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>History shows an inexorable march forward in understanding the universe brought about via the scientific method. At no point in the history of the scientific m

>History shows an inexorable march forward in understanding the universe brought about via the scientific method. At no point in the history of the scientific method has this been reversed. Again, this is just dogma. Science is frequently wrong and sometimes remains wrong for decades. You can say "well eventually someone will correct it, and we'll be open to that possibility", but that is JUST DOGMA. It is not incontrovertible or inexorable. As for "at no point in history has this been reversed", let's take a few simple examples. One good one is the recent serotonin theory of depression, which enjoyed a good run and racked up a few billion in drug sales before evidence began to accumulate that it is wrong. That is a reversal; people introduced a faulty theory and proceeded with it for decades. Even if we accept that Kirsch and others are overturning this, it was STILL WRONG for a long time. Or let's take another prominent recent example: fat. For decades we were told that eating fat is bad for you and causes obesity, but sugar was okay. This is all garbage science that persisted because (1) people were incentivized to look the other way and (2) the epistemology was weak. Or let's take decades of bad science on female physiology that persisted merely because science was controlled by men who were uninterested in women's health. This didn't change because of some self-correcting mechanism in science, it changed because feminism resulted in women taking up the role. >No other method has ever shown anything close to the scientific methods ability to understand how the universe actually functions. This is not the question under issue, and obviously if I really felt otherwise I wouldn't be doing science every day. But I don't believe there are foolproof 'scientific methods' that give us an ability to understand anything, there is just our commitment to observation and examining evidence. That is it. We do NOT have a foolproof epistemology. Where this becomes especially important is where our epistemology is weakest. Nutrition and psychology are good candidates because (1) what we are trying to examine is poorly understood in the first place and (2) we lack good methodologies for dissecting the underlying questions. In general biology is not as tractable as physics, which is governed by fundamental physical laws that can be modeled using a few parameters. Biological complexity is much greater and can't be attacked using the same methods - you can't do thought-experiments to figure out how ribosomes operate. The mathematical tools required are mostly statistical and are often inadequate to model the complexity we observe. This means our epistemology just fails most of the time - without the necessary tools we can't generate the insights required, nor can we set up experiments to test the propositions we wish to make. > ultimately data and it’s ability to falsify hypothesis will always overturn mistakes. Data has no abilities, and falsification is only possible if you're able to create hypotheses in the first place. Creating a hypothesis requires insight; insight requires human understanding. If humans are unable to grasp the basic concepts at work (e.g., how cytokine cascades modulate immune responses) because they are too complex and are not easily amenable to controlled experiment, we can't do "science" to move ahead on these problems.

crazydoggers 7y ago
Your examples are headline understandings of science, and not how science actually progresses. Science has an issue with public perception of how it functions, hence when knew data demonstrates that old hypothesis were incomplete or indeed wrong, people like you say “See, the scientific method doesn’t work” when in fact these are beautiful examples of how science progresses. New understandings of the “serotonin theory of depression” for instance, which is more accurately termed “monoamine hypothesis of depression” does not mean that science doesn’t work. Science makes the best of what data is available. Monamines like serotonin substantial impact the course of clinical depression. Current understanding via the scientific method reveals that early hypothesis don’t explain everything. This is a refinement. It does not discount the effects of SSRIs it other antidepressants which currently help millions of people. Could we do better once we have a more complete picture of depression. Yes. And the scientific method is how we will get there. Einstein’s theory of general relativity updated Newton’s laws of physics. Was Newton and the scientific method wrong? No, he simply didn’t have all the data, and the scientific method allowed us to refine those hypothesis. I urge anyone who has trouble with the scientific method to read Carl Sagan’s fabulous book, Demon Haunted World. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World
- astazangasta 7y ago
  >Your examples are headline understandings of science, and not how science actually progresses. I do science every day. I have done science for all of my adult life, at the best research institutions in America. I have a very intimate understanding of how science works. My guess from your writing is that you are NOT a scientist, you're an engineer with a deep technical education. You have learned a lot of science but you don't spend much time actually doing it. In point of fact science is a culture; its practitioners are subject to all sorts of weaknesses, moral and rational, that end up in its method. Let me give you an example from my field - my current PI invented CTLA4 blockade, a cancer immunotherapy, in 1996. His PhD advisor, Jim Allison, just won the Nobel Prize for this work. Since about 2014 people have become interested in immunotherapy following several successful new therapies, but it was largely ignored since 1996 - why? Because the cancer establishment wasn't interested. People who wished to study the immune component of cancer were shunned or ridiculed, and what is now an entire field was reduced to a rump study of the "tumor microenvironment" that could never receive funding. Why is it receiving funding now? Because drug companies are interested now that there are successful therapies on the market. The actual scientific evidence, meanwhile, was produced a generation ago. What this means is that whatever epistemology is at work in "science" is not merely evidence-driven, it's subject to all sorts of human foibles, being done by humans.

crazydoggers 7y ago

Your examples are headline understandings of science, and not how science actually progresses. Science has an issue with public perception of how it functions, hence when knew data demonstrates that old hypothesis were incomplete or indeed wrong, people like you say “See, the scientific method doesn’t work” when in fact these are beautiful examples of how science progresses. New understandings of the “serotonin theory of depression” for instance, which is more accurately termed “monoamine hypothesis of depression” does not mean that science doesn’t work. Science makes the best of what data is available. Monamines like serotonin substantial impact the course of clinical depression. Current understanding via the scientific method reveals that early hypothesis don’t explain everything. This is a refinement. It does not discount the effects of SSRIs it other antidepressants which currently help millions of people. Could we do better once we have a more complete picture of depression. Yes. And the scientific method is how we will get there. Einstein’s theory of general relativity updated Newton’s laws of physics. Was Newton and the scientific method wrong? No, he simply didn’t have all the data, and the scientific method allowed us to refine those hypothesis. I urge anyone who has trouble with the scientific method to read Carl Sagan’s fabulous book, Demon Haunted World. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

astazangasta 7y ago
>Your examples are headline understandings of science, and not how science actually progresses. I do science every day. I have done science for all of my adult life, at the best research institutions in America. I have a very intimate understanding of how science works. My guess from your writing is that you are NOT a scientist, you're an engineer with a deep technical education. You have learned a lot of science but you don't spend much time actually doing it. In point of fact science is a culture; its practitioners are subject to all sorts of weaknesses, moral and rational, that end up in its method. Let me give you an example from my field - my current PI invented CTLA4 blockade, a cancer immunotherapy, in 1996. His PhD advisor, Jim Allison, just won the Nobel Prize for this work. Since about 2014 people have become interested in immunotherapy following several successful new therapies, but it was largely ignored since 1996 - why? Because the cancer establishment wasn't interested. People who wished to study the immune component of cancer were shunned or ridiculed, and what is now an entire field was reduced to a rump study of the "tumor microenvironment" that could never receive funding. Why is it receiving funding now? Because drug companies are interested now that there are successful therapies on the market. The actual scientific evidence, meanwhile, was produced a generation ago. What this means is that whatever epistemology is at work in "science" is not merely evidence-driven, it's subject to all sorts of human foibles, being done by humans.