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We talk about political power all the time. And energy drinks. And force of personality. Time. These words didn't have the precise scientific meaning they have

by iguy 9y ago

We talk about political power all the time. And energy drinks. And force of personality. Time. These words didn't have the precise scientific meaning they have acquired until someone got the science working. Their older less precise meaning are not mistakes. Temperature is another good example. Most of the objections you are raising were raised against this single number when it was being invented. How can the many-faceted feelings of weather become a single number, etc. Your number doesn't fit my pre-existing idea, you're studying the wrong concept, etc. All the same squirming. Lots of messy back and forth. But what survived all that was a number which turned out to be scientifically useful for predicting stuff, like how well your steam engine would work. So it got accepted. (Much later we learned what was going on microscopically, but this wasn't necessary.)

pasabagi 9y ago
At the risk of descending to a column of words: What we're talking about here is essentially epistemology. What is science, and what is its epistemic status? My feeling is that to the extent that scientists are capable of coming up with good questions, they have cast off the baggage of unscientific and pre-scientific thought systems. The problem is, it is not the case that a hypothesis is either good, or bad. Mendel proved that even with a very bad hypothesis, you can do very good science (he was a monk). A society of scientists who were incapable of coming up with good hypothesis, whose experiments always proved the null hypothesis - would not be too bad at science. A society of scientists who were very bad at formulating, identifying, and outlining problems, on the other hand, would be very bad at science. They could devise experiments where neither the null, nor the alternative hypothesis, were of any value in regards to the world. You can come up with any number of questions like this. The most famous one is probably, 'when did you stop beating your wife?' The most scientifically relevant one is the search for the philosophers stone. You can look through the history of science and see a ton of these questions - areas where vast amounts of effort were essentially wasted, where the only useful results were side effects. They are universally marked by one trait: they attempt to solve questions that are obvious and important to a non-scientist, and, in terms that have a root outside of the sciences. Really Interesting science problems are, on the other hand, almost invariably about topics that non-scientists wouldn't find interesting. Feymann spent years working on wobbling plates - and won a Nobel prize for the application of this research to particle physics! So, if you find yourself trying to answer non-scientific questions in non-scientific terms, the question is, can your answer be scientific? You're essentially saying yes: enough research into the philosopher's stone would make the philosopher's stone science. I'm saying no: the only science that could come about from searching for the philosopher's stone would be an accident. The philosophers stone, unless it divested itself entirely from its non-scientific content (as in the case of energy, temperature, etc), will never be science. PS: I think there's fairly obviously a conceptual distinction between the concept of power, as in, watts, and the concept of power, as in, Donald Trump. A similar distinction would be between 'vectors' and 'arrows'. I think such conflations are actually a major and frequently encountered obstacle to teaching. But you're welcome to disagree.

by iguy 9y ago

pasabagi 9y ago

At the risk of descending to a column of words: What we're talking about here is essentially epistemology. What is science, and what is its epistemic status? My feeling is that to the extent that scientists are capable of coming up with good questions, they have cast off the baggage of unscientific and pre-scientific thought systems. The problem is, it is not the case that a hypothesis is either good, or bad. Mendel proved that even with a very bad hypothesis, you can do very good science (he was a monk). A society of scientists who were incapable of coming up with good hypothesis, whose experiments always proved the null hypothesis - would not be too bad at science. A society of scientists who were very bad at formulating, identifying, and outlining problems, on the other hand, would be very bad at science. They could devise experiments where neither the null, nor the alternative hypothesis, were of any value in regards to the world. You can come up with any number of questions like this. The most famous one is probably, 'when did you stop beating your wife?' The most scientifically relevant one is the search for the philosophers stone. You can look through the history of science and see a ton of these questions - areas where vast amounts of effort were essentially wasted, where the only useful results were side effects. They are universally marked by one trait: they attempt to solve questions that are obvious and important to a non-scientist, and, in terms that have a root outside of the sciences. Really Interesting science problems are, on the other hand, almost invariably about topics that non-scientists wouldn't find interesting. Feymann spent years working on wobbling plates - and won a Nobel prize for the application of this research to particle physics! So, if you find yourself trying to answer non-scientific questions in non-scientific terms, the question is, can your answer be scientific? You're essentially saying yes: enough research into the philosopher's stone would make the philosopher's stone science. I'm saying no: the only science that could come about from searching for the philosopher's stone would be an accident. The philosophers stone, unless it divested itself entirely from its non-scientific content (as in the case of energy, temperature, etc), will never be science. PS: I think there's fairly obviously a conceptual distinction between the concept of power, as in, watts, and the concept of power, as in, Donald Trump. A similar distinction would be between 'vectors' and 'arrows'. I think such conflations are actually a major and frequently encountered obstacle to teaching. But you're welcome to disagree.