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A dogmatic belief in anything is detrimental. It takes wisdom to understand this. Many followers of science lack this. Scientific method is a great tool - for t

A dogmatic belief in anything is detrimental. It takes wisdom to understand this. Many followers of science lack this. Scientific method is a great tool - for the type of questions that it is designed to deal with - and a disaster waiting to happen if used for other areas of inquiry.

devoply 8y ago
Except wisdom in large complex systems is impossible. Like for instance take any piece of technology you are going to introduce into the system. How can anyone be wise about how that technology will effect the system before hand? After the fact how can you get rid of the technology when millions or people depend on it for their existence? The same is true of pure knowledge. You introduce a new paradigm. You don't know how it will effect all the other knowledge that depends on it. Once it's adopted careers of many scientists depend on it... it's only after those scientists die and a new paradigm is found that the next generation can build its career on that old knowledge dies. None of this is due to wisdom. It's just the way the political economy works. Wisdom only applies to individual action about things that have a small enough scope to have some idea about their impact on decisions. For anything bigger than that, it's political... and I highly doubt the crowds have wisdom especially about untested things.
stdbrouw 8y ago
> Scientific method is a great tool - for the type of questions that it is designed to deal with - and a disaster waiting to happen if used for other areas of inquiry. What other areas of inquiry would that be?
- featherrust 8y ago
  Interpersonal relationships?
  - igor47 8y ago
    I'm a fan of NVC(non-violent communication) and that framework could be summarized by the sentence, "when you do X,I feel Y". You basically become an instrument that reports on your internal state, plus you're also supposed to avoid assuming anything about the other person's internal state. This is a lot more like science then the usual default of blaming and assumptions and implicit expectations that most people conduct their relationships in.
    - justtopost 8y ago
      I find that type of communication childing and dehumanizing. To each their own.
      - cobbzilla 8y ago
        Kinda ironic that your comment is a good example of this style, in describing your feelings using an “I” statement without attacking the speaker.
        synecdoche 8y ago
        I would contend that despite the "I" the form of those words implies projection, or at least victimization of oneself.
      - benj111 8y ago
        Really? I do a similar thing when dealing with idiots (not idiots, fully formed human beings, with a legitimate point of view, probably not evil, probably quite normal in person) on the internet. I find it helps keep me sane.
      - tunesmith 8y ago
        If it were limited to "when you do blah, I feel blah" verbiage, it would feel like that. But it's more generally about taking accountability for one's own side, while listening to the other side, without needless escalation. I can't really see a flaw with that approach, other than it taking more work. I wonder how many arguments would be defused if both sides could phrase the other side's point of view in a way they would agree was accurately stated.
- vharuck 8y ago
  What we value. The scientific method can be used to make better paints, but we decide what styles of art we prefer.
- pfortuny 8y ago
  Raising your children, talking to strangers, charity, you name it.
  - benj111 8y ago
    Do you mean you shouldn't raise your kids based on science? You shouldn't experiment to see what works with your child, or you just shouldn't do experiments on your child?
    - Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
      Children need love, compassion and a lot of patience. They want to be treated like living beings, not like science projects. Yes science in general can obviously make some generic guidelines or provide some good insights in very specific questions of this childraising enterprise, but the vast majority of choices and everyday actions will fall outside of this.
      - benj111 8y ago
        "and a lot of patience" I find the distance, that analysing behaviour brings, actually helps with the patience, and compassion (if they're having a weird tantrum because they wanted something trivial). I also think it keeps me motivated in consciously raising my kids, rather than just passively whiling away the years. Maybe I have younger kids, so there aren't really any philosophical issues being raised.
- maire 8y ago
  A really good book to read on this is "the Signal and the Noise" by Nate Silver. Basically, the scientific method requires modeling the system correctly which only works for certain kinds of systems. Systems where the complexity exceeds the available data causes people to see patterns where they don't exist and to be overly confident in their interpretation of the data. The entire area of nutrition and weight management is a joke. Medicine is problematic and Psychology is questionable. Another problem is that the popular media publishes inconclusive studies because they are click bait. People read them because they are interested in living longer and losing weight and being happy. Fear also turns studies into clickbait. The latest was the blizzard of articles on if bugs are dying off or not. Then there is the fact that negative studies tend to be ignored and when the study failed or it introduces data that does not conform to general knowledge. All this makes people question studies where the data is conclusive.
  - bsder 8y ago
    > The entire area of nutrition and weight management is a joke. Medicine is problematic and Psychology is questionable. Note that the issue is that there is a human in that system. The problem is that we (rightfully!) don't easily allow experiments on humans that might be harmful. And, as an aside, nutrition and weight management does have people doing real science (things like studies of hunter gatherer societies with deuterated water), it's just that the results aren't very flashy (ie. a human burns roughly the same amount of calories regardless of activity level--so the only way to lose weight is to eat less--moving more is healthy but doesn't contribute substantially to weight loss).
    - maire 8y ago
      Scientists are trying to study nutrition, it is just that the data is inconclusive. Yet the popular media reports each conflicting study as fact. Here is an interesting Stanford Medicine study of individual variation on the impact on low carb vs low fat. The punchline is that they still don't know after a fairly rigorous study. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SBZ4HYOxf0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SBZ4HYOxf0
- 50656E6973 8y ago
  Social and political science. Psychiatrists paved the way for the Holocaust: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23511221 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23511221
- mensetmanusman 8y ago
  What the Germans did during WW2: which race is better, etc., etc.
cameronh90 8y ago
I agree. However, most people are not philosophers, and are going to essentially pick a dogma. I think it's better that is the scientific method.
sqrt17 8y ago
> Scientific method is a great tool - for the type of questions that it is designed to deal with - and a disaster waiting to happen if used for other areas of inquiry. ... which is why the actual sciences (and other research disciplines) use methods that have more of a family resemblance to the prototypic scientific method than being point-for-point identical with it. Many common points exist - showing your reasoning and evidence rather than to appeal to authority, and the idea that hypotheses should be falsifialbe (in the sense of Thomas Kuhn) to be central ideas. Both of these very good idea in all situations in which you're actually interested in the truth, rather than having a shoot-first-ask-questions-later situation where you need to act on imperfect information. There's no disaster waiting to happen, at least not in comparison to other tools of reasoning being misused. Sophism (i.e. people playing mind games to make their claims look better) exists inside and outside of science, just as self-interest and wanting to increase your own sphere of influence do, but that's no fault of the scientific method (any more than it is a fault of religion when it occurs there). Any system that lends credibility and authority to people will (loosely mis-citing Bourdieu) attract power-mongery.

devoply 8y ago

Except wisdom in large complex systems is impossible. Like for instance take any piece of technology you are going to introduce into the system. How can anyone be wise about how that technology will effect the system before hand? After the fact how can you get rid of the technology when millions or people depend on it for their existence? The same is true of pure knowledge. You introduce a new paradigm. You don't know how it will effect all the other knowledge that depends on it. Once it's adopted careers of many scientists depend on it... it's only after those scientists die and a new paradigm is found that the next generation can build its career on that old knowledge dies. None of this is due to wisdom. It's just the way the political economy works. Wisdom only applies to individual action about things that have a small enough scope to have some idea about their impact on decisions. For anything bigger than that, it's political... and I highly doubt the crowds have wisdom especially about untested things.

stdbrouw 8y ago

> Scientific method is a great tool - for the type of questions that it is designed to deal with - and a disaster waiting to happen if used for other areas of inquiry. What other areas of inquiry would that be?

featherrust 8y ago
Interpersonal relationships?
- igor47 8y ago
  I'm a fan of NVC(non-violent communication) and that framework could be summarized by the sentence, "when you do X,I feel Y". You basically become an instrument that reports on your internal state, plus you're also supposed to avoid assuming anything about the other person's internal state. This is a lot more like science then the usual default of blaming and assumptions and implicit expectations that most people conduct their relationships in.
  - justtopost 8y ago
    I find that type of communication childing and dehumanizing. To each their own.
    - cobbzilla 8y ago
      Kinda ironic that your comment is a good example of this style, in describing your feelings using an “I” statement without attacking the speaker.
      - synecdoche 8y ago
        I would contend that despite the "I" the form of those words implies projection, or at least victimization of oneself.
    - benj111 8y ago
      Really? I do a similar thing when dealing with idiots (not idiots, fully formed human beings, with a legitimate point of view, probably not evil, probably quite normal in person) on the internet. I find it helps keep me sane.
    - tunesmith 8y ago
      If it were limited to "when you do blah, I feel blah" verbiage, it would feel like that. But it's more generally about taking accountability for one's own side, while listening to the other side, without needless escalation. I can't really see a flaw with that approach, other than it taking more work. I wonder how many arguments would be defused if both sides could phrase the other side's point of view in a way they would agree was accurately stated.
vharuck 8y ago
What we value. The scientific method can be used to make better paints, but we decide what styles of art we prefer.
pfortuny 8y ago
Raising your children, talking to strangers, charity, you name it.
- benj111 8y ago
  Do you mean you shouldn't raise your kids based on science? You shouldn't experiment to see what works with your child, or you just shouldn't do experiments on your child?
  - Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
    Children need love, compassion and a lot of patience. They want to be treated like living beings, not like science projects. Yes science in general can obviously make some generic guidelines or provide some good insights in very specific questions of this childraising enterprise, but the vast majority of choices and everyday actions will fall outside of this.
    - benj111 8y ago
      "and a lot of patience" I find the distance, that analysing behaviour brings, actually helps with the patience, and compassion (if they're having a weird tantrum because they wanted something trivial). I also think it keeps me motivated in consciously raising my kids, rather than just passively whiling away the years. Maybe I have younger kids, so there aren't really any philosophical issues being raised.
maire 8y ago
A really good book to read on this is "the Signal and the Noise" by Nate Silver. Basically, the scientific method requires modeling the system correctly which only works for certain kinds of systems. Systems where the complexity exceeds the available data causes people to see patterns where they don't exist and to be overly confident in their interpretation of the data. The entire area of nutrition and weight management is a joke. Medicine is problematic and Psychology is questionable. Another problem is that the popular media publishes inconclusive studies because they are click bait. People read them because they are interested in living longer and losing weight and being happy. Fear also turns studies into clickbait. The latest was the blizzard of articles on if bugs are dying off or not. Then there is the fact that negative studies tend to be ignored and when the study failed or it introduces data that does not conform to general knowledge. All this makes people question studies where the data is conclusive.
- bsder 8y ago
  > The entire area of nutrition and weight management is a joke. Medicine is problematic and Psychology is questionable. Note that the issue is that there is a human in that system. The problem is that we (rightfully!) don't easily allow experiments on humans that might be harmful. And, as an aside, nutrition and weight management does have people doing real science (things like studies of hunter gatherer societies with deuterated water), it's just that the results aren't very flashy (ie. a human burns roughly the same amount of calories regardless of activity level--so the only way to lose weight is to eat less--moving more is healthy but doesn't contribute substantially to weight loss).
  - maire 8y ago
    Scientists are trying to study nutrition, it is just that the data is inconclusive. Yet the popular media reports each conflicting study as fact. Here is an interesting Stanford Medicine study of individual variation on the impact on low carb vs low fat. The punchline is that they still don't know after a fairly rigorous study. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SBZ4HYOxf0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SBZ4HYOxf0
50656E6973 8y ago
Social and political science. Psychiatrists paved the way for the Holocaust: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23511221 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23511221
mensetmanusman 8y ago
What the Germans did during WW2: which race is better, etc., etc.

cameronh90 8y ago

I agree. However, most people are not philosophers, and are going to essentially pick a dogma. I think it's better that is the scientific method.

sqrt17 8y ago

> Scientific method is a great tool - for the type of questions that it is designed to deal with - and a disaster waiting to happen if used for other areas of inquiry. ... which is why the actual sciences (and other research disciplines) use methods that have more of a family resemblance to the prototypic scientific method than being point-for-point identical with it. Many common points exist - showing your reasoning and evidence rather than to appeal to authority, and the idea that hypotheses should be falsifialbe (in the sense of Thomas Kuhn) to be central ideas. Both of these very good idea in all situations in which you're actually interested in the truth, rather than having a shoot-first-ask-questions-later situation where you need to act on imperfect information. There's no disaster waiting to happen, at least not in comparison to other tools of reasoning being misused. Sophism (i.e. people playing mind games to make their claims look better) exists inside and outside of science, just as self-interest and wanting to increase your own sphere of influence do, but that's no fault of the scientific method (any more than it is a fault of religion when it occurs there). Any system that lends credibility and authority to people will (loosely mis-citing Bourdieu) attract power-mongery.