4 ms·
Ask HN: Do Scientific Cultures Exist?
Anyone ever run across a group of people than make all choices within the group that occur with significant frequency based on the scientific method regardless of context?
- By context, I mean professional, personal, etc.
- If needed, happy to provide examples, clarifications, etc.
- DerekBickerton 4y agoWhat like think tanks? Academic circles?
- O__________O 4y agoThanks for commenting. Think tanks and academia in my experience are professional in nature; I am including all aspects of life, including personal. Trying not to limit the scope, but in my experience there vast difference between using science professionally and applying it regardless of context.
- sargstuff 4y agoLike technical comittees?
- O__________O 4y agoSee your point. More likely like a co-op that’s data driven for decision making. To me, technical committees rarely are making decisions that impact themselves and rarely responsible for actually getting things done, which to me is part of being scientifically driven.
- gus_massa 4y agoProbably the FAA. Each time there is an accident they investigate it thoughtfully. And they have long checklist to ensure the lessons are applied. Also Big Pharma. They would be happy to sell snake oil, so they are very regulated and forced to make good experiments.
- O__________O 4y agoAgree, FAA & Pharma are good examples. That said, keyword everyone seems to be missing is “personal” — specifically from: >> By context, I mean professional, personal, etc. Lots of professional examples exist; consumer reports would likely be a personal example, even throughly researched medical decisions, but not aware of any culture, even small group of people of significant size, that try to base choices on science; or at the very least identify which choices are not being made using science. Basically, I mean a culture most likely that lives and works together, though at the very least all practice science based choices all the time.
- gus_massa 4y agoLojban language? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban But I suspect if it get even moderately popular, people will start to add shorcuts and idioms and it will mutate in the usual mess that are normal languages.
- O__________O 4y agoThanks, appreciate the effort, and yes, run across logical languages before, which theorize that people’s perceptions are relative to their spoken language, which I understand, but don’t really agree with and given how long it takes to run language experiments from scratch, feels like a long, longer term goal to evaluate impact of linguistics of reasoning, logical thinking, scientific leans, etc. Understand idea of “living” science-based decisions is a little odd, likely pipe dream, but not aware of any fundamental reasoning of why it’s flawed, impossible, etc. PS - One of the limits of Lojban in logic there is no notation for probability, there is only truth and falsity. There have been efforts to address this, obviously addressable, but my main point is the original form of Lojban had a significant flaw. Here’s example of one attempt to address this one gap: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BS8dYNN5D6kLhvdXR/thinking-bayesianically-with-lojban https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BS8dYNN5D6kLhvdXR/thinking-b...
- gus_massa 4y ago