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Science is a method. Science isn't a religion, nor is it a paper, thesis, or journal. It's a method for understanding the world around us through rigorous app

Science is a method. Science isn't a religion, nor is it a paper, thesis, or journal. It's a method for understanding the world around us through rigorous application of testing and retesting. Science can be trusted. Measurements and the testing and retesting can be trusted. It's people that can't be trusted. We call people in the field of Science, Scientists. Perhaps we should stop labeling fallible and untrustworthy humans as such. Science is trustworthy. Humans are not.

ants_everywhere 3y ago
> Science can be trusted. Measurements and the testing and retesting can be trusted. It's people that can't be trusted. This is an important point and I think people should make it more often. A human scientist who is committing fraud is misrepresenting facts about the world. And the way you would accurately describe those facts is with science. It's not that science is in the wrong here, it's that the human is lying about what the science says. You want to be able to say "objectively, this guy lied about his research." But if you want to say that, then you need to be able to accurately describe both the world and the research so you can compute the diff between them. So if you throw out the science with the human scientist, then you've thrown out any objective means by which you were going to say the human scientist did anything wrong in the first place.
whelp_24 3y ago
I strongly agree that there is a difference between science and "science". >Science can be trusted. Measurements and the testing and retesting can be trusted. I still wouldn't go so far. Science doesn't provide a pure understanding of the world it produces at best a model based on observations and axioms. These both can be wrong without politics,money, or personal bias. Our senses are fallible and sometimes you measured the wrong thing with the wrong tool. You shouldn't trust science, you scrutinize it and use what you find works until it doesn't (and then publish that).

ants_everywhere 3y ago

> Science can be trusted. Measurements and the testing and retesting can be trusted. It's people that can't be trusted. This is an important point and I think people should make it more often. A human scientist who is committing fraud is misrepresenting facts about the world. And the way you would accurately describe those facts is with science. It's not that science is in the wrong here, it's that the human is lying about what the science says. You want to be able to say "objectively, this guy lied about his research." But if you want to say that, then you need to be able to accurately describe both the world and the research so you can compute the diff between them. So if you throw out the science with the human scientist, then you've thrown out any objective means by which you were going to say the human scientist did anything wrong in the first place.

whelp_24 3y ago

I strongly agree that there is a difference between science and "science". >Science can be trusted. Measurements and the testing and retesting can be trusted. I still wouldn't go so far. Science doesn't provide a pure understanding of the world it produces at best a model based on observations and axioms. These both can be wrong without politics,money, or personal bias. Our senses are fallible and sometimes you measured the wrong thing with the wrong tool. You shouldn't trust science, you scrutinize it and use what you find works until it doesn't (and then publish that).