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“Because science” is a deeply anti-scientific and epistemologically-unsound view. Science is about observing natural phenomena in accordance with an established

“Because science” is a deeply anti-scientific and epistemologically-unsound view. Science is about observing natural phenomena in accordance with an established paradigm, creating hypotheses and accepting or refuting them from empirical evidence. A new empirical observation has the potential to change the whole paradigm and unlock a new framework for understanding.

brookst 4y ago
Yes, but you either have to do science or respect science. You don’t get to treat a single personal anecdote as equivalent to a body of peer reviewed studies.
- bluetomcat 4y ago
  Why should personal anecdotal evidence be worthless per se? A unifying scientific theory usually explains stuff by using a hierarchy of abstract models, detached from a concrete local environment. The subjective experience defines a plethora of factors which are hard to fit into a general theory. If you live in a high-crime neighbourhood, you'd better trust your anecdotal evidence instead of relying on nation-wide sociological evidence.
  - brookst 4y ago
    Me: a personal anecdote does not have the weight of a body of peer reviewed articles. You: why are personal anecdotes worthless? Binary thinking is too transparent. You seem to be using binary thinking to suggest that if anecdotes have any value, they must be treated as having equal value with any other source of data, including rigorously designed and executed studies.
- fwungy 4y ago
  Yes, but that's only true if peer review is functioning as intended. Peer review has been gamed and is broken. Science is a career and an industry and individuals have figured out how to protect their fiefdoms within it. The financial incentives in pharmaceutical research are particularly corrupting due to their size.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    "Peer review" is not limited to the preprint proofreading most journals do. That is just a minimal filter to verify a paper doesn't have any clear or obvious mistakes. That's why actually fraudulent papers still get printed. The actual "peer review" is when people try to make similar observations to what you did (replication) or when people try to build on your work and fail to. This is why we know the amyloid hypothesis isn't very good even though it regularly passes "peer review" and gets into journals: We can't build on it and things it predicts don't happen
    - fwungy 4y ago
      Replication has reached crisis proportions now, especially in fields like medicine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
- somenameforme 4y ago
  When Galileo "discovered" that the Earth revolves around the sun, rather than everything revolves around the Earth - it was not just him against the Church, as is often framed. It was him against the entirety of scientific knowledge and other scientists of the day. And he didn't really have any precise proof. In fact his ideas were mostly wrong. He made a large number of incorrect assumptions (such as requiring perfectly spherical orbits) that resulted in his entire concept having more holes than swiss cheese. And it was easily picked apart by other scientists of the time, which many readily did. He had utter disrespect for the science of the times, and held his own hamstringed ideas above all. Yet he was able to express them. And eventually he would get to play his small part in the advancement of the knowledge of humanity. And this is precisely how science operates. In science one does not HAVE to do anything. Had Galileo instead been determined that e.g. Jupiter is the center of the universe, and spent an equally feverish amount of energy trying to demonstrate such, then we wouldn't know his name today - but his work and ideas would have been no less scientific - but merely wrong.
  - brookst 4y ago
    All true and well said. But my crazy aunt repeating falsehoods she read on Facebook is most certainly not sciencing even up to the imperfect standards of Galileo. Just because some legit scientists were dismissed as quacks does not make every quack a scientist.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    >it was not just him against the Church, as is often framed. It was him against the entirety of scientific knowledge and other scientists of the day It really really wasn't. There were already models of the solar system that had the sun as the central element. Often they just weren't as good at predicting the movement of the stars because the prevailing mathematical models were very overfitted to the (bad) data, so it always looked closer. Really it had just been refined very well. Some things to keep in mind: The scientific method didn't exist, the idea of representing the world as mathematical models to predict things and understand physics was barely there, and the primary purpose of the mathematical models of the solar system was to make astrology better. Nobody really cared about whether the world was helio or geo centric, because the idea of deferring to mathematical models was not considered the gold standard we have today.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 4y ago
A new empirical observation has the potential to change the whole paradigm and unlock a new framework for understanding. *P = 0.005
- tpoacher 4y ago
  That's just the pointer. What's the actual stored value?

brookst 4y ago

Yes, but you either have to do science or respect science. You don’t get to treat a single personal anecdote as equivalent to a body of peer reviewed studies.

bluetomcat 4y ago
Why should personal anecdotal evidence be worthless per se? A unifying scientific theory usually explains stuff by using a hierarchy of abstract models, detached from a concrete local environment. The subjective experience defines a plethora of factors which are hard to fit into a general theory. If you live in a high-crime neighbourhood, you'd better trust your anecdotal evidence instead of relying on nation-wide sociological evidence.
- brookst 4y ago
  Me: a personal anecdote does not have the weight of a body of peer reviewed articles. You: why are personal anecdotes worthless? Binary thinking is too transparent. You seem to be using binary thinking to suggest that if anecdotes have any value, they must be treated as having equal value with any other source of data, including rigorously designed and executed studies.
fwungy 4y ago
Yes, but that's only true if peer review is functioning as intended. Peer review has been gamed and is broken. Science is a career and an industry and individuals have figured out how to protect their fiefdoms within it. The financial incentives in pharmaceutical research are particularly corrupting due to their size.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  "Peer review" is not limited to the preprint proofreading most journals do. That is just a minimal filter to verify a paper doesn't have any clear or obvious mistakes. That's why actually fraudulent papers still get printed. The actual "peer review" is when people try to make similar observations to what you did (replication) or when people try to build on your work and fail to. This is why we know the amyloid hypothesis isn't very good even though it regularly passes "peer review" and gets into journals: We can't build on it and things it predicts don't happen
  - fwungy 4y ago
    Replication has reached crisis proportions now, especially in fields like medicine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
somenameforme 4y ago
When Galileo "discovered" that the Earth revolves around the sun, rather than everything revolves around the Earth - it was not just him against the Church, as is often framed. It was him against the entirety of scientific knowledge and other scientists of the day. And he didn't really have any precise proof. In fact his ideas were mostly wrong. He made a large number of incorrect assumptions (such as requiring perfectly spherical orbits) that resulted in his entire concept having more holes than swiss cheese. And it was easily picked apart by other scientists of the time, which many readily did. He had utter disrespect for the science of the times, and held his own hamstringed ideas above all. Yet he was able to express them. And eventually he would get to play his small part in the advancement of the knowledge of humanity. And this is precisely how science operates. In science one does not HAVE to do anything. Had Galileo instead been determined that e.g. Jupiter is the center of the universe, and spent an equally feverish amount of energy trying to demonstrate such, then we wouldn't know his name today - but his work and ideas would have been no less scientific - but merely wrong.
- brookst 4y ago
  All true and well said. But my crazy aunt repeating falsehoods she read on Facebook is most certainly not sciencing even up to the imperfect standards of Galileo. Just because some legit scientists were dismissed as quacks does not make every quack a scientist.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  >it was not just him against the Church, as is often framed. It was him against the entirety of scientific knowledge and other scientists of the day It really really wasn't. There were already models of the solar system that had the sun as the central element. Often they just weren't as good at predicting the movement of the stars because the prevailing mathematical models were very overfitted to the (bad) data, so it always looked closer. Really it had just been refined very well. Some things to keep in mind: The scientific method didn't exist, the idea of representing the world as mathematical models to predict things and understand physics was barely there, and the primary purpose of the mathematical models of the solar system was to make astrology better. Nobody really cared about whether the world was helio or geo centric, because the idea of deferring to mathematical models was not considered the gold standard we have today.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

anigbrowl 4y ago

A new empirical observation has the potential to change the whole paradigm and unlock a new framework for understanding. *P = 0.005

tpoacher 4y ago
That's just the pointer. What's the actual stored value?