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Whenever I hear word science attached to other words like Data-science, climate-science, economic-science, social-science, it smells like pushing up some kind o
by geodel 10y ago
Whenever I hear word science attached to other words like Data-science, climate-science, economic-science, social-science, it smells like pushing up some kind of agenda that has very little to do with science. They sound very non-neutral words to me as compared to statistics, economics, atmosphere, social studies etc.
- SeanLuke 10y agoSocial studies is not a field; it is the name of a class in elementary school. I dunno about your other terms, but "social science" is a pretty old term, dating from the 1820s. It (or the "social sciences") has come to be the standard term for the superset of economics, political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, archaeology, and related scientific fields involving the study of Man. This seems like a pretty reasonable term, just as "physical sciences" or "biological sciences" refer to their respective supersets.
- jackmott 10y agoVery scientific critique there, guy.
- dekhn 10y agoI am not certain why you associate "climate science" with agenda. It's the study of the climate using scientific principles. Everything about it is neutral.
- dozzie 10y ago> It's the study of the climate using scientific principles. Like falsifiability. Oh, wait, you can't falsify most of the climate-related speculations because of complexity of the system.
- omginternets 10y agoFor instance?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dozzie 10y agoLet's reverse the question: how to falsify any of the climatology's big claims?
- Xylakant 10y agoFor example by providing a theory that better explains all phenomena that haven been observed so far. Because there are observable phenomena: The statistical increase in temperatures, the rise of the sea level, the rise in extreme weather events. And so far, the models line up fairly well. Sometimes scientist find flaws and refine models, but nobody has yet found a fundamental flaw or provided a better explanation.
- dozzie 10y ago> For example by providing a theory that better explains all phenomena that haven been observed so far. This is not how falsification works. If you provide another hypothesis, even if it was better tailored to your measured data, you now have two of them that work. The former one didn't magically stop working. Which one is valid? (Hint: may be the former, if you account for variables you didn't think about previously, or may be neither of them). And most hypotheses are formed as a cause-effect explainations. How to verify that in a correlation of two phenomena one of them is the reason for the other? Climatology has only offered speculation till this day. > Sometimes scientist find flaws and refine models, but nobody has yet found a fundamental flaw or provided a better explanation. Well, nothing to brag about in this case. Those climatologists claim that atmospheric CO2 concentration is major (or even main) cause for greenhouse effect, yet CO2 has twenty times smaller(!) heat capacity compared to atmospheric water at current concentrations.
- omginternets 10y agoSuch as what? Let's get into specifics.
- dekhn 10y agoAre you implying that you can't scientifically study the climate because some of the predictions it makes aren't falsifiable? That does not seem like a particularly useful argument.