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In the orthodoxy discussed in the article, people are taking it for granted that their beliefs are true and working diligently to ridicule those who don't agree

In the orthodoxy discussed in the article, people are taking it for granted that their beliefs are true and working diligently to ridicule those who don't agree. In science, people hold many beliefs that have already been proven beyond a reasonable doubt and are working diligently to prove others.

djsumdog 6y ago
> beyond a reasonable doubt This might be true for things like the conventional laws of physics. But there are many things scientists do not agree or argue over. Quantum physics and string theory are two examples. The 1994 book The Bell Curve is another example from social sciences. And today, we have grave reproducibility crises in science. We have people trying to apply rules about the psychological and metaphysical worlds into the doctrine of hard science. In the current crisis, we have conflicting papers published almost every week, and there is a deep political climate that cannot be denied behind much of the current research. Even for thing that we can agree on work under experiment, like a certain class of drug, we can't explain WHY it works. We can say drug x will stop a heart attack 99% of the time and is generally considered safe in 99% of human beings, but often we're guess at the very specific interactions, based on what we see in labs, because we have no real introspection into all the complex things happening at the micro-level within the incredible complex cell systems inside of us. Maybe one day we'll be able to see what happens at that microlevel in human bodies, and that could lead us to discover the drug isn't working at all the way we thought it was. Science is iterative.
- mumbisChungo 6y ago
  >and are working diligently to prove others
- oasisbob 6y ago
  _The Bell Curve_ is not an academic treatise, and was near-universally derided. If anything, it itself was an anti-orthodox work trying to restore the basis of ethnicity as an explainer for many different phenomenon. Maybe I'm confused. Are you using _The Bell Curve_ as an example of pseudo-scientific pop publication gone wrong, or as a worthy scientific viewpoint which is worthy of debate and was unfairly crucified in academia?

djsumdog 6y ago

> beyond a reasonable doubt This might be true for things like the conventional laws of physics. But there are many things scientists do not agree or argue over. Quantum physics and string theory are two examples. The 1994 book The Bell Curve is another example from social sciences. And today, we have grave reproducibility crises in science. We have people trying to apply rules about the psychological and metaphysical worlds into the doctrine of hard science. In the current crisis, we have conflicting papers published almost every week, and there is a deep political climate that cannot be denied behind much of the current research. Even for thing that we can agree on work under experiment, like a certain class of drug, we can't explain WHY it works. We can say drug x will stop a heart attack 99% of the time and is generally considered safe in 99% of human beings, but often we're guess at the very specific interactions, based on what we see in labs, because we have no real introspection into all the complex things happening at the micro-level within the incredible complex cell systems inside of us. Maybe one day we'll be able to see what happens at that microlevel in human bodies, and that could lead us to discover the drug isn't working at all the way we thought it was. Science is iterative.

mumbisChungo 6y ago
>and are working diligently to prove others
oasisbob 6y ago
_The Bell Curve_ is not an academic treatise, and was near-universally derided. If anything, it itself was an anti-orthodox work trying to restore the basis of ethnicity as an explainer for many different phenomenon. Maybe I'm confused. Are you using _The Bell Curve_ as an example of pseudo-scientific pop publication gone wrong, or as a worthy scientific viewpoint which is worthy of debate and was unfairly crucified in academia?