What is science?

Everything else
41

I noticed that.

Please. Science should not be some sort of religion, where believers dress up in lab coats in order to worship at the Temple of Evolution or whatever! One does not “believe in” science the way one “believes in” angels or God-assisted miracles or what have you.

The problem is that while it shouldn’t be that way, it does have people who “believe” in it in the same blind, hypocritical way that so many Christians “believe” in Christ.* Scientists accept things blindly just as often as Christians fail to love their enemy.

No. I think Science is something that scientists should do more often than they currently do.

*And just so you know I’m not completely on my high horse, I admit that I am not an exception – in either case.

42

Oh, it works well even beyond detecting pseudoscience. It works very well within the ranks of science proper. I’ve also found it very effective within religion.

It quite applies to anything.

43

Right. “Science” is not something to be believed in. It’s a method of trying to understand the world that happens to have a greater success rate than alternatives like witchcraft. One of the big problems I see is that people don’t seem to understand this when they talk about science. It does not refer to some objective, empirical reality out there to which you can invest yourself.

The philosophy of science is actually one of the most interesting branches of philosophy today. The original question is a non-trivial one and there has already been a good century’s worth of interest in the subject.

44

What’s fallacious about it? Ignoring stuff that’s not easily measured is just a common error that science types seem to make more than people in general do.

45

Are those real quotes? I get the impression they come from off the top of your head.

It’s the hollywood version of events. I’m sure many scientists would like to think of themselves as some kind of heretic, demolishing years of established dogma in the face of intense opposition. That doesn’t come across if look at a simple timeline for this particular “struggle”:

1984 Marshall and Warren’s paper is accepted by The Lancet in May and published in June. Many reviewers dislike the paper.
1990 World Congress of Gastroenterology recommends eradicating H. pylori in order to cure duodenal ulcers.
1994 Conference held by National Institute of Health (USA) demonstrating the general acceptance of H. pylori as cause of PUD (Peptic ulcer disease) in the US.
2005 Warren and Marshall are awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on H. pylori and PUD

For comparison:

1610 Gallileo writes Sidereus Nuncius.
1633 Gallileo stands trial on suspicion of heresy. His book is banned, and he remains under house arrest for the rest of his life.
1992 The Catholic Church get around to admitting they were wrong.

46

I’ve always been more interested in practical things than philosophical naval gazing. I’m gonna rewire my house now.

47

Yeah. I totally made that shit up.

48

Science does not contain beliefs, this sentence is fallacious. Up until recently there was no good reason to believe the Coelecanth existed. When one was found, the truth was immediately accepted. The difference between a person who practices science and a person that practices religious is just that. New information is accepted, folded into current understanding, and dealt with. Religion would instead suppress that knowledge, unless that knowledge fit into an already existing worldview, and would be highly dismissive of it to the point of having its members continually lie to convince others they are correct.

49

I used the wrong word.

Up until recently there was no good reason to believe the Coelecanth existed. When one was found, the truth was immediately accepted.

Actually, people were looking for it at the time. And that’s the reason why the truth was immediately accepted.

You make it sound like there are no disagreements within science or within religion, and that one is always one way and one is always the other. But none of that is the case; Scientists frequently believe things despite the evidence to the contrary and religious folk change their beliefs based on given evidence just as often as scientists do.

50

There are constant disagreements in the scientific establishment. Scientists that believe things despite unequivocal evidence to the contrary are typically derided and not listened too. You can be an accredited scientist, and still be a complete pariah. One issue is that to the laymen, it often looks like scientists are arguing something very basic, when in fact they are arguing something very fiddly and arcane. Gould was always a lightning rod of criticism in Evolution, and some would consider him wrong. He made a lot of convincing arguments, but unfortunately died before it was really shown whether he was right or wrong.

I also have to call bullshit on

religious folk change their beliefs based on given evidence just as often as scientists do.

The most regressive people are always religious in our western world. They accept things that don’t “matter” to them. Some new LCD technology, some weird jellyfish from deep in the ocean. These things are not paramount in their worldview and are meaningless to them. Yet, anything that touches on their central tenets it usually dismissed out of hand. This is exactly the opposite of how a scientist would react to any given piece of information. Scientists seek to disprove themselves, it is how science is set up. I absolutely do not accept that these kinds of minds are alike in this regard at all, and trying to draw some equivalence between them is intellectually dishonest.

51

http://www.conservapedia.com/Science

You probably don’t want to read the entry on evolution. Or maybe you do.

52

Recommended reading:

Scientific Blunders by Robert Youngson

Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science by Martin Gardner

Voodoo Science - The Road from Foolishness to Fraud by Robert Park.

All in my permanent library.

53

You truly believe that a scientist’s brain is qualitatively different in the way it functions from someone who is religious, or that religion and science are mutually exclusive?

You truly believe that scientists are not full of the same petty disagrements and vain jealousies that infect every other person in the world?

In theory, scientists should all be that way, just as all Christians should be non-judgmental folk who love their enemy. However, if you are going to claim that this theory somehow translates into the kind of reality you describe, you’re going to have to produce some evidence.

But what you need to recognize is that what I’m saying here is not an attack on the validity of science, but rather an examination of your religious beliefs.

In science, these claims you make require a kind of support behind them that you have not given. And I’d go as far as to say you can’t, because I am quite sure that a scientist’s brain works the exact same way as every other human’s.

In other words, when you say that “the most regressive people are religious in our Western World,” you need to recognize that you are making a statement of your own “regressive” religious beliefs and not something that has any valid scientific basis behind it. And if you can’t admit that, then that is true intellectual dishonesty.

It’s the old “takes one to know one” rule, y’know.

54

You are hurting the internet.

55

Just out of curiosity, how many people posting on these science topics have experience working in the real world of science, with scientists? It’s hard to convey intent in an internet posting, but I seriously don’t ask that in any put-down way, I’m genuinely interested in the level of experience here.

What I see quite often is that people forget that scientists are just people who took certain topics in school and work in places where you can do science and get paid for it. But the bottom line is that they are just people. No better, no worse. There is a distribution of personalities, levels of integrity, agendas, etc. that are no different from people in other fields, such as accountants, business managers, CEOs, cops, religious workers, software suits, athletes, etc. Think about the range of people you know and work with - same thing. Being people, my experience is that most scientists that I’ve seen, worked with, etc. over the last 30 years are NOT driven by a pure quest for knowledge. They are driven by the same motivations that everyone else is: how to get promoted, how to make more money, professional ego, fame, a fun place to work, good people to work with, etc.

So, when someone working at a university becomes a professor specializing in nuclear chemistry, global warming, evolution, tribology, catalysis, fuel cells, etc. the perhaps unfortunate reality is that they have vested interests in the results of their research. I have very rarely seen a professor who published papers and earned his/her salary (which means getting public and government grants) in a given field come out and say “Hey, you know I have been saying for years that this is true? Well, we just discovered that I was wrong all these years, and the people arguing with me were right.” Because, even if that is the truth, that means they lose face, lose prestige, and lose grants and money. You can argue that it is better for them to say it than have it proved by others, but that’s just the way it is for the most part.

Scientists do what they do to make a living. Not because they are pure driven nobles in white robes. Some (fortunately a minority) lie and distort the truth because it helps them make more money in some way. I’ve had to fire more than one scientist for precisely that reason. I used to think that that couldn’t happen, because in one way or another the data would find them out, but you’d be surprised how often data is open enough to interpretation to keep it from being so open and shut. So whenever I take over a new lab or R&D organization, one of the first things I tell people is that I only have 3 unforgiveable sins for which I have zero tolerance, and one of them is lying about the data - then I go on to define lying about the data as any form of misleading people about the data in any way.

I guess my bottom line is that most scientists are good honest people but only in the same way and the same proportion that all people in all areas are good honest people. The ideal that scientists are pure in some way and driven only by a seek for the truth as opposed to making a living and paying their mortgage and buying a new car is just a bit naive.

56

Wouldn’t be the first time, Muchacho del Dos Polos.

57

Jeff, the argument isn’t that scientists are immune to the foibles of mankind, it’s rather that the institutions through which science proceeds are set up in such a way as to minimize the effects of those foibles. Referencing and building on previous work, carefully documenting data and methods, and peer review all act to reduce the ability of anyone, no matter how well-respected, to maintain discredited ideas in the face of contradictory evidence.

That said, I would expect that the average scientist is, in fact, much more likely than the average non-scientist to have genuine interest in understanding how the world works. Scientists aren’t a randomly selected subset of the population; there’s no reason to expect that the distribution of personalities within science (or any other profession for that matter) is the same as in any field. People with a genuine curiousity about the way the world works are more likely to self-select into science. These traits would be amplified by both scientific training and the institutions mentioned above.

Perhaps Sidd knows of some studies comparing the personality traits of scientists and people in other fields. I’d be genuinely interested to know if my hypothesis is consistent with the evidence!

58

Well, having worked in the field for about 30 years, I"ve seen the distribution to be fairly broad. Political biases, etc. I would say there are more “geeks” in the sciences than, say, journalism, just as there probably are in programming. But you’d be surprised how ignorant many scientists are about science outside their own field. Most people here probably know about as much about biology as the average, say, nuclear physicist.

I’ve been a referee for peer reviewed journals in the past, and that does help for articles published in those journals. However, I’ve also seen editors for said journals bias the journals through whom they select as referees (it is very common for it to be their friends in the field) and what they do to override referee comments. Again, you’re dealing with people.

The other thing that worries me about a field like, say global warming as the best current example, is that when something becomes as politicized and big as that, it is a goldmine of easy money for any scientist who jumps in. Guess how hard it is to get money to go measure the feather losses on penguins right now? So you get a huge number of scientists with a very personal and real reason to ride the gravy train (if you’ve ever worked in an area of the sciences where you get paid based on how many grants you can get funded, and know the pain of writing them and submitting them and hoping to get then approved so you can pay the mortgage, you know the glee of finding an area where money is being thrown out in huge sums.) I interviewed in March with a solar panel technology company. The chief technical officer was describing, with glee, how easy it was to get cash from the German government for their new plants, how the German government’s “Green Funds” had guaranteed them contracts through 2012 as well as cash for their new plant, and how much everyone’s stock options were going to be worth a ton as a result. This guy is considered one of the top scientists in the world in the field of solar cell technology.

I guess my overall feeling is that every field of science should be opened to honest confrontation and questioning, and any time that someone who questions the consensus is immediately personally attacked or made a pariah, that’s bad. That disagreement is precisely the process to which you refer that should keep things honest. If the person questioning has less than noble reasons for questioning, so what? The answer should be the same: here’s the data, here’s how the data was gathered, here are the alternative ways that the data could be interpreted, here are the ways that the hypothesis could be negated and the experiments we did to try to disprove the hypothesis. It is very common for a scientist to be challenged by people in marketing, people at other companies, other scientists, or any one that would benefit from the scientist being wrong. In all cases the correct answer is simply the data, not a personal attack of the person questioning, because that is the scientific response.

59

One could also claim that churches are set up in such a way as to minimize the effects of foibles, and be no more wrong.

Science shouldn’t be a religion unto itself, but it has become one, because people still seek some kind of certainty and comfort. People don’t want the truth; they want security, and any fallibility – be it in what they were told the Word of God meant or in Scientific Truth – is seen as a horrible failure.

60

Okay, don’t leave me hanging, what are the other two sins? Not refilling the coffee pot?