6 ms·

Scientific theories are not "proven", that is not how science works. All theories are always and forever open to falsification. The scientific attitude is one o

Scientific theories are not "proven", that is not how science works. All theories are always and forever open to falsification. The scientific attitude is one of eternal doubt. "Proof" is something that only exists in the realm of pure math.

keiferski 7y ago
Yes, thank you. I really wish scientists (and the general public) learned more about the fundamentals of their field. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science
- sn41 7y ago
  Actually I wonder whether Karl Popper is considered very important by philosophers of science. I have had arguments with people who claim that Feyerabend has a better "approach" to science. On the other hand, practicing scientists consider Popper's falsification one of the great unifying themes guiding scientific research. Though perhaps not as well-known, Popper's approach towards falsification of probabilistic claims is also a great read.
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    We discussed popper in some classes I took, the main theme for that for like an explanation yes it needs to be falsifiable, but also sometimes science is just "look I made a thing!" Or "look I found a thing!" And it's less relevant there. The unanimous belief accross different classes in the sciences I took was that yes, when we think about science we look at it from the perspective of falsification, but when we actually do science, we usually think of it as exploration until we have something we think falsifies the status quo or needs rigorous data collection to reject the mill. Nobody is really running an RNA sequencing experiment to evaluate the impacts of a drug on the rna transcriptome with falsification in mind (even if in a sense the null of "nothing changes" is what you're trying to falsify"). Psychologically it's just seen as some exploration to see what happens.
    - vharuck 7y ago
      >Nobody is really running an RNA sequencing experiment to evaluate the impacts of a drug on the rna transcriptome with falsification in mind (even if in a sense the null of "nothing changes" is what you're trying to falsify"). Psychologically it's just seen as some exploration to see what happens. Isn't this, along with and maybe encouraging p-hacking, a major cause of the non-reproducability crisis? Scientists hunting out supporting evidence instead of showing their theories don't easily break?
      - vikramkr 7y ago
        It likely is, but this is also an outgrowth of the "explorer" sort of mindset where people juts see themselves as diving into the unknown to see what they find. It's not malicious, but it could contribute to p hacking for sure
        omar_a1 7y ago
        The explorer mindset is how scientists discovered penicillin, x-rays, and vulcanized rubber. Science isn't as cut and dry as the scientific method suggests. I'd say to the extent that this behavior contributes to the reproducibility crisis, it has more to do with not backing that exploration with rigorous experimentation. But more to the point, I'd argue that the lack of funding and publish-or-perish atmosphere has more to do with it. Academics don't necessarily publish because the results are noteworthy, but because they have to, regardless of the robustness of their methodology.
        vikramkr 7y ago
        That's absolutely true as well, and in my reply above I wasn't contesting that, just contemplating what the poster above that mentioned about p hacking, how maybe this mindset makes it easier as a justification? But yeah we should never just discard the importance of exploration for the sake of it, it's how we also got crucial technologies like current PCR tools - some guy just really wanted to see what was up with those Yellowstone bacteria and found all sorts of heat stable compounds. That rigorous follow-up is super important though as you stated
  - jfengel 7y ago
    Feyerabend isn't so much a "better approach" as a lack of an approach. He does a good job trying to get past the numerous problems of Popper's work, but in doing so largely just reverses it without adding anything useful. The way I read it, it really dates back to Hume and the problem of induction. Until we have a Final Theory to hand, we never really know anything. That is a statement of epistemology. But science can't proceed on that basis: people make decisions on where to focus their efforts, and not all hypotheses are equally worth considering. That is a statement of scientific pragmatism, and those two fields don't overlap as much as we'd like them to. Feyerabend is easily read as continuing to conflate the two: "Hey, all knowledge is provisional, so you might as well study astrology." Maybe that's useful from an epistemological standpoint, but it's not helpful for grants committees to think that way. Nor is it helpful for epistemological anarchists to insist that grants committees never really know and therefore really should fund astrology. The question of how scientists actually work is an important one, but it's a separate question from what TRVTH actually is -- even though scientists would like to believe otherwise. They're not as close as they think.
    - msla 7y ago
      > Feyerabend is easily read as continuing to conflate the two: "Hey, all knowledge is provisional, so you might as well study astrology." Maybe that's useful from an epistemological standpoint, but it's not helpful for grants committees to think that way. It isn't helpful for anyone and we have very concrete examples of that to hand: Anti-vaxxers love to point out stuff like Vioxx, but never say a damn thing about all the drugs and therapies which are helpful, do much more good than harm, and which are "proven" to work for all practical intents and purposes. Being unwilling to attack stuff like anti-vaccine nonsense head-on because of some abstract epistemological nonsense kills people. There's no upside to that. Saying "Nothing is absolutely certain, therefore it is absolutely certain that we know nothing" is bad enough. Actually believing it is dangerous in direct proportion to how much of a hand you have in shaping policy. The bus driver might believe in utter epistemological nihilism, but they'd better not veer into oncoming traffic just the same.
      - jfengel 7y ago
- yarrel 7y ago
  While the history of science emerges from and has an ongoing productive dialogue with that of philosophy, the humanities dept. status panic confection of "philosophy of science" has very little to do with this.
  - keiferski 7y ago
    I'm not sure what "status panic confection" is supposed to mean. Nor does philosophy generally fall under humanities departments. The philosophy of science is an established field that is hundreds of years old and includes pretty serious thinkers like Kant, Popper, Kuhn, and quite a few others. Ignore it at your own peril. https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=philosophy+of+science https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=philosop...
marcosdumay 7y ago
Yes, and on this case this is completely correct. But evolutionary theories are so close to pure math (ie., they assume so little empirical knowledge) that it does happen once in a while to have some aspect of them proven on the literal sense. Every scientific theory has this thing where a complex conclusion is proven to follow from a simpler set of hypothesis. It just tends to happen more often with Evolution. Edit: On the old text it wasn't clear I agree on this case.
- gus_massa 7y ago
  This is about the comparison of terrestrial mammal species and marine mammal species, and how many subspecies each one has. They have to model how the natural and artificial barriers in each environment produce subpopulations that are isolated enough to produce subspecies. And compare the simulations of the models with the data of real mammal species to see if they have similar results. This is not so close to pure math.
  - 0thgen 7y ago
    to follow up on gus_massa's point, it's not the "math" of an evolutionary thoery/agorithm that's being "proved" here; it's the assertion that it "proves" something about the environment it's trying to model and saying you've "proved" something about natural events is probably bad practice
- vikramkr 7y ago
  In those cases, is something about evolutionary science proven, or is a mathematical concept proven derived from a model of evolutionary systems? We can create proofs and do real math in extending and understanding the implications of the mathematical models we use for the world, but I don't think proving anything about the behavior of the model implies any proof of the behavior of the underlying science - it suggests it's likely but proof?
BaronSamedi 7y ago
I think the reality is more subtle than this. Is, for example, the discovery of DNA going to be falsified? I don't think so. Is the notion that living organisms evolve going to be falsified? Again, I doubt it. The case of Newton and Einstein is relevant here. Einstein didn't "falsify" Newton but rather enriched our understanding of physics. A better model seems to be that scientific theories fit into a spectrum of certainty: a very few that are certain up to the highly speculative. That scientists need to be open-minded and maintain a level of skepticism is necessary, however, the extreme skepticism you appear to be suggesting is not warranted.
- 0thgen 7y ago
  if scientific theories lie on a spectrum of certainty, then "prove" is at the maximum end of that spectrum the "extreme skepticism" you claim the OP has seems more like a cautionary statement about avoiding the extreme assumption that a scientific theory can be "proven" i think the OP is correct here; assuming evolutionary theory can be "proven" is a risky thing to say in a research article
- vikramkr 7y ago
  Dna could be falsified. It's incredibly low chance but it could. Just like the discovery of the bacteria that causes influenza was falsified once it became clear it's a virus. Just like the so called central dogma of DNA->RNA->protein turned out to be not so central or not so dogmatic. And Einstein definitely falsified Newton with the famous experiment with the eclipse and with more correctly showing Mercury's orbit, both of which contradicted fundamentally with Newton. Newton is an extraordinary breakthrough, and still useful as a model, but our understanding is no longer Newtonian. And, finding a way to enrich our understanding of physics even further means finding ways to falsify parts of einstein and quantum mechanics to provide the foundation for an even deeper understanding.
  - tossAsimov 7y ago
    I think he's trying to make a point similar to the one made by Asimov: https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.ht...
throwaway4787 7y ago
The Popperian vision of science is good enough for students so that their naive mind can enter the field with idealistic perspectives but it's not how actual professionals practice it in real life. Oftentimes there are multiple theories competing, all with reasonable evidence, suggestions, and subscribers. The reason one theory prevails above another is not that the previous' subscribers were definitely convinced by the others' evidence, but simply that they died of old age. [0] The most egregious example is taxonomy: modern-day biologists have long switched to phylogenetics/cladistics to classify groups of individuals, while old school researchers still cling to traditional classification methods (sometimes using retired terms like "race"). In addition, different fields have different standards and methods for what qualified as evidence: for instance, mathematicians want nothing short of absolute proof - that's a given. But biologists are more from Missouri: they don't care that a theory is 'proven', they want to 'see' it [1]. For this reason they put very little trust in simulations no matter how advanced they are. On the other hand, they don't care that much about the mathematical rigor of the tools they use as long as it works out in the end and can be readily confirmed with something you can 'see'. [0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-math-works https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-math-works [1] Think of it as a 'constructive' view of evidence: everything must be explicit. For instance, if you want to show that trait X is 'genetic' you need to point out an explicit genetic mechanism and show it in action in model organisms. If you want to show that mechanism Y happens in one's cells you ideally need some microscopy to show Y happening live before your eyes, etc.
grabbalacious 7y ago
The main thing is, "so-and-so proved that" or "he showed that" or "they demonstrated scientifically that" refer to processes that can't convey certainty. Even in mathematics there's no certainty because mathematicians are fallible and someone may eventually find a flaw in a proof.
LessDmesg 7y ago
B-b-but my scientific consensus!!! My 97%!!! Scientific truth is clearly determined by UN/Greenpeace propaganda and mentally disturbed Swedish teenagers! Are you saying you're a climate denier?
- dang 7y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've done it a lot, and we're trying for a different sort of site here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
abtinf 7y ago
Can Popper be falsified?
pdonis 7y ago
> Scientific theories are not "proven" True, but one should not expect careful use of language from phys.org. They are trying for more clicks, not accuracy.
rmrfstar 7y ago
Half of me: Feynman! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw Other half: it's a little tiring to be hyper rational and pedantic all the time.

keiferski 7y ago

Yes, thank you. I really wish scientists (and the general public) learned more about the fundamentals of their field. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science

sn41 7y ago
Actually I wonder whether Karl Popper is considered very important by philosophers of science. I have had arguments with people who claim that Feyerabend has a better "approach" to science. On the other hand, practicing scientists consider Popper's falsification one of the great unifying themes guiding scientific research. Though perhaps not as well-known, Popper's approach towards falsification of probabilistic claims is also a great read.
- vikramkr 7y ago
  We discussed popper in some classes I took, the main theme for that for like an explanation yes it needs to be falsifiable, but also sometimes science is just "look I made a thing!" Or "look I found a thing!" And it's less relevant there. The unanimous belief accross different classes in the sciences I took was that yes, when we think about science we look at it from the perspective of falsification, but when we actually do science, we usually think of it as exploration until we have something we think falsifies the status quo or needs rigorous data collection to reject the mill. Nobody is really running an RNA sequencing experiment to evaluate the impacts of a drug on the rna transcriptome with falsification in mind (even if in a sense the null of "nothing changes" is what you're trying to falsify"). Psychologically it's just seen as some exploration to see what happens.
  - vharuck 7y ago
    >Nobody is really running an RNA sequencing experiment to evaluate the impacts of a drug on the rna transcriptome with falsification in mind (even if in a sense the null of "nothing changes" is what you're trying to falsify"). Psychologically it's just seen as some exploration to see what happens. Isn't this, along with and maybe encouraging p-hacking, a major cause of the non-reproducability crisis? Scientists hunting out supporting evidence instead of showing their theories don't easily break?
    - vikramkr 7y ago
      It likely is, but this is also an outgrowth of the "explorer" sort of mindset where people juts see themselves as diving into the unknown to see what they find. It's not malicious, but it could contribute to p hacking for sure
      - omar_a1 7y ago
        The explorer mindset is how scientists discovered penicillin, x-rays, and vulcanized rubber. Science isn't as cut and dry as the scientific method suggests. I'd say to the extent that this behavior contributes to the reproducibility crisis, it has more to do with not backing that exploration with rigorous experimentation. But more to the point, I'd argue that the lack of funding and publish-or-perish atmosphere has more to do with it. Academics don't necessarily publish because the results are noteworthy, but because they have to, regardless of the robustness of their methodology.
        vikramkr 7y ago
        That's absolutely true as well, and in my reply above I wasn't contesting that, just contemplating what the poster above that mentioned about p hacking, how maybe this mindset makes it easier as a justification? But yeah we should never just discard the importance of exploration for the sake of it, it's how we also got crucial technologies like current PCR tools - some guy just really wanted to see what was up with those Yellowstone bacteria and found all sorts of heat stable compounds. That rigorous follow-up is super important though as you stated
- jfengel 7y ago
  Feyerabend isn't so much a "better approach" as a lack of an approach. He does a good job trying to get past the numerous problems of Popper's work, but in doing so largely just reverses it without adding anything useful. The way I read it, it really dates back to Hume and the problem of induction. Until we have a Final Theory to hand, we never really know anything. That is a statement of epistemology. But science can't proceed on that basis: people make decisions on where to focus their efforts, and not all hypotheses are equally worth considering. That is a statement of scientific pragmatism, and those two fields don't overlap as much as we'd like them to. Feyerabend is easily read as continuing to conflate the two: "Hey, all knowledge is provisional, so you might as well study astrology." Maybe that's useful from an epistemological standpoint, but it's not helpful for grants committees to think that way. Nor is it helpful for epistemological anarchists to insist that grants committees never really know and therefore really should fund astrology. The question of how scientists actually work is an important one, but it's a separate question from what TRVTH actually is -- even though scientists would like to believe otherwise. They're not as close as they think.
  - msla 7y ago
    > Feyerabend is easily read as continuing to conflate the two: "Hey, all knowledge is provisional, so you might as well study astrology." Maybe that's useful from an epistemological standpoint, but it's not helpful for grants committees to think that way. It isn't helpful for anyone and we have very concrete examples of that to hand: Anti-vaxxers love to point out stuff like Vioxx, but never say a damn thing about all the drugs and therapies which are helpful, do much more good than harm, and which are "proven" to work for all practical intents and purposes. Being unwilling to attack stuff like anti-vaccine nonsense head-on because of some abstract epistemological nonsense kills people. There's no upside to that. Saying "Nothing is absolutely certain, therefore it is absolutely certain that we know nothing" is bad enough. Actually believing it is dangerous in direct proportion to how much of a hand you have in shaping policy. The bus driver might believe in utter epistemological nihilism, but they'd better not veer into oncoming traffic just the same.
    - jfengel 7y ago
yarrel 7y ago
While the history of science emerges from and has an ongoing productive dialogue with that of philosophy, the humanities dept. status panic confection of "philosophy of science" has very little to do with this.
- keiferski 7y ago
  I'm not sure what "status panic confection" is supposed to mean. Nor does philosophy generally fall under humanities departments. The philosophy of science is an established field that is hundreds of years old and includes pretty serious thinkers like Kant, Popper, Kuhn, and quite a few others. Ignore it at your own peril. https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=philosophy+of+science https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=philosop...

marcosdumay 7y ago

Yes, and on this case this is completely correct. But evolutionary theories are so close to pure math (ie., they assume so little empirical knowledge) that it does happen once in a while to have some aspect of them proven on the literal sense. Every scientific theory has this thing where a complex conclusion is proven to follow from a simpler set of hypothesis. It just tends to happen more often with Evolution. Edit: On the old text it wasn't clear I agree on this case.

gus_massa 7y ago
This is about the comparison of terrestrial mammal species and marine mammal species, and how many subspecies each one has. They have to model how the natural and artificial barriers in each environment produce subpopulations that are isolated enough to produce subspecies. And compare the simulations of the models with the data of real mammal species to see if they have similar results. This is not so close to pure math.
- 0thgen 7y ago
  to follow up on gus_massa's point, it's not the "math" of an evolutionary thoery/agorithm that's being "proved" here; it's the assertion that it "proves" something about the environment it's trying to model and saying you've "proved" something about natural events is probably bad practice
vikramkr 7y ago
In those cases, is something about evolutionary science proven, or is a mathematical concept proven derived from a model of evolutionary systems? We can create proofs and do real math in extending and understanding the implications of the mathematical models we use for the world, but I don't think proving anything about the behavior of the model implies any proof of the behavior of the underlying science - it suggests it's likely but proof?

BaronSamedi 7y ago

I think the reality is more subtle than this. Is, for example, the discovery of DNA going to be falsified? I don't think so. Is the notion that living organisms evolve going to be falsified? Again, I doubt it. The case of Newton and Einstein is relevant here. Einstein didn't "falsify" Newton but rather enriched our understanding of physics. A better model seems to be that scientific theories fit into a spectrum of certainty: a very few that are certain up to the highly speculative. That scientists need to be open-minded and maintain a level of skepticism is necessary, however, the extreme skepticism you appear to be suggesting is not warranted.

0thgen 7y ago
if scientific theories lie on a spectrum of certainty, then "prove" is at the maximum end of that spectrum the "extreme skepticism" you claim the OP has seems more like a cautionary statement about avoiding the extreme assumption that a scientific theory can be "proven" i think the OP is correct here; assuming evolutionary theory can be "proven" is a risky thing to say in a research article
vikramkr 7y ago
Dna could be falsified. It's incredibly low chance but it could. Just like the discovery of the bacteria that causes influenza was falsified once it became clear it's a virus. Just like the so called central dogma of DNA->RNA->protein turned out to be not so central or not so dogmatic. And Einstein definitely falsified Newton with the famous experiment with the eclipse and with more correctly showing Mercury's orbit, both of which contradicted fundamentally with Newton. Newton is an extraordinary breakthrough, and still useful as a model, but our understanding is no longer Newtonian. And, finding a way to enrich our understanding of physics even further means finding ways to falsify parts of einstein and quantum mechanics to provide the foundation for an even deeper understanding.
- tossAsimov 7y ago
  I think he's trying to make a point similar to the one made by Asimov: https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.ht...

throwaway4787 7y ago

The Popperian vision of science is good enough for students so that their naive mind can enter the field with idealistic perspectives but it's not how actual professionals practice it in real life. Oftentimes there are multiple theories competing, all with reasonable evidence, suggestions, and subscribers. The reason one theory prevails above another is not that the previous' subscribers were definitely convinced by the others' evidence, but simply that they died of old age. [0] The most egregious example is taxonomy: modern-day biologists have long switched to phylogenetics/cladistics to classify groups of individuals, while old school researchers still cling to traditional classification methods (sometimes using retired terms like "race"). In addition, different fields have different standards and methods for what qualified as evidence: for instance, mathematicians want nothing short of absolute proof - that's a given. But biologists are more from Missouri: they don't care that a theory is 'proven', they want to 'see' it [1]. For this reason they put very little trust in simulations no matter how advanced they are. On the other hand, they don't care that much about the mathematical rigor of the tools they use as long as it works out in the end and can be readily confirmed with something you can 'see'. [0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-math-works https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-math-works [1] Think of it as a 'constructive' view of evidence: everything must be explicit. For instance, if you want to show that trait X is 'genetic' you need to point out an explicit genetic mechanism and show it in action in model organisms. If you want to show that mechanism Y happens in one's cells you ideally need some microscopy to show Y happening live before your eyes, etc.

grabbalacious 7y ago

The main thing is, "so-and-so proved that" or "he showed that" or "they demonstrated scientifically that" refer to processes that can't convey certainty. Even in mathematics there's no certainty because mathematicians are fallible and someone may eventually find a flaw in a proof.

LessDmesg 7y ago

B-b-but my scientific consensus!!! My 97%!!! Scientific truth is clearly determined by UN/Greenpeace propaganda and mentally disturbed Swedish teenagers! Are you saying you're a climate denier?

dang 7y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've done it a lot, and we're trying for a different sort of site here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

abtinf 7y ago

Can Popper be falsified?

pdonis 7y ago

> Scientific theories are not "proven" True, but one should not expect careful use of language from phys.org. They are trying for more clicks, not accuracy.

rmrfstar 7y ago

Half of me: Feynman! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw Other half: it's a little tiring to be hyper rational and pedantic all the time.