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To paraphrase Feynman: "Settled science" is nothing resembling a homogeneous body of certainty. It's a huge, chaotic mish-mash - of everything from actual roc
by bell-cot 2y ago
To paraphrase Feynman:
"Settled science" is nothing resembling a homogeneous body of certainty. It's a huge, chaotic mish-mash - of everything from actual rock-solid results, to "it sound reasonable at some point...then human nature took over" baloney. Everybody <cough/>knew<cough/> the latter, so nobody ever carefully checked.
And the worst part? Even long-tenured experts, specializing in the specific scientific niche, seldom know how certain their various facts actually are.
- M95D 2y agoYes, but science can't "blink" into existence with all proofs already provided. We need to do the work. We created the scientific method and now we're basing more and more knowledge on demonstrated facts/truths. Some of the knowledge will be invalidated and removed. In non-science that doesn't happen. In non-science (religion, flat earth, or whatever domain you want), facts/truths only change when a figure of authority orders the change, but even that is problematic and many practitioners will refuse. We'll never reach a state where all scientific knowledge is demonstrated. Some parts are currently impossible to demonstrate. And even if we could immediately validate everything we know, some new knowlegde can still invalidate old demonstrated knowledge. See newton mechanics vs. relativity. We use the best science that we have.