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I'm glad it is fascinating. You should think on this, and realise how much trust and faith you are putting into the stories you are told, and how much or how l

I'm glad it is fascinating. You should think on this, and realise how much trust and faith you are putting into the stories you are told, and how much or how little it coheres with what is the gold standard - your personal experience. Yes - at school, I think you were convinced I think by water condensating and by the loud pop (as was I). This is almost the definition of a magic trick! You are told it explains something, but of course at that age, you wouldn't have looked at the experiment with a critical or knowledgeable eye. The evidence that we were shown as kids should not be considered rigorous or acceptable in science - mixing invisible gases in an open container that allows air in, is not rigorous. Personally I have not seen any examples of this experiment that are undertaken in what I deem to be an acceptable scientific manner. I too believe that computers work. :) I don't dispute that we are able to use things to create some excellent technology. What I dispute that we know what we're doing. What I'm saying is that we do not get to see or understand the first principles. We do not see them in almost any of the science we are presented when we are taught at school. What we are given are claims and explanations that are not supported by the evidence. We are put in a position where we are forced to trust. It seems we require an explanation, so much so that we will latch on to any story rather than sit uncomfortably with one or 2 open-ended hypotheses. The heart of the issue, we are not given evidence to know, we are given a claim to believe. I can know I am resting on a table. I can know that if I drop my pen it will fall on the table. There is no debate to be had. There is a clear path to experience, or empiricism. Empiricism is purported to be the basis of science, but some very basic ideas are not actually possible to experience it seems. In the original article here, evolution is the implied explanation. But, we have no means to test or confirm the truth or not. We cannot see evolution occurring. (Feel free to point me to an article or something that you think shows this.) Yet we are all taught it as if it was true! If it is as I say, what we are presented with is an unfalsifiable theory which is without evidence. This is to say it is based on trust and faith. This is religious thinking, and is no different to a religion. Finally, are you aware of the replication crisis in science? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis and https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778 "According to a survey published in the journal Nature last summer, more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments." There should be 100% replicability, not 30%. Science shouldn't be about playing the odds in a casino. And as to the science we do, funding is probably the most serious issue. All science funding comes from the government, the military and corporations. These 3 entities form our governance structure. This is to say they have vested interests in ensuring that only certain areas are looked into, the point being is that science is not an independent field of enquiry - it is about what is expedient to the governance structure.

tsimionescu 6y ago
> The evidence that we were shown as kids should not be considered rigorous or acceptable in science - mixing invisible gases in an open container that allows air in, is not rigorous. Well, have you seen other gas-gas reactions produce water vapor? Because most of the ones I've seen, especially exothermic ones, don't produce any vapor at all. So when a hydrogen-oxygen reaction produces vapor, why else would it be if not because they reacted and produced a gas that quickly condensed on the glass? (true, I never personally tasted that condensed liquid to confirm it is water and not some other liquid). > I too believe that computers work. :) I don't dispute that we are able to use things to create some excellent technology. What I dispute that we know what we're doing. Well, how could we reliably make them work if we don't know what we're doing? This is why I don't need to take so many things on faith: I see people reliably make them work. If I saw a faith healer or church reliably cure people, by the millions every day, I wouldn't even need faith: it would be obvious that they know something real. > We cannot see evolution occurring. (Feel free to point me to an article or something that you think shows this.) First of all, as I explained earlier, I don't need to literally see it happen to understand how it must have. The present derives from the past, and if you simply extend how we see genetics working today into the past (or future), evolution is in fact the only possible result (assuming no magical forces are acting). Your way of thinking is a dead end for any process that lies outside the limited human senses: if something is smaller than what we can see, or further away than we can see, or takes longer than a single human lifetime, it would be completely out of the reach of science. I do not accept this view of the world, and I don't see any reason why theories couldn't be extrapolated beyond what is immediately visible. If I understand what my eyes see, and I understand how a lense works, and I understand how an electron microscope works, then I can trust that the image the electron microscope is drawing of a microbe is true, even though if I take away the microscope I can only see a mess. The same works if you apply this reasoning backwards in time, even over millions of years. By the way, there have apparently been quite a few experiments of artificially producing new species from a single colony - there's a list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_experiments_of_speciation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_experiments_of_spec... The crisis of reproducibility is a tangent, and it only affects a limited set of fields, it is not a crisis in all of science. It is also caused by all sorts of economic incentives (we live under capitalism, unfortunately) pushing scientists to avoid revealing too much data - it is not necessarily a crisis of bad science (though there are fields that should barely be regarded as scientific at all - nutrition "science" being a prime example).

tsimionescu 6y ago

> The evidence that we were shown as kids should not be considered rigorous or acceptable in science - mixing invisible gases in an open container that allows air in, is not rigorous. Well, have you seen other gas-gas reactions produce water vapor? Because most of the ones I've seen, especially exothermic ones, don't produce any vapor at all. So when a hydrogen-oxygen reaction produces vapor, why else would it be if not because they reacted and produced a gas that quickly condensed on the glass? (true, I never personally tasted that condensed liquid to confirm it is water and not some other liquid). > I too believe that computers work. :) I don't dispute that we are able to use things to create some excellent technology. What I dispute that we know what we're doing. Well, how could we reliably make them work if we don't know what we're doing? This is why I don't need to take so many things on faith: I see people reliably make them work. If I saw a faith healer or church reliably cure people, by the millions every day, I wouldn't even need faith: it would be obvious that they know something real. > We cannot see evolution occurring. (Feel free to point me to an article or something that you think shows this.) First of all, as I explained earlier, I don't need to literally see it happen to understand how it must have. The present derives from the past, and if you simply extend how we see genetics working today into the past (or future), evolution is in fact the only possible result (assuming no magical forces are acting). Your way of thinking is a dead end for any process that lies outside the limited human senses: if something is smaller than what we can see, or further away than we can see, or takes longer than a single human lifetime, it would be completely out of the reach of science. I do not accept this view of the world, and I don't see any reason why theories couldn't be extrapolated beyond what is immediately visible. If I understand what my eyes see, and I understand how a lense works, and I understand how an electron microscope works, then I can trust that the image the electron microscope is drawing of a microbe is true, even though if I take away the microscope I can only see a mess. The same works if you apply this reasoning backwards in time, even over millions of years. By the way, there have apparently been quite a few experiments of artificially producing new species from a single colony - there's a list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_experiments_of_speciation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_experiments_of_spec... The crisis of reproducibility is a tangent, and it only affects a limited set of fields, it is not a crisis in all of science. It is also caused by all sorts of economic incentives (we live under capitalism, unfortunately) pushing scientists to avoid revealing too much data - it is not necessarily a crisis of bad science (though there are fields that should barely be regarded as scientific at all - nutrition "science" being a prime example).