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People are downvoting you, but I'm going to upvote you and respond carefully because I think there's an important lesson about language and science here. > Tha

People are downvoting you, but I'm going to upvote you and respond carefully because I think there's an important lesson about language and science here. > That's not science, that's a cargo cult. Science deals completely and exclusively with modeling "if this then that". And the breakdown for "if this then that" depends on the current observability of the scale you're trying to describe. We don't know how gravity works, because we can't look inside gravity, we can only look at gravity's effects on other things, but we know that it does appear to work, and we believe that it works in the same way every time, and we can use observations and organized thinking to model gravity in a way that allows us to predict what will happen "if this". So we can safely say we don't know how gravity itself works, but we can also safely say that we do know the relationship between gravity and mass, because that's something we can observe. Likewise, we can safely say we don't know "how antipsychotics work inside the brain", but we can also safely say we do know "how antipsychotics work on populations", because populations are easily observed and inside the brain is not. Both use the word "how". The difference is what we're currently able to observe. This is a language problem, not a science problem. At an essential level, science can't answer how many things work, because the deeper into the unobserved you try to talk about (and the workings of the brain are still approximately 100% unobserved) "how", which is a question about things we can observe, becomes more and more a mis-use of the word "how" to talk about "why", which is a question about things we cannot observe, and science doesn't talk about things we cannot observe. It would only be cargo culting if the "but...", which I assume went on to say "...it appears to be beneficial for many people", were instead "and we haven't bothered to observe whether it helps anyone". But again I assume that's not how the sentence ended.

s1artibartfast 3y ago
I would add that there's infinite gradations to how and why. Answers for how range from the extremely simplistic: you put the pill in your mouth and swallow it, down to questions about the fundamental forces of the universe, and the nature of consciousness, neither of which are understood
- BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
  That's certainly an important point, though I would argue that it's just a consequence of there being many different levels and directions of observation. "How does this pill work?" -> "You put it in your mouth" comes from observing at the level of your mouth, or alternately observing the intake process. It's not the most insightful detail to observe about the pill, but it's probably the most practically useful! You could of course put the pill somewhere else, and maybe it would work there too or maybe not (it probably depends on where exactly you put it).
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    Agreed. I put my pills in the dishwasher and I don't know why they aren't working.
m463 3y ago
I found going to the doctor strange as a kid growing up. I had science class and had to know the details of things on the test. But going to the doctor, they didn't tell me what I had. They usually didn't know exactly. Mostly it was just treating the symptoms. This bugged me, but I would get worn down by it and sort of give up the "search for truth". I feel bad, and then I rest, or take ibuprofen, or drink fluids, and my body just fixes it eventually and the mysteries continue.
- BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
  Yeah, after all these years we still know very little about the body. Almost nothing, really, in the grand scheme of things. Most of the time the best thing we can do is literally rest and hope for the best. And this is compounded by a major misalignment between expert goals and lay expectations. The great misconception of medicine is that people think it's about healing when almost none of it is directed at healing, only at putting your body in a better position to heal itself. Medical intervention, nearly universally, aims to destroy or rearrange things considered to be anomalous by presence or arrangement. That's true from antibiotics to chemotherapy to appendectomies to skin grafts to casting broken bones. And if there's no bone to move or bacteria to kill or appendix to extract, there's nothing to do but destroy the pain. The healing is actually always done by your body. Doctors don't make your body better. They only make your body less worse than normal. And those sound like they should be logically the same, but they aren't. And then on top of all that, bodies are simultaneously both magical and complete, utter, absolute garbage. So you have people who live in constant pain, extreme pain, blinding, crippling, exhausting pain, and we either don't know why, or we don't know how to fix it, or the process for fixing it is too dangerous.
jrapdx3 3y ago
> At an essential level, science can't answer how many things work... Indeed, science provides scant information about how drugs work and that includes medications with effects (favorable or not) in the brain. The reality is that drugs have a great number of effects very few of which receive adequate study. IOW while there are useful target effects that are exploited, the fact that drugs are more or less tolerable is largely a matter of luck. This reality is illustrated by instances of tragic drug outcomes despite long use in clinical practice. Of course observing for and identifying random events (adverse effects) depends on the sample size. Registration trials generally use hundreds to a few thousand people which is highly unlikely to reveal serious, rare outcomes occurring on the order of 1/100K recipients. Monitoring of after-market AEs is necessary to detect such anomalous outcomes. The upshot is that clinical practice is at least as much art form as reliant on science. But as you say this is also the case with all science, albeit to a variable degree. It implies your statement should read "science can't answer how anything actually works" since there's no way to know what is not yet known. That doesn't mean we have no useful knowledge, far from it, as the vast array of extant productive technologies clearly shows. But in truth we can't fully "explain" anything, we have to be content developing usable "working solutions" to real-world problems. To my mind process of science is satisfactory to the extent we accept the inherent constraints of human knowledge. With that acceptance we gain the flexibility to move forward, to find new and better working solutions, and add insightful observations to the knowledge base of science.

s1artibartfast 3y ago

I would add that there's infinite gradations to how and why. Answers for how range from the extremely simplistic: you put the pill in your mouth and swallow it, down to questions about the fundamental forces of the universe, and the nature of consciousness, neither of which are understood

BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
That's certainly an important point, though I would argue that it's just a consequence of there being many different levels and directions of observation. "How does this pill work?" -> "You put it in your mouth" comes from observing at the level of your mouth, or alternately observing the intake process. It's not the most insightful detail to observe about the pill, but it's probably the most practically useful! You could of course put the pill somewhere else, and maybe it would work there too or maybe not (it probably depends on where exactly you put it).
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  Agreed. I put my pills in the dishwasher and I don't know why they aren't working.

m463 3y ago

I found going to the doctor strange as a kid growing up. I had science class and had to know the details of things on the test. But going to the doctor, they didn't tell me what I had. They usually didn't know exactly. Mostly it was just treating the symptoms. This bugged me, but I would get worn down by it and sort of give up the "search for truth". I feel bad, and then I rest, or take ibuprofen, or drink fluids, and my body just fixes it eventually and the mysteries continue.

BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
Yeah, after all these years we still know very little about the body. Almost nothing, really, in the grand scheme of things. Most of the time the best thing we can do is literally rest and hope for the best. And this is compounded by a major misalignment between expert goals and lay expectations. The great misconception of medicine is that people think it's about healing when almost none of it is directed at healing, only at putting your body in a better position to heal itself. Medical intervention, nearly universally, aims to destroy or rearrange things considered to be anomalous by presence or arrangement. That's true from antibiotics to chemotherapy to appendectomies to skin grafts to casting broken bones. And if there's no bone to move or bacteria to kill or appendix to extract, there's nothing to do but destroy the pain. The healing is actually always done by your body. Doctors don't make your body better. They only make your body less worse than normal. And those sound like they should be logically the same, but they aren't. And then on top of all that, bodies are simultaneously both magical and complete, utter, absolute garbage. So you have people who live in constant pain, extreme pain, blinding, crippling, exhausting pain, and we either don't know why, or we don't know how to fix it, or the process for fixing it is too dangerous.

jrapdx3 3y ago

> At an essential level, science can't answer how many things work... Indeed, science provides scant information about how drugs work and that includes medications with effects (favorable or not) in the brain. The reality is that drugs have a great number of effects very few of which receive adequate study. IOW while there are useful target effects that are exploited, the fact that drugs are more or less tolerable is largely a matter of luck. This reality is illustrated by instances of tragic drug outcomes despite long use in clinical practice. Of course observing for and identifying random events (adverse effects) depends on the sample size. Registration trials generally use hundreds to a few thousand people which is highly unlikely to reveal serious, rare outcomes occurring on the order of 1/100K recipients. Monitoring of after-market AEs is necessary to detect such anomalous outcomes. The upshot is that clinical practice is at least as much art form as reliant on science. But as you say this is also the case with all science, albeit to a variable degree. It implies your statement should read "science can't answer how anything actually works" since there's no way to know what is not yet known. That doesn't mean we have no useful knowledge, far from it, as the vast array of extant productive technologies clearly shows. But in truth we can't fully "explain" anything, we have to be content developing usable "working solutions" to real-world problems. To my mind process of science is satisfactory to the extent we accept the inherent constraints of human knowledge. With that acceptance we gain the flexibility to move forward, to find new and better working solutions, and add insightful observations to the knowledge base of science.