial"?

Doing science and producing results is not necessarily a result or proof of the philosophy the scientist adheres to. One could believe all sorts of things and get scientific results, so I don't see scientism as beneficial in any sense.

It is wrong as a theory and it undermines science itself in a major way. Scientism undermines the presuppositions science philosophically rests on*and which cannot be proven by science itself.

Therefore if Scientism believes that you can only believe "truths" that are the result of scientific experiments and you have to rely on presuppositions that cannot categorically be proven by science itself, you cannot do science anymore.

Scientism is the enemy of science, logically speaking.

* I still believe that "the Good" and "Truth" are directly entangled and necessary.

* a) belief in an external world, independent of mind, languagy or theory, b) the nature of the world is orderly, especially its "deep structure" that lies under and beyond the manifest world of ordinary perception c) objective truth exists d) our sensory and cognitive faculties are reliable for gaining truth and knowledge of the world, and tehy are able to grasp the world's deep structure that lies beyond the sense-perceptible world, e) various types of values and "oughts" exist f) the laws of logic and mathematics exist

Most people are still not aware of the extent of the corruption of clinical research, and the manipulation of statistical data by “health authorities.” This article clearly lays it all out and is probably the most important article written this year:

https://pierrekory.substack.com/p/californias-misinformation...

So I disagree vaccination is a good case… the mRNA vaccines kill more than they save, yet 80% of the population was still convinced to take it.

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