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Comment by ironmagma | Hacker News Reader

Science is amazing because it sucks and yet it's somehow still better than anything else we came up with for thousands of years.

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We can't come up with anything better because we're using a term that would include anything better we come up with. There are religious studies in science! And if you suddenly had most of discoveries from revelation, that'd still be part of some old or new scientific discipline. So you're mostly amazed by your own vocabulary papering over all the nonsense it includes

I should have specified for pedants that I meant the system of peer review and scientific inquiry.

You're still too vague. Do you mean the <100 old peer review system? And that it's better than all the scientific discoveries of the past thousands of years?

You think that's better than the work that preceded peer review, by people like Einstein, Bunsen, Kelvin, Planck, Darwin, Maxwell, Mendeleev, Michelson, Steinmetz, Faraday, Davy, Haber, Tesla, etc.? Because I have to say I find the pre-peer-review papers to generally be of much higher quality.

How did you come to the conclusion that those have not been peer-reviewed? Every uni course that presents the work of these people implicitly reviews it for consistency, and the advanced practices courses repeat their experiments.

Also, survivorship bias.

"The system of peer review" in this context is the system where a scholarly journal editor sends your submitted paper out to other experts in the field to decide whether or not to publish it. This system came into use in the middle of the 20th century, and Einstein was famously outraged by it. It does not refer generically to every time someone reads or discusses a paper or replicates an experiment.

I don't think survivorship bias is particularly relevant for three reasons. First, both papers from 50 years ago and papers from 150 years ago are already heavily filtered. Second, if you look at journal issues from 150 years ago, you will find forgotten papers in the same issue with the foundational ones, and the quality is still much better than today's forgotten papers. Third, what I'm really concerned about is not that bad papers about bad research are being published, but that good papers about good research that would have been done are not, echoing Higgs's remark about how he couldn't have done his work on the Higgs boson today because he wouldn't get tenure. Or, read Freeman Dyson's autobiography, and contrast the years when he was working on nuclear energy to the rather uninspired following 50 years, because, as he put it, it stopped being fun.

We can modify the human genome now, how is that not an order of magnitude more impressive?

Shoulders of giants. Couldn't do that without somebody doing what Bunsen and Maxwell did

Science doesn't provide a Priest who will show up and sit with you at your time of grief or despair in handling the unpredictable. Priests in all religions are trained to occupy that space. And that is the prime reason Religions have survived for thousands of years long past the death of empires, kings and nations who all get tired or bored of showing up and occupying the unpredictability space.

Lot of that Despair is thanks to how the architecture of the chimp brain handles unpredictability over different time horizons - whats the system going to do tomorrow/next month/next year/next decades. Confidence decreases anxiety increases. You want to break the architecture keep feeding it the unpredictable.

So we get the corporal hudson in aliens cycle - "I'm ready, man. Check it out. I am the ultimate badass. State of the badass art" > unpredictability > "Whats happening man! Now what are we supposed to do? Thats it man. Game over man. Game over!"

Think about what science offers corporal hudson.

So, basically:

Where science can't make you better, non-science can make you feel better.

Where truth is painful, untruth can attempt to provide comfort.

(not sure how any of this relates to the comment or the article, maybe I should have just ignored this)

I have considered the problem of how the strong social benefits and cohesion of religion might be reproduced in some way not tied to the very strange attractor of identity based beliefs and shibboleths.

Science, democracy, religion. Three curses. Each embodying ideals. Each the best choice we have for the areas where they do or have functioned well. Each presenting challenges, and dysfunctional local maxima, as maintenance/optimization problems.

Of the three, science's self-correcting basis does make it the least problematic.

In the highest contrast, mathematics foundations are only weak if you look! Whereas the piles built on debatably wobbly foundations hold up extremely well.

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