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I find myself reading and thinking and quietly ranting about this (and similar) topics often. The reason being that fundamentally I feel we are witnessing an er

by air7 5y ago

I find myself reading and thinking and quietly ranting about this (and similar) topics often. The reason being that fundamentally I feel we are witnessing an erosion of the acceptance of the scientific method itself. The scientific method simply put is "Truth has more validity then beliefs". Of course we don't have access to Truth so we use evidence as a proxy to Truth via interpretation. Obviously interpretations may vary and even contradict, but that's a good thing and discussion should be encouraged, not censored, as we hopefully stirve towards consensus. In the spirit of this I have no problem with holocaust deniers moon landing truthers etc insofar as the presentation and discussion of evidence is concerned. I think that there should be strong public unacceptance of any kind of scientific discussions being shot down.

deltasixeight 5y ago
No. You don't understand science. Science is about making a hypothesis and then verifying that hypothesis against observations. That's it. One thing to note is that within science and therefore the universe as we know it, no hypothesis can be verified to be 100% true. In other words no statement about the universe can ever be proven true. This occurs due to a number of things. First, all observations have statistical inaccuracies attached to them. Nothing is ever 100% accurate. Thus because observations aren't 100% accurate, observations can never be used to prove a statement with 100% accuracy as a consequence. Second, the universe is unknown and thus at any point in time we can suddenly uncover and observe a completely new piece of evidence that totally invalidates all previous hypothesis. I know what you're talking about in your post. But when you truly understand science you will see that the line between truth and belief is actually really blurry. Science has given us zero verified truths. It has only given us probabilities and likelihoods that we just assume (aka believe) to be true. In fact the foundations of science function off axiomatic assumptions that logic is real and probability is real. These two aspects of reality can NEVER be verified as they are the tools we use to verify other things.

by air7 5y ago

deltasixeight 5y ago

No. You don't understand science. Science is about making a hypothesis and then verifying that hypothesis against observations. That's it. One thing to note is that within science and therefore the universe as we know it, no hypothesis can be verified to be 100% true. In other words no statement about the universe can ever be proven true. This occurs due to a number of things. First, all observations have statistical inaccuracies attached to them. Nothing is ever 100% accurate. Thus because observations aren't 100% accurate, observations can never be used to prove a statement with 100% accuracy as a consequence. Second, the universe is unknown and thus at any point in time we can suddenly uncover and observe a completely new piece of evidence that totally invalidates all previous hypothesis. I know what you're talking about in your post. But when you truly understand science you will see that the line between truth and belief is actually really blurry. Science has given us zero verified truths. It has only given us probabilities and likelihoods that we just assume (aka believe) to be true. In fact the foundations of science function off axiomatic assumptions that logic is real and probability is real. These two aspects of reality can NEVER be verified as they are the tools we use to verify other things.