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"Science and technology" are a vague abstraction. What people mean when they describe science as becoming a religion is more specific - they're using "science"
by thu2111 5y ago
"Science and technology" are a vague abstraction. What people mean when they describe science as becoming a religion is more specific - they're using "science" as a shorthand for academic institutions specifically and the various maladies that go along with that, maladies like:
- The reproducibility crisis in social sciences
- The floods of BS coming out of public health research, a crisis for which we don't even have a name yet
- The journals who only care about impact and not about scientific integrity
- Politicians who appear to be completely controlled by modellers who never validate their models and whose predictions are always wrong
- People who are instinctively loyal to that whole set of power structures and rituals, such that they dismiss any claim of scientific misconduct as conspiracy theories, as ignorance, etc.
and so on. The fact that certain fields of study and other parts of society have been able to use the scientific method to produce concrete things doesn't automatically imply that all (so-called) scientists do so, and given the proliferation of scientific fields that produce nothing concrete, doesn't even imply the majority do.