4 ms·

Calling people “anti-science” now also sets off alarm bells for me. “Anti-science” is analogous to calling someone a “heretic” in the 1400’s, but with our benef

by aksss 4y ago

Calling people “anti-science” now also sets off alarm bells for me. “Anti-science” is analogous to calling someone a “heretic” in the 1400’s, but with our benefit of hindsight into the fallacy of groupthink and servility to orthodoxy.

edmundsauto 4y ago
Especially when the field is archaeology, which is a study and not a science. It has its rigor, but it is more of an interpretation of understanding rather than experimentation. Still valuable, still rigorous… but no ground truth is possible.
- tonyg 4y ago
  > no ground truth is possible. Oof. I have bad news for you about science in general.
  - edmundsauto 4y ago
    Eh, I'm not overly proscriptive that science answers all the questions, or that it has the precision people think that it does. OTOH, it has been important for civilizational science, so I'm pretty comfortable saying that it's a good option. More germane to the point, it's probably better to think about "ground truth" as "sufficiently reasonable approximation for the grain that I need to operate at".
- anthk 4y ago
  >but no ground truth is possible. Carbon 14.
  - edmundsauto 4y ago
    This is actually a really interesting situation. Carbon-14 resides only in organic matter, and so a lot of stone age artifacts found can only be dated based on what surrounds it. Humans have a tendency to dig down to bury organic matter, which makes it very difficult to understand if the C14 readings are associated with what artifacts. So while we can reasonably ascertain the age of (organic) artifacts, it does not answer the questions being asked.
  - icare_1er 4y ago
    Carbon14 is hard-science. Archeology is not. It is mostly speculations, where you allow yourself to imagine a scenario that would explain what happened over 1 million years, on the basis of a bone that you found.
bee_rider 4y ago
Of course, alarm bells just mean we should look into things. In this case, the author being discussed seems to literally looking for non-material/"Otherworld" based explanations for history. I think he would not be insulted, to be called anti-science. There might be something unfortunate going on in broader discussion around the phrase "anti-science" (I'm not ready to defend that too strongly either way), but in this case it seems pretty apt.
- aksss 4y ago
  Some heretics were/are complete loons. But there’s an insanity in the religious devotion to “Science” in popular culture driving the word to take on a synonymity to “orthodoxy” or “establishment”. “Trust the orthodoxy” wouldn’t have nearly the same ring to it, but that’s what I think I most often hear from people wearing cheesy Bill Nye and NDT t-shirts. Calling someone “anti-science” then also sounding like “anti-establishment”. Sure they may be, but insofar as the scientific method is concerned, we need antithesis ideas, loon hypotheses, and room for those to be tested and discussed.

by aksss 4y ago

edmundsauto 4y ago

Especially when the field is archaeology, which is a study and not a science. It has its rigor, but it is more of an interpretation of understanding rather than experimentation. Still valuable, still rigorous… but no ground truth is possible.

tonyg 4y ago
> no ground truth is possible. Oof. I have bad news for you about science in general.
- edmundsauto 4y ago
  Eh, I'm not overly proscriptive that science answers all the questions, or that it has the precision people think that it does. OTOH, it has been important for civilizational science, so I'm pretty comfortable saying that it's a good option. More germane to the point, it's probably better to think about "ground truth" as "sufficiently reasonable approximation for the grain that I need to operate at".
anthk 4y ago
>but no ground truth is possible. Carbon 14.
- edmundsauto 4y ago
  This is actually a really interesting situation. Carbon-14 resides only in organic matter, and so a lot of stone age artifacts found can only be dated based on what surrounds it. Humans have a tendency to dig down to bury organic matter, which makes it very difficult to understand if the C14 readings are associated with what artifacts. So while we can reasonably ascertain the age of (organic) artifacts, it does not answer the questions being asked.
- icare_1er 4y ago
  Carbon14 is hard-science. Archeology is not. It is mostly speculations, where you allow yourself to imagine a scenario that would explain what happened over 1 million years, on the basis of a bone that you found.

bee_rider 4y ago

Of course, alarm bells just mean we should look into things. In this case, the author being discussed seems to literally looking for non-material/"Otherworld" based explanations for history. I think he would not be insulted, to be called anti-science. There might be something unfortunate going on in broader discussion around the phrase "anti-science" (I'm not ready to defend that too strongly either way), but in this case it seems pretty apt.

aksss 4y ago
Some heretics were/are complete loons. But there’s an insanity in the religious devotion to “Science” in popular culture driving the word to take on a synonymity to “orthodoxy” or “establishment”. “Trust the orthodoxy” wouldn’t have nearly the same ring to it, but that’s what I think I most often hear from people wearing cheesy Bill Nye and NDT t-shirts. Calling someone “anti-science” then also sounding like “anti-establishment”. Sure they may be, but insofar as the scientific method is concerned, we need antithesis ideas, loon hypotheses, and room for those to be tested and discussed.