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Edit: It’s becoming ever more increasingly common on HN to get downvotes for innocuous respectful posts. If you’re downvoting, I’d genuinely appreciate if you e
by latexr 5mo ago
Edit: It’s becoming ever more increasingly common on HN to get downvotes for innocuous respectful posts. If you’re downvoting, I’d genuinely appreciate if you explained what is it that you find offensive about this post. You’re not going to hurt my feelings, I sincerely want to understand what it is that you see as transgressive so I can learn from it. Thank you. Another example which baffled me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222383#48227701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222383#48227701
> As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.
I appreciate Feynman’s contributions—and in fact have been recently revisiting the Messenger lectures—but that seems like an unnecessary jab. The use of “usually” is also a convenient cop-out which makes the remark meaningless because the speaker can pick and choose in any conversation so they always win.¹
I thought about it and picked the first thing which came to mind: Natural science. From Wikipedia²:
> Natural science or empirical science is a branch of science concerned with the description, understanding, and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and reproducibility of findings are used to try to ensure the validity of scientific advances.
Seems pretty scientific to me. But alright, let’s check the article to give it a fair shot in context. The only time the word “science” comes up is “Social Sciences”. Again from Wikipedia³:
> Social science (or the social sciences) is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among members within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 18th century. It now encompasses a wide array of additional academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, sociology, culturology, and political science.
That’s a wide range. Are all of those “not science”?
¹ Assuming your rephrasing is accurate and not missing important context.
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_science
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science
- eastbound 5mo ago[flagged]
- latexr 5mo agoYou lost me. As in, I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make. Are you saying you don’t trust climate science but you would trust them if they declared some other branch of science which has nothing to do with them as being unscientific? What does one thing have to do with the other? Are you also saying medicine is not a science because doctors got it wrong about masks? Science isn’t about always being right, but about observation and experimentation to try to arrive at the truth and a deeper understanding. Can you name a single branch of science which has never got anything wrong ever? Your last paragraph is particularly confusing. Is your entire post sarcastic? And if so, which group exactly are you criticising?
- eastbound 5mo agoYes, I am saying that I don’t trust anyone who trusts obviously-bad science and requires me to believe it. Some parts of science became political. The goal seems to convince a population, not determine what is true or not. So if you extract one field which is extremely corrupt, with practices that would seem obvious to anyone who studied Stalin, which soils the ideas and principles of sciences, and another fields rejects the idea of denouncing the first field: that demonstrates that they are both politicized sciences. Covid science, climate science and social sciences all three ask you to “trust the science” and use authority to become right. Meanwhile a researcher who is funded by private companies for technical advances, generally produces good science. They don’t usually need to jail their opponents.
- piva00 5mo ago> Meanwhile a researcher who is funded by private companies for technical advances, generally produces good science. They don’t usually need to jail their opponents. This is such an ideology-laden bullshit leap that it pushes you into the "not even wrong" category.
- aeternum 5mo agoI'm the one that said usually, Feynman didn't have that cop-out and he was specifically talking about social science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo Worth watching the clip so you can hear the argument directly. IMO his point is that peer review is not what makes something science. Nor are studies, publishing papers nor p-values, even gathering and reproducing data is not what makes science science.