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We're being conned. Yes, Webb telescope is Science, and it's great, and it's lovely, and there should be more of it and it should get more respect and resour

We're being conned. Yes, Webb telescope is Science, and it's great, and it's lovely, and there should be more of it and it should get more respect and resources. But. Other people take the same word "Science" and use it for.... less clear-cut stuff. With less clear-cut benefits. And they use the same word because they want to get more respect and more resources and want to confuse you. This works because it's hard to know what's "Science". Most people use heuristics like "My side's Authority says so" or "It happens in a University" or "It uses Times News Roman". Unfortunately there is no easy solution. You'll have to think for yourself. If only there was some kind of method to tell the bullshit apart from the facts!

alexisread 4y ago
These are all hypotheticals, but if you can trace articles back to their source, and you have a Web of trust, then things like Wikipedia can carry more authority/trust. So too can random Facebook articles, war reporting, tutorials, science with data to match, escrow etc You'd likely get a split-brain scenario in society, but we seem to already have a partisan narrative for most things, and this at least makes for a solid foundation.
sgt101 4y ago
I dunno. Webb seems to me to be data gathering. Really good data gathering. Science is building hypothesis that predict the data, and confirming or falsifying them (I know that Popper was clear that it's the latter). The point is that Science is made of contingent knowledge. I believe these hypothesis, but if you show me evidence that supports better hypothesis or that contradicts my previous hypothesis then I'll change my mind - possibly (depends on the evidence). Anyway, science isn't I think about clear cut things - it's about developing and weighing a body of evidence.
- pas 4y ago
  good science is good data. there's no way around it. it's the same thing. sure we devise clever (and expensive) experiments to falsify bad models, but that's because we don't have enough high quality data that you can look at and immediately tell which model is good and which is bad. but nowadays everything in science is even more data driven. (mostly because we have the infrastructure/technology to process all that data.) initially it was mostly high energy physics (run the big machine for a few years, gather data, check for 5 sigma) but when it comes to things like LIGO and the EHT (event horizon telescope) to even get the signal out of the noise they need to use a model, that of course builds on data (and its interpretation) from previous observations. many advances in the medical field are due to better microscopes, better techniques to gather data. sure, without interpretation it's just pretty images or just big "science machines" (in case of colliders and other data gathering experiments)

alexisread 4y ago

These are all hypotheticals, but if you can trace articles back to their source, and you have a Web of trust, then things like Wikipedia can carry more authority/trust. So too can random Facebook articles, war reporting, tutorials, science with data to match, escrow etc You'd likely get a split-brain scenario in society, but we seem to already have a partisan narrative for most things, and this at least makes for a solid foundation.

sgt101 4y ago

I dunno. Webb seems to me to be data gathering. Really good data gathering. Science is building hypothesis that predict the data, and confirming or falsifying them (I know that Popper was clear that it's the latter). The point is that Science is made of contingent knowledge. I believe these hypothesis, but if you show me evidence that supports better hypothesis or that contradicts my previous hypothesis then I'll change my mind - possibly (depends on the evidence). Anyway, science isn't I think about clear cut things - it's about developing and weighing a body of evidence.

pas 4y ago
good science is good data. there's no way around it. it's the same thing. sure we devise clever (and expensive) experiments to falsify bad models, but that's because we don't have enough high quality data that you can look at and immediately tell which model is good and which is bad. but nowadays everything in science is even more data driven. (mostly because we have the infrastructure/technology to process all that data.) initially it was mostly high energy physics (run the big machine for a few years, gather data, check for 5 sigma) but when it comes to things like LIGO and the EHT (event horizon telescope) to even get the signal out of the noise they need to use a model, that of course builds on data (and its interpretation) from previous observations. many advances in the medical field are due to better microscopes, better techniques to gather data. sure, without interpretation it's just pretty images or just big "science machines" (in case of colliders and other data gathering experiments)