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Not sure if HN understands what science is, because I caught reddit saying a scientist's opinion was science. Science is science when an author can be removed

Not sure if HN understands what science is, because I caught reddit saying a scientist's opinion was science. Science is science when an author can be removed from a study and the experiment can be repeated. A 12 year old or science hater should be able to reproduce the results if it's science. Things that aren't science- >Authority- A PhD/medical doctor/a scientist, these are human opinions, not science. They can cite studies to be scientific. >Art >Tradition There's value in non scientific disciplines, but they have their own burdens to be aware of.

rriepe 6y ago
Science has become an ironic religion for people who believe there's such a thing as a non-religious human.
scarmig 6y ago
There's a segment of the population that sees scientists as materialist, secular replacements for priests and mystics, instead of sophisticated monkeys trying their best to make sense of a messy, confusing world. As a side note, I'd push back against the idea that replicability is the key ingredient of science: it's neither necessary nor sufficient to discover scientifically "true" knowledge, though it's definitely a nice to have. Plenty of important measurements have been made confirming theories we see as true today (or true enough) that turn out to have been irreproducible, plagued by experimenter bias, or even outright fraudulent. But it's a particular research programme, embedded in a social context, that generates knowledge, not a single reproducible experiment.
- fastball 6y ago
  Maybe that is because there is a segment of "scientists" (read: people who publish in "scientific" journals) that are just materialist, secular replacements for priests and mystics. Can you give an example of something that isn't reproducible but was still true?
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    I imagine the LD50 of many substances are defacto non-reproducible despite being mechanically replicable. i.e. the world will not permit us to test the LD50 of FOOF so any measure of its danger to human lives is defacto untestable. Yet we have a notion of its truth. Of course there is an epistemological distinction here between a thing that cannot be reproduced by its nature vs. one that cannot be reproduced by societal norms.
  - scarmig 6y ago
    Millikan's oil drop experiment on quantization of charge and measurement of e is an infamous example. No one can reproduce his reported results and, in some ways, his reported results go beyond what's attributable to bias and cross the line into fraud. And yet his ultimate result was true enough, and he progressed science enough to win a Nobel.
    - fastball 6y ago
      Millikan's oil drop experiment is definitely reproducible. He excluded values to reduce his error (seems like), but that doesn't make the experiment non-reproducible. You can do the same experiment today and get an approximate value for e. Will you get the exact same results as Millikan? Of course not. But that's not what reproducible means.
      - scarmig 6y ago
        The issue is that you get substantively different results from Millikan if you follow his stated experimental procedure. The only way to reproduce his results is to perform the experiment and then selectively remove datapoints that disagree with his result until you only have results remaining that are close to his. That doesn't qualify as reproducible in my book, except in the trivial sense you can perform the same experiment he did, irrespective of the actual result.
        fastball 6y ago
        The goal of the experiment is not to get a certain arbitrary number (the one Millikan came up with), the goal is to get the approximate value of the elementary charge. Reproducible means that if you follow the method outlined by Millikan, you should get an approximate value for e. This is indeed the case, so the experiment is reproducible. A non-reproducible experiment would be one where you follow Millikan's method but get something that is nowhere close to being a value for e.
- pushrax 6y ago
  My take on science is defined by the scientific method: - we want to be able to understand and predict things - we can come up with various explanations that might be able to do this - if our explanation fails to predict an observation, it is wrong and we need to update or replace it If you're doing that, you're doing science.
  - scarmig 6y ago
    In a universe with spherical cows, maybe. But the issue is that theories we view as true (at least within their scope) often fail to predict observations. Which is fine: we modify them with ad hoc hypotheses to round off the rough edges. The issue is that all theories, true or false, do that. Copernican theories were initially less predictive than Ptolemaic ones, for instance; a simple heuristic of rejecting theories that generate more incorrect predictions than other theories would have left us committed to a Ptolemaic universe. And yet we moved.
    - pushrax 6y ago
      I'm not saying to follow a purely incremental optimization path, leading to local maxima. Thinking outside the box is clearly important for generating new ideas to test. We're not done until we run out of things to perfectly predict. I would say some of the ancients did science too, to the best of their knowledge.
    - visarga 6y ago
      > But the issue is that theories we view as true (at least within their scope) often fail to predict observations. Which is fine: we modify them with ad hoc hypotheses to round off the rough edges. This passage reminds me of how neural nets learn and often fail to generalise.
  - Complexicate 6y ago
    This is very close to Richard Feynman's explanation of the scientific method: https://youtu.be/kBqemHR49-c?t=33 https://youtu.be/kBqemHR49-c?t=33 " Guess -> Compute Consequences -> Compare to Nature / Experiment / Experience / Observation If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science."
- clairity 6y ago
  you see this sort of (religious) appeal to authority prevalently on topics like mask wearing, with phrases like “based on science” and “science tells us...” to justify largely politically-based beliefs, in many cases citing administrators or doctors (who are generally not first and foremost scientists) as ‘evidence’ (npr & nyt literally does this every day). science has told us so far that masks might help at the margins, but hasn’t proven it, which indicates it probably shouldn’t be counted on as a primary mitigative measure, but the public signaling value is just too irresistible for the believers (transmission principally happens in private where social norms oppose mitigative measures).
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    Doctors' hands on experience gives them a special kind of knowledge pretty close to scientific. Also, science doesn't really proves, but rather disproves, and the "softer" the science, the harder it is to get any certainties... (And medicine, unlike biology, is a soft science.)
    - marketingPro 6y ago
      I don't understand this. If I spend my life designing bridges I still have to prove it with math. What kind of medicine is not science but "hands on"?
      - BlueTemplar 6y ago
        Bridges are a good example. You have to remember that bridge building (as pretty much any field of engineering or even science) didn't start out as math-first, but as experience-first. And there's really no opposition there, after all whole fields of science (the 'soft' sciences) don't (can't) even use math ! Medecine is a mix of hard and soft sciences (and other things too).
    - clairity 6y ago
      it's not that doctors don't have specialized knowledge that might be stochastically predictive in specific cases, but that their experience, especially around something like a pandemic, skews their perspecive in ways that are very difficult to self-identify and compensate for. and that's on top of doctors holding their own idiosyncratic sociopolitical views too. in other words, expertise is narrow, and treatment experience isn't research.
- KKPMW 6y ago
  > But it's a particular research programme, embedded in a social context, that generates knowledge, not a single reproducible experiment. Somewhat disagree. That particular research programme must still have reproducible experiment as a unit. A million irreproducible experiments will generate exactly zero knowledge.
ars 6y ago
Simulation is also not science. It can help narrow the search space, but you can not draw conclusions from it, because what comes out of a simulation depends on what you put it. And if you knew what needs to be put in, you would not need the simulation in the first place. Note that a simulation is not the same as a model. A model is tested and refined based on real world data, until the model returns the same results.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  Simulation is "not science" in the same way that microscopes are "not science". These are tools that may be used by scientists, but are not themselves 'science'.
klyrs 6y ago
> A 12 year old or science hater should be able to reproduce the results if it's science. Well, that's going to be pretty limiting. A 12yo isn't going to have the budget to build their own LHC -- reproducibility is certainly an important goal, but "a 12yo or science hater" is an unreasonable place to set the bar.

rriepe 6y ago

Science has become an ironic religion for people who believe there's such a thing as a non-religious human.

scarmig 6y ago

There's a segment of the population that sees scientists as materialist, secular replacements for priests and mystics, instead of sophisticated monkeys trying their best to make sense of a messy, confusing world. As a side note, I'd push back against the idea that replicability is the key ingredient of science: it's neither necessary nor sufficient to discover scientifically "true" knowledge, though it's definitely a nice to have. Plenty of important measurements have been made confirming theories we see as true today (or true enough) that turn out to have been irreproducible, plagued by experimenter bias, or even outright fraudulent. But it's a particular research programme, embedded in a social context, that generates knowledge, not a single reproducible experiment.

fastball 6y ago
Maybe that is because there is a segment of "scientists" (read: people who publish in "scientific" journals) that are just materialist, secular replacements for priests and mystics. Can you give an example of something that isn't reproducible but was still true?
- renewiltord 6y ago
  I imagine the LD50 of many substances are defacto non-reproducible despite being mechanically replicable. i.e. the world will not permit us to test the LD50 of FOOF so any measure of its danger to human lives is defacto untestable. Yet we have a notion of its truth. Of course there is an epistemological distinction here between a thing that cannot be reproduced by its nature vs. one that cannot be reproduced by societal norms.
- scarmig 6y ago
  Millikan's oil drop experiment on quantization of charge and measurement of e is an infamous example. No one can reproduce his reported results and, in some ways, his reported results go beyond what's attributable to bias and cross the line into fraud. And yet his ultimate result was true enough, and he progressed science enough to win a Nobel.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Millikan's oil drop experiment is definitely reproducible. He excluded values to reduce his error (seems like), but that doesn't make the experiment non-reproducible. You can do the same experiment today and get an approximate value for e. Will you get the exact same results as Millikan? Of course not. But that's not what reproducible means.
    - scarmig 6y ago
      The issue is that you get substantively different results from Millikan if you follow his stated experimental procedure. The only way to reproduce his results is to perform the experiment and then selectively remove datapoints that disagree with his result until you only have results remaining that are close to his. That doesn't qualify as reproducible in my book, except in the trivial sense you can perform the same experiment he did, irrespective of the actual result.
      - fastball 6y ago
        The goal of the experiment is not to get a certain arbitrary number (the one Millikan came up with), the goal is to get the approximate value of the elementary charge. Reproducible means that if you follow the method outlined by Millikan, you should get an approximate value for e. This is indeed the case, so the experiment is reproducible. A non-reproducible experiment would be one where you follow Millikan's method but get something that is nowhere close to being a value for e.
pushrax 6y ago
My take on science is defined by the scientific method: - we want to be able to understand and predict things - we can come up with various explanations that might be able to do this - if our explanation fails to predict an observation, it is wrong and we need to update or replace it If you're doing that, you're doing science.
- scarmig 6y ago
  In a universe with spherical cows, maybe. But the issue is that theories we view as true (at least within their scope) often fail to predict observations. Which is fine: we modify them with ad hoc hypotheses to round off the rough edges. The issue is that all theories, true or false, do that. Copernican theories were initially less predictive than Ptolemaic ones, for instance; a simple heuristic of rejecting theories that generate more incorrect predictions than other theories would have left us committed to a Ptolemaic universe. And yet we moved.
  - pushrax 6y ago
    I'm not saying to follow a purely incremental optimization path, leading to local maxima. Thinking outside the box is clearly important for generating new ideas to test. We're not done until we run out of things to perfectly predict. I would say some of the ancients did science too, to the best of their knowledge.
  - visarga 6y ago
    > But the issue is that theories we view as true (at least within their scope) often fail to predict observations. Which is fine: we modify them with ad hoc hypotheses to round off the rough edges. This passage reminds me of how neural nets learn and often fail to generalise.
- Complexicate 6y ago
  This is very close to Richard Feynman's explanation of the scientific method: https://youtu.be/kBqemHR49-c?t=33 https://youtu.be/kBqemHR49-c?t=33 " Guess -> Compute Consequences -> Compare to Nature / Experiment / Experience / Observation If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science."
clairity 6y ago
you see this sort of (religious) appeal to authority prevalently on topics like mask wearing, with phrases like “based on science” and “science tells us...” to justify largely politically-based beliefs, in many cases citing administrators or doctors (who are generally not first and foremost scientists) as ‘evidence’ (npr & nyt literally does this every day). science has told us so far that masks might help at the margins, but hasn’t proven it, which indicates it probably shouldn’t be counted on as a primary mitigative measure, but the public signaling value is just too irresistible for the believers (transmission principally happens in private where social norms oppose mitigative measures).
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Doctors' hands on experience gives them a special kind of knowledge pretty close to scientific. Also, science doesn't really proves, but rather disproves, and the "softer" the science, the harder it is to get any certainties... (And medicine, unlike biology, is a soft science.)
  - marketingPro 6y ago
    I don't understand this. If I spend my life designing bridges I still have to prove it with math. What kind of medicine is not science but "hands on"?
    - BlueTemplar 6y ago
      Bridges are a good example. You have to remember that bridge building (as pretty much any field of engineering or even science) didn't start out as math-first, but as experience-first. And there's really no opposition there, after all whole fields of science (the 'soft' sciences) don't (can't) even use math ! Medecine is a mix of hard and soft sciences (and other things too).
  - clairity 6y ago
    it's not that doctors don't have specialized knowledge that might be stochastically predictive in specific cases, but that their experience, especially around something like a pandemic, skews their perspecive in ways that are very difficult to self-identify and compensate for. and that's on top of doctors holding their own idiosyncratic sociopolitical views too. in other words, expertise is narrow, and treatment experience isn't research.
KKPMW 6y ago
> But it's a particular research programme, embedded in a social context, that generates knowledge, not a single reproducible experiment. Somewhat disagree. That particular research programme must still have reproducible experiment as a unit. A million irreproducible experiments will generate exactly zero knowledge.

ars 6y ago

Simulation is also not science. It can help narrow the search space, but you can not draw conclusions from it, because what comes out of a simulation depends on what you put it. And if you knew what needs to be put in, you would not need the simulation in the first place. Note that a simulation is not the same as a model. A model is tested and refined based on real world data, until the model returns the same results.

bigbubba 6y ago
Simulation is "not science" in the same way that microscopes are "not science". These are tools that may be used by scientists, but are not themselves 'science'.

klyrs 6y ago

> A 12 year old or science hater should be able to reproduce the results if it's science. Well, that's going to be pretty limiting. A 12yo isn't going to have the budget to build their own LHC -- reproducibility is certainly an important goal, but "a 12yo or science hater" is an unreasonable place to set the bar.