[HN Gopher] When science was the best show in America
___________________________________________________________________
When science was the best show in America
Author : CapitalistCartr
Score : 105 points
Date : 2020-11-22 13:37 UTC (9 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (m.nautil.us)
| guscost wrote:
| Science is now thoroughly political, from top to bottom (with the
| exception of some applied sciences). The biggest reason people
| don't respect it anymore is because it no longer deserves
| respect.
|
| This is a tough pill to swallow but you'll get it down
| eventually.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Science is the use of data and math to conduct experiments to
| test hypotheses about cause and effect.
| guscost wrote:
| If only. That was the idea before Kuhn.
| dang wrote:
| You may have a substantive point here but expressing something
| this inflammatory as flamebait is basically trolling. That's
| against the site guidelines so please don't. It just leads to
| dumb, shallow fights, and nothing interesting.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Edit: we've had to ask you this more than once before, and
| (coincidentally) almost in exactly the same terms:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23398227. Could you please
| take the intended spirit of HN more to heart, and please fix
| this? We're looking for _curious_ conversation here. How you
| raise a topic like this is by far the biggest influence on
| whether the conversation develops curiously.
| guscost wrote:
| > How you raise a topic like this is by far the biggest
| influence on whether the conversation develops curiously.
|
| An influence surely, but in my experience not at all the
| biggest. Curiosity is a two-way street, and there are some
| topics that most people here simply do not want to be curious
| about.
|
| But yes, I'm mostly just spending karma fighting an info-war.
| Success in that context is not only about the quality of
| discussion, it's that more people see the controversy. If the
| collateral damage is not acceptable I understand.
|
| And if I end up getting kicked out, please just take to heart
| that your effort to apply the rules impartially is not
| unappreciated. The opposition here is used to receiving
| wildly-inflammatory escalating nasty replies that rarely get
| flagged or moderated, but it's still better than most places:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25017661
| azinman2 wrote:
| You're only able to type and communicate this message because
| of science. If you're going to say something so inflammatory,
| you better have an argument to back it up.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's one factor, definitely.
|
| But one could also say that science wouldn't be allowed to
| flourish if we didn't have peace for example (what we
| experience now is rare in the history of humanity), and that
| the institutions that support peace are involved in being
| able to type and communicate this.
| guscost wrote:
| Because of _applied_ science. And don't give me nonsense
| about all science eventually being applied. Most of it won't.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| This type of language and tone is not acceptable on HN.
| Please refrain from further inflammatory comment regardless
| of the topic or stance.
| guscost wrote:
| It's a fine, fine line. I've been on the receiving end of
| much more insulting personal attacks here, many times.
|
| And note that my comment says nothing about the person
| I'm arguing with, it just pre-empts a common response and
| calls the _response_ nonsense.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| yeah, I would just respond like this to avoid any kind of
| misinterpretation:
|
| > It's because of applied science. Most of the science
| won't be applied.
| guscost wrote:
| That's a good suggestion, thanks.
| mr_overalls wrote:
| I'm kind of curious how you expect science to be applied
| without its discovery phase being performed first.
| guscost wrote:
| If you think of e.g. string theory as the "discovery
| phase" of anything other than a ponzi scheme, we're not
| going to come to agreement here.
| augustt wrote:
| Can we can an update to your blog post lamenting the death of
| science, now that science is only reason we will have a vaccine
| for a virus that has killed a quarter-million people in the US?
| Could also expound on your interpretation of the LIGO data
| while you're at it.
| guscost wrote:
| > science is only reason we will have a vaccine
|
| Applied science. Did you read it?
|
| > for a virus that has killed a quarter-million people in the
| US
|
| Contributed to their deaths, sure. But not as much as the
| lockdown and war (still cultural for now, thankfully) will
| have contributed to the death of science.
| rrss wrote:
| I don't understand. You consider the alleged mistakes
| public health officials who provided guidance about
| pandemic response to signal the end of basic science, but
| the successes of vaccine production are exempt from that
| analysis because it is applied?
|
| How are those public health recommendations less applied
| than vaccine creation (especially mRNA vaccines, which are
| only possible today due to a ton of basic research in the
| last 2 decades)?
| guscost wrote:
| To the extent that epidemiology is an applied science, it
| does not on its own "herald the end of science."
|
| But even in that field, ludicrously simple and narrow-
| minded theories that are "tested" by running computer
| games, and then memory-holed as soon as they are no
| longer politically useful, are a big part of the problem.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| I agree that this is problematic. Can you point to
| instances where this was found to be true? Or, better
| yet, evidence this is widespread?
|
| tbh I'm not clear what you mean by a lot of the terms
| like "memory holed" - do you mean like the work of Bayes
| or Boole? I love learning about stuff that we learned,
| then forgot (scurvy, comes to mind).
| rrss wrote:
| "memory holed" is a reference to 1984. 'guscost appears
| to believe that epidemiologists eradicate evidence of
| their theories and simulation results in a manner
| comparable to the Ministry of Truth's purging of evidence
| and rewriting of history.
| augustt wrote:
| I did, and it's pretty clear your gripes about social
| sciences carry over into taking cheap shots at a bunch of
| other fields.
|
| 2: it's the literal cause of their death. Don't know what
| you're getting at with trying to compare that to how much
| science is dying. Sounds like incomparable quantities to me
| - be the good scientist you want to see in this world!
| guscost wrote:
| > it's the literal cause of their death
|
| Are you sure about that? Last I heard (from Dr. Birx on
| TV), many states count anyone with a positive test as a
| "COVID death", regardless of what the coroner's report
| says.
|
| If we counted deaths for any cold the same way, it would
| be a shocking (perhaps not as big, but still shocking)
| number.
|
| > be the good scientist you want to see in this world!
|
| Unfortunately there is no place for a good scientist in
| most fields, you either play the political game or you
| get frozen out. I would rather fight to tear the whole
| system down to its foundations, so more people will have
| the opportunity to be good scientists in the future.
| watwut wrote:
| You are going to be shocked when you learn how flu deaths
| are counted. Hint: positive test is not even necessary.
|
| And fascinatingly, you don't worry at all about people
| who died without test missing from statistics.
| guscost wrote:
| Flu deaths are estimated, not counted. Often victims are
| not tested for it at all.
|
| > And fascinatingly, you don't worry at all about people
| who died without test missing from statistics.
|
| Actually "presumed COVID deaths" are included in some
| states' numbers, but yes there is some undercounting too.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Does no one - by this logic - ever die of AIDS because
| it's something else (like pneumonia) that does them in at
| the end?
| guscost wrote:
| That's an interesting question. Officially the answer is
| "no", but what if someone with AIDS contracts COVID-19
| and dies? Does that person count toward both statistics?
| How many statistics can one death count towards?
|
| Now try "diabetes and hypertension", or "lung cancer", or
| "temporary immunodeficiency" and you can start to see how
| dishonest it is to represent the death toll of this
| disease as a single number, based on an interpretation
| that generates the largest possible number, and an
| interpretation not used with _any other respiratory
| disease_.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Is it the bullet or the blood loss that kills me?
| gumby wrote:
| Unfortunately, in popular culture, "science" is primarily another
| form of entertainment. Thus it's not especially surprising that
| it's also seemingly* a political issue today.
|
| I am not suggesting everyone need learn quantum mechanics, but a
| basic, qualitative understanding of "science" (uncertainty,
| experimentation, theory) would help understanding and decision
| making. In the case of COVID-19: when I read the breathless
| reports on vaccine announcements, potential treatments and
| mitigation techniques, most of the popular discussion is
| profoundly confused. Likewise on climate change. In both cases,
| as with so many, the need to describe the story 1 - as a clash or
| people, or as originating in a person whose backstory must take
| up most of the article and 2 - the need to push the point of the
| article close to one pole or another (sometimes made up by the
| author) completely obscures the point.
|
| This is no way to make policy, or, for that matter, live life.
|
| * I think the degree to which this meme is developed (e.g.
| "democrats are the party of science") is grossly overplayed, even
| when there are a couple of convenient examples to point it at.
| xorcist wrote:
| Well, "politics" is also another form of entertainment.
|
| What isn't, nowadays?
| smarx007 wrote:
| Just to point out, ignorance knows no boundaries.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_scientists_(meme) is a
| way to turn any serious research finding into a joke in Eastern
| Europe.
| rocgf wrote:
| This is fantastic, I did not know this has a Wikipedia page.
| As an Eastern European, I have noticed the use of this meme
| regularly, it's basically a recurring joke.
|
| With that said, I think it mainly refers to actually bullcrap
| research that sometimes comes out of Western (and for some
| reason, mostly British) universities. For example, back when
| radio was a thing and I was listening to it in public
| transportation, the radio hosts would bring up these faux
| science papers - e.g. "Some British University found out that
| chocolate actually helps you lose weight. That's some great
| news to start off the weekend". And after a million of these
| papers that were most likely flawed in methodology,
| misinterpreted by media or simply fake, what would you
| expect?
| cycomanic wrote:
| The funny thing is: The "chocolate helps you loose weight"
| is actually quite well established and is a common strategy
| to use to help people loose weight, particularly people who
| "comfort eat" sweets.
|
| The catch is high cocoa content chocolate (>80%) is an
| appetite inhibiter. So the recommendation is that people
| who need the "sweets/sugar" rush in certain situations to
| eat a piece of dark chocolate, because it gives them the
| "rush", but also reduces their appetite, unlike many other
| sweets which have been designed to want more.
|
| Many words just to say that often this is more about the
| science reporting than the science.
| the8472 wrote:
| > Some British University found out that chocolate actually
| helps you lose weight.
|
| That was a hoax to expose bad science reporting, not bad
| science itself. So the radio fell for it too.
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/05/28/410313446/w
| h...
| jojo2000 wrote:
| I deeply agree with your interpretation.
|
| At school, we all learn basic skills read/write to understand
| each other. But in today's society, a basic grasp of science, a
| minimal level of scientific literacy is crucial to swim through
| our techno-society.
|
| To this day, I cannot picture the void in someone's head that
| doesn't know how computers work. It would surely give a sour
| taste of powerlessness. Same can be said about anything that
| explains how the world around us revolves.
| svrb wrote:
| You claim to disagree with GP comment but nothing in your
| comment even comes close to addressing its main points,
| unless I'm much mistaken.
|
| Indeed, the only points of contact between the comments I can
| find is where you agree with GP comment, namely that
| scientific literacy is necessary.
| rrss wrote:
| > claim to disagree with GP comment
|
| maybe 'jojo2000's comment has been changed, but it
| currently says "I deeply agree," not "I disagree"
| svrb wrote:
| Indeed it does... but I guess a bit of mild dyslexia
| earns one downvotes on HN.
| taeric wrote:
| Amusingly, I read the same as you did. Even knowing that
| was the wrong reading, it is hard to see correctly for
| some reason. Yay for reading issues! ;)
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Hmm i think its mindset (and to some extent intelligence)
| based - for some folks phone will always be a gizmo for
| clicking on whatapp, call, watch funny videos and mabe 1-2
| more things. Open concept of OS, tweakability etc. is beyond
| their care.
|
| Some simpler folks need simple world - if this, then that.
| Critical thinking, complex topics, more than 1 truth etc are
| just too much. This yes, this no. This confirms my
| fears/makes me happy to hear, I will vote for it. Of course
| they are frustrated. But in much simpler way than you would
| probably imagine, and for shorter time. And quite possibly
| they don't know that they don't know how computers work.
| Look, they can turn it on and click on icon and it works.
| Mission accomplished.
|
| To be honest my mom also doesn't know how computers work, and
| she has an university degree in economics from times where it
| was really hard to even get to university back home.
| okareaman wrote:
| Related: My grandmother had a thing for World Fairs so took me to
| one in Spokane, then I dragged my girlfriend to one in Knoxville.
| I miss those.
| foldingmoney wrote:
| Did you get to see the fabulous Sunsphere?
| nend wrote:
| This is a little off topic so apologies, but I was watching a
| documentary on nasa's project mercury last night, and one thing
| that struck me was how pro science the "america first" crowd was.
|
| Framing it as a competition for supremacy against other countries
| really seemed to get people with different political views to
| unite.
|
| I'm not advocating for returning to the political and social
| climate of the 50's and 60's, there's a lot of obvious problems
| in that time period too. But it was striking to realize how
| intertwined politics, society, and science was, and still is.
|
| It makes me think the solution to today's anti science bias isn't
| just "educate more".
| daveFNbuck wrote:
| The "educate more" solution is known as the deficit model and
| there's a large body of research showing that it's not true for
| science communication.
|
| You can read a bit about it at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_deficit_model
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The difference was that it was a time of prosperity. "Progress"
| = wealth. A lot of that prosperity was false as well --
| unsustainable development, a requirement for growth that
| ultimately kills many businesses, etc.
|
| Now the average Joe is pretty fucked, so blaming someone else
| is a successful strategy.
| pm90 wrote:
| I don't agree the prosperity was false. Federal minimum wage
| was quite decent. Labor unions were stronger. Income
| inequality was lower and so was partisanship in politics.
|
| Both socially and economically, the average American was
| doing ok then compared to today.
|
| Although it must also be said: norms and laws around same sex
| marriage and Drugs were different too, so this analysis
| certainly leaves out those parts of American society affected
| by them.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Fair points, but the ability of the government to use
| social security surpluses to fuel massive defense and
| public works (automotive focused) expenditure and that
| nonpartisanship in Congress created serious issues that are
| already defining the 21st century.
|
| The legacy of the unfinished great society, the
| accommodation of racists and poor infrastructure choices is
| already haunting us.
| throwmylifawy wrote:
| Yes!
|
| The promise of prosperity sounds like a long con these days.
| Science was the gateway for prosperity and hope and now it
| seems only to deliver bad news.
|
| Here is what the tech and science crowd is projecting these
| days:
|
| You are no longer the center of the universe, you are
| infinitesimal and unimportant.
|
| Everything you do is destroying life in someway.
|
| There is no meaning; everything you believe was wrong and
| misguided.
|
| The world is capricious and your personal security can change
| at any moment no matter how hard you work. Adapt or die.
|
| Most of humanity is too dumb to understand how great this is!
|
| Who wants to hear that?
|
| The average Joe has lost all faith, so in order to cope they
| drop all pretense of rational behavior and go with what feels
| good at the moment.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Who wants to hear that?
|
| Science is telling people that everyone driving 20k miles
| per year in large individual vehicles and flying to a
| tropical island twice a year for vacation will eventually
| result in altering the parameters of nature so that it's no
| longer possible to do that.
|
| People don't want to hear that, but they need to hear that.
| Covering their ears and going lalalala isn't going to
| exempt their kids from the future. Unfortunately, it
| doesn't seem most people are adult enough to face the
| music.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| Who can afford to fly anywhere more than once every few
| years (assuming no surprise expenses), or not to drive
| 20k miles a year across urban sprawl to their jobs?
|
| The first restriction is so alien to much of the
| population as to be meaningless, the second is a threat
| to their livelihoods. An accompanying promise of public
| transit rings hollow for many Americans, who think of
| their local governments as only marginally competent
| enough to fill potholes in the road sometimes.
|
| Naturally people will bristle at the abstract of many
| climate restrictions. Not because the fun will stop, but
| because they aren't having any fun in the first place,
| and they just don't want things to get less fun than
| that.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Climate change is also tied up in politics, because the
| fossil fuel industry is worth more than a trillion
| dollars and employs millions of people.
|
| Then the problem is not that people don't understand the
| science, it's that profit-seeking entities pay money to
| muddy the waters and people whose paycheck depends on the
| non-acceptance of the truth choose to believe the
| convenient lie.
|
| Worse, because it then becomes a political issue, the
| side that was originally right starts to fight anyone who
| says anything at all convenient to the other tribe, even
| if it's correct.
|
| So you lose the ability to do good science because both
| sides are polluted by politics and money.
| disown wrote:
| > It makes me think the solution to today's anti science bias
| isn't just "educate more".
|
| "Anti-science" is just a propaganda term extremists accuse each
| other of being. It's a very easy tell.
|
| Nobody is against science. What people fight about is politics.
| "Man can be a woman", "climate science", "masks vs no masks",
| "lockdowns", etc are not scientific issues, it's political
| issues.
|
| "Educate more" wouldn't help because it's not a matter of
| science, but politics. And there are plenty of educated people
| on both sides.
|
| Also, when a political group tries to use science to push their
| agenda, people should be wary. Pretty much all the genocides
| and horrors of the past 200 years have been a result of
| politicized science. People forget that modern white supremacy,
| nazism, communism, etc are all a result of politicized science.
| People who use terms like anti-science today are the same
| people who accused supporters of racial equality as being anti-
| science 100 years ago.
|
| And it's been my experience that people who accuse other people
| of being "anti-science" have no background in science or
| understand the history of science. They are just political
| extremists who undeservedly wrap themselves around the good
| name of science as if it were a flag to attack their political
| opponents.
| smolder wrote:
| Climate science is not political, climate policy is. You
| aren't wrong that some people misunderstand what it is to
| support science, and conflate that with certain policy
| preferences. I also think the blame for that can be placed
| squarely with those who have chosen to attack institutions of
| scientific truth because they are opposed to policy that
| might result from what is clearly true. Blame the
| politicization of "science" on the pro oil propagandists that
| put in the effort to make it that way. The naive "pro-
| science" stance is a reaction.
| grawprog wrote:
| Science is highly politicized still. It's part of why I stopped
| doing that kind of work.
|
| Everything through the grant applications, working with
| different industries and government groups, presenting our
| results. Everything ended up being political.
|
| Our data ended up being locked behind a paid government
| database against the approved plan in our grant application.
| This came shortly, coincidentally after we ended up discovering
| an endangered species in an area they hadn't been found before
| near an active mine site.
|
| I also seen first hand as a wetland restoration project was
| carried out for absolutely no reason after water samples in a
| lake pointed to the town golf course being the problem.
|
| Sampling was immediately stopped, there was no more talk of the
| golf course and a project was approved to mitigate lake
| pollution by building a wetland on the opposite side of the
| lake away from the golf course.
|
| Tens of thousands of dollars were wasted on this project. The
| lake's just as polluted as ever. But the town council just
| couldn't not have the greenest, green on their golf course.
|
| The whole actual issue was fertilizer run off from the course
| and it was totally ignored.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| In those days, science was chiefly thought of as a framework to
| further our understanding of the natural world, and how we
| could utilize that knowledge for the betterment of our
| collective ends.
|
| Societal policy and morality were issues for politicians and
| priests, scientists (though they did occasionally chime in).
| The USSR's technological progress served as a constant reminder
| that science was an epistemological tool, and not a
| teleological one.
|
| The public was also directly downstream from the benefits of
| scientific advancement. Microwave ovens, color televisions,
| better engine, cheap refrigeration, the increasing ubiquity of
| plastics, and the jobs they all brought with them were
| conspiring to raise the American standard of living by leaps
| and bounds over a short period of time, and automating away
| many of life's greatest inconveniences. Almost every
| technological leap raised the tide of human experience, and
| every boat was lifted along with it.
|
| Science was also the bulwark between the country, and the USSR.
| The advent of the nuclear bomb showed us how awesomely
| destructive and game changing a technological advance could be
| in the field of war. By the mid fifties, it was generally
| understood that if the US didn't have a riposte for every
| possible Soviet weapon, then the US could not continue to
| exist.
|
| Scientific advancement was material, it was flashy, you could
| touch it. Rocket engines propelled humans beyond heights
| previously imagined, and jets shrank the world exponentially.
| Helicopters flew unlike anything we'd ever seen before, and
| even primitive computers performed mathematical calculations on
| their own with unprecedented speed and efficiency.
|
| Today, science has advanced much more subtly, especially since
| the maturation of the microprocessor in the mid 2010s. Many of
| our physical advancements are refinements to technologies
| established in the 50s and 60s, rather than fantastical new
| applications of hitherto unknown physical phenomena.
|
| Advances in material sciences and automation offer large
| increases in performance for industrial applications, but at
| the potential cost of employment, in exchange for often only
| marginal increases at the high-end of consumer products.
|
| The lion's share of consumer-facing advancements in automation
| in particular, has been developed to manipulate, cajole, and to
| track our every choice. Our refrigerators remind us we need
| milk, our coffee makers try to protect us from unlicensed
| nonproprietary coffee blends. We can't share what we buy,
| because new technology ensures that we can only license. Every
| minor convenience we receive is another bar in a gilded cage
| being constructed around us.
|
| More transformative advances are so abstract as to be
| inapplicable to the average person's life, too expensive to
| leveraged, or squirreled behind the closed doors of military
| and industry.
|
| Scientifically sound advice for society is no longer
| liberating. Stay indoors, don't work. Get rid of your cars,
| they're bad for the earth. The words of scientists anymore
| often advise caution and restriction.
|
| Science is now less often treated as a tool, and more a cudgel
| to justify social and economic policies. Politicians will
| launder their beliefs policies through lopsided studies to give
| their ideologies an air of impenetrable objectivity
|
| A large handful of the population has sought to fill the
| existential/moral/purposeful void in their lives by looking to
| our scientists and technologists as if it were a new church.
| This is perhaps inspired by the legends of 20th century
| scientists, and profundities of great scientific communicators
| such as Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
|
| These people tend to be incapable of differentiating between a
| scientifically sound policy regime meant to fulfill goals that
| align with their value system, and 'the will of science'.
|
| Others, objecting to these policy regimes, not knowing better,
| assume these people are right about the 'will of science', and
| throw the baby out with the bathwater, rejecting scientific
| knowledge outright, ignoring that nothing about science as an
| epistemological framework is reasonably morally prescriptive.
|
| 'Science says' has become shorthand for _"A group of academics
| or liberals want this, they think they know how they can get
| there, no it's not up for debate'_. So most people who don't
| believe in a neoliberal future ignore, reject, and sneer at the
| use of the term.
|
| Through all these things, the brand of 'science' has been
| diluted, and tarnished to the point where much of the
| population no longer takes it seriously. Especially since
| 'science based' policies are occasionally accompanied by white
| lies meant to coerce people into behaving a certain way.
| mistermann wrote:
| Imagine if the media used it's impressive persuasion powers to
| unite the public on issues rather than divide them, what kind
| of a country and world could we live in?
|
| Based on my reading of history, it seems unlikely that this day
| will ever come through voluntary means, so I wonder if it could
| be brought about organically via incremental improvements. I
| wonder what percentage of people can agree on the general
| notion of whether the aggregate actions of the media divides
| people, for now completely leaving aside whether this is
| intentional or not. It would be fun and informative if HN had
| polls on questions like this, and perhaps could even lead
| somewhere.
|
| > It makes me think the solution to today's anti science bias
| isn't just "educate more".
|
| I agree. It's weird how outside of technology and science, we
| insist on coming up with solutions before even trying to
| analyze what the problem is, while simultaneously complaining
| about people being anti-science.
| [deleted]
| henvic wrote:
| Thinking about how wasteful was the early exploration of outer
| space gets me thinking if it didn't backfire. There could've
| been a moment in society where people where supportive about
| it, when the costs weren't clear enough. However, once the
| taxpayers realized these were not only huge endeavours, but had
| huge costs just for the rush of being the first at all costs +
| many catastrophic system accidents... clearly society put these
| things on hold.
|
| Now, society is getting back to explore science more and more,
| but with a better, lasting attitude. See, for example, Space X.
| Likely, they'll send someone to Mars without deaths or even
| huge accidents that could only be justified by a lack of
| financial responsibility in NASA's early days.
| mulmen wrote:
| SpaceX rests on the shoulders of all previous space programs.
| They did not invent space travel. They iterated.
|
| I'm not sure NASA was financially irresponsible. They were
| doing things for the first time. Mistakes are going to be
| made, lessons were learned. That's even true of SpaceX.
|
| If your prediction that SpaceX gets people to mars with no
| deaths turns out to be true it will be because of NASA, not
| in spite of them.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Why do you think SpaceX won't have deaths or accidents?
| SpaceX has had plenty of accidents and going to Mars is so
| much more dangerous than any space exploration ever
| attempted.
| thrav wrote:
| SpaceX seems to have an ability to test without human risk
| that far exceeds past space missions. (Thanks to reusable
| rockets and autonomous / remote systems)
| henvic wrote:
| Exactly. I'd argue also that NASA was specially bad
| regarding safety in its infancy, probably because it was
| very militaristic and they don't need to care about
| profit, given its nature - so dozens of accidents might
| happen and they might still be in business.
| mulmen wrote:
| What are these dozens of accidents? How many fatal human
| space flight accidents did NASA have? I can only think of
| three, two of which came during the shuttle program.
| mulmen wrote:
| Not really.
|
| All launches of Mercury era rockets had non-crewed test
| flights of the spacecraft. And they were on proven
| boosters. One benefit of using ICBMs is they start out
| autonomous.
|
| Both launch vehicles for Gemini (Atlas and Titan) were
| again completely autonomous because they were ICBMs. They
| were tested and proven before astronauts flew them.
|
| The first Saturn V launch was not crewed.
|
| As I understand all US spacecraft were largely
| autonomous, especially in the boost phase.
|
| SpaceX has refined that to automate docking but it's not
| new.
| oivey wrote:
| I don't know that taxpayers "thought" about the cost of the
| space program and decided to give up on it. It could be true,
| but that's not how I've seen politics work. I think it more
| had to do with the fact that we beat the USSR and the USSR
| stopped competing. There weren't any really major milestones
| to be had after the Moon, either. Sputnik proved to Americans
| that the Soviets could fire a missile from Russia and hit the
| US, and we didn't have a similar capability. Nothing has been
| quite that scary since.
|
| I think it's premature to claim SpaceX will make it to Mars
| without deaths. They've only done two manned space flights to
| LEO at this point. While it does appear to be easier,
| cheaper, and safer to send people to space, sending people to
| Mars has never done before. It is going to be extremely
| dangerous.
| henvic wrote:
| You're right. Politics doesn't work this way, and taxpayers
| have no say on this matter (lest civil unrest, but it
| didn't went this far). To be honest, I only ended up saying
| taxpayer because I know how people here are and I was
| unconsciously avoiding to get down voted for my
| libertarian-minded opinion.
| lumberjack wrote:
| The "anti-science" crowds are all about trust. They aren't
| anti-science per se. Education as it is currently done won't
| really help much because it is not focused on what are actually
| persuasive arguments to these people. The fundamental problem
| is that "science" in practice means trusting in scientific
| institutions. To tackle anti-science you need to make the
| argument for why trust in universities and other scientific
| institutions is justified.
|
| I don't understand how such big heads cannot understand such a
| simply basic human situation, and instead they produce videos
| talking about the scientific method, as if Mr. average Joe is
| going to go download some papers and datasets and spend
| thousands of hours reproducing the results.
|
| It's a bit like free software. Why use it? Do you personally go
| through every source code of every application you use or do
| you just trust in the community? Now what if I spread a
| conspiracy theory that actually some big maintainer is
| injecting malware and other free software developers are in
| cahoots with him? You might think such a conspiracy theory is
| ridiculous but others might find it compelling.
| pm90 wrote:
| > I don't understand how such big heads cannot understand
| such a simply basic human situation, and instead they produce
| videos talking about the scientific method, as if Mr. average
| Joe is going to go download some papers and datasets and
| spend thousands of hours reproducing the results.
|
| What specifically are you referencing here?
|
| I completely agree with you that we need a lot more science
| explainers. There are already a lot of good content on eg YT,
| but no doubt it's not something that gets surfaced to most
| viewers.
|
| In school, nobody really taught me what the scientific method
| was. I was never told that Science isn't just "gospel truths"
| like scriptures but instead (essentially) this growing body
| of peer reviewed papers that are used to form a shared
| understanding of the principles by which we believe the world
| works.
|
| Meanwhile YT is swarmed with conspiracy theories almost
| daily, because it's so fucking easy to make a stupid shocking
| conspiracy video.
|
| The depressing thing is that people really do genuinely
| believe this nonsense, and it is the source of much despair
| in their lives.
|
| Not being a religious person, I classify religious beliefs on
| the same level as conspiracy theories. Except that, most of
| the older ones have been refined by religious scholars over
| centuries to at least be interpreted in socially advantageous
| ways.
| lumberjack wrote:
| I see scientists who put themselves in the public sphere
| behaving like this mostly. They double down on the science,
| when people are questioning the whole institution rather
| than whether or not some particular science is correct.
| Rury wrote:
| The thing is though... there is no way around the "trust"
| problem, whether it comes to science or anything else.
| Plato's allegory of the cave makes this quite evident IMO. In
| the end, we're all ignorant, all have our set of beliefs, and
| all must willfully choose for ourselves what's persuasive.
| Science just sees pointing to evidence as the most practical
| way of testing beliefs. And quite honestly... what else is
| there for testing beliefs? Making a different argument for
| the nature of something that could also be reasonably
| plausible (e.g. a conspiracy theory)? Well that's a
| hypothesis, which is also a belief, and so we're back to
| square one... which is everything is ultimately a stack of
| willfully chosen beliefs that we deem trustworthy.
| lumberjack wrote:
| You can make persuasive arguments that might not appeal to
| the scientifically literate rationalist, but will appeal to
| the somebody who is just using very crude heuristics and
| might have ended up believing in a conspiracy theory.
|
| For example regarding climate change: you can construct an
| argument around the ridiculous idea that scientists are
| somehow taking on the worldwide fossil fuel industries, and
| the most powerful and ruthless countries on earth,
| including the US, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, and they
| are doing this because by inventing a lie about the earth
| warming up. The very lopsided power dynamics in this
| scenario expose the conspiracy theory for the farce that it
| is.
| Rury wrote:
| Yes, you can make different arguments. The point I'm
| making is that it's ultimately upon them to decide what
| to believe in. They may or may not accept your
| alternative argument as convincing. Everyone ultimately
| chooses what they believe and trust in as evidence. There
| is no way around this, so you cannot force anyone to
| accept something. But yes, you can keep trying by
| presenting different arguments/evidence...
| germinalphrase wrote:
| The problem, of course, is that it is much easier to destroy
| trust than create it.
| leftyted wrote:
| I think you're partly right but I also think there's something
| a bit deeper at work here.
|
| These days science is viewed as a means to various ends. These
| ends are all wonderful...eliminate poverty, curtail climate
| change, cheaper energy, etc. But what's missing is the idea of
| doing something for the sake of doing it. It's not totally
| clear what landing on the moon or maintaining a space station
| really accomplished in terms of material goals. They're
| glorious accomplishments because of their difficulty.
|
| I think that attitude is what's missing. Listening to JFK's "we
| will go to the moon" speech is almost unbelievable today.
| Politicians of either party absolutely cannot talk like that
| today.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Human spaceflight programs have struggled to justify their
| existence pretty much their entire lives. Non-human
| spaceflight has had clearer rationales: the development of
| rocket technology is intertwined with long-range missile
| technology, and satellite technology has long _clear_
| military ramifications from the launch of Sputnik. The Space
| Race grew past its missile origins largely because it was a
| competition between the US and the USSR for prestige points.
| Once Apollo 11 successfully landed a man on the moon, both of
| them quickly lost interest in manned space travel to the
| moon.
|
| Post-moon, human spaceflight programs seem to be have been
| largely directionless. The early space stations were probably
| originally meant as a stepping stone to developing orbital
| habitation, but the fact that we haven't really expanded much
| further makes it look more like faffing about. The US
| developed the space shuttle with the intention of building a
| low-cost, human-driven satellite launch and servicing
| service, but the only real success it had there was the
| Hubble. Instead, a lot of the real purpose probably lies more
| in geopolitical goals: the US-USSR cooperation helped drive
| some amount of detente. The ISS in particularly was driven in
| large part by a desire to keep ex-Soviet rocket engineers
| gainfully employed and not seek employment with rogue states
| looking to rapidly develop a missile program.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Well, that didn't stop North Korea from getting their hands
| on Ukrainian ICBMs...
| leftyted wrote:
| Your post shows how significant events are stripped of
| their meaning by the dictum that there must be some
| material end behind every act. But it's a decision to look
| at history and explain everything in terms of geopolitics.
| Can't people get together and do something for the glory of
| doing it?
| crocodiletears wrote:
| In theory? Yes. In practice? Rarely, if ever at scale.
|
| Retroactively misattributing human action to fulfill a
| moral narrative produces a distorted view of the world,
| conducive to making dangerously naive mistakes.
|
| That the space program was a friendly front for a highly
| visible ICBM program doesn't negate the glorious
| achievement of reaching the moon.
|
| Not everyone working on the space program particularly
| cared about missiles. I'm certain most of them probably
| just wanted to reach the moon in the spirit of patriotism
| and scientific advancement. Their victory was pure. We
| just shouldn't pretend that their project was only
| facilitated due to a confluence of circumstances that
| made it a political necessity.
| leftyted wrote:
| Unless "geopolitical theory" can be used to predict the
| future then I see no reason to assume it's the correct
| way of interpreting the past.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| Predicting, advising, and describing political behaviors
| within the bounds of their constraints are geopolitic's
| raison d'etre. 100% accurate all the time? No. But then
| again, neither is any other predictive field.
|
| Friedman, and Zeihan have both proven very prescient over
| the last decade or so.
|
| Besides, I hardly think there's a lot of latitude for
| interpretation. As far back as 1958 the USAF was mulling
| over nuking the moon as a show of force with incidental
| scientific ramifications. Sagan was involved in it. [0]
|
| I think willfully ignoring those parts of the story
| stretch credulity within the context where the events of
| the space race happened borders on historical revisionism
| for the sake of creating a moral parable about the
| virtues of human endeavor.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_A119
| laretluval wrote:
| > The ISS in particularly was driven in large part by a
| desire to keep ex-Soviet rocket engineers gainfully
| employed and not seek employment with rogue states looking
| to rapidly develop a missile program.
|
| Is there any documentation of this?
| [deleted]
| harikb wrote:
| Energy independence (from Middle East) was once unthinkable,
| but we did it, and also included a speech. Sure, not the same
| level.
|
| Climate change is also a similarly difficult problem, but
| neither of this gives a Hollywood movie style ending in a
| capsule format the "we are the greatest" crowd really wants -
| not just America though . Humility, empathy, and non-
| military-gained peace doesn't give a movie style ending.
|
| This is also why the mass public doesn't give credit to
| leaders for solving issues though diplomatic means
| kortilla wrote:
| Energy independence is a huge obvious prize in itself. It
| was very easy to get people to agree that it would be
| something good to have.
|
| The point about JFK's moon speech is that it was justifying
| an endeavor that was a hard challenge without any
| particularly useful outcome. Nobody thought it was going to
| solve world hunger or prevent an energy crisis.
|
| It would be like Trump giving a speech to justify sending
| astronauts on a trip around Venus. It's super difficult and
| mostly useless scientifically.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Shale oil isn't going to last long, and then what? (And
| probably shouldn't have been extracted in the first place
| considering the low energy return and climate change...)
| Clubber wrote:
| It's because we had a common enemy, the USSR. The USSR also
| launched Sputnik, which alarmed the country. Of course this was
| the backdrop of the Cold War.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_crisis
|
| The common enemy went from Anarchism (WWI) to Communism (WWII)
| to Terrorism (WoT), but now it's each other; the Left's common
| enemy is the Right, and vice versa. I'll let the reader surmise
| where that will lead.
| johnr2 wrote:
| > the Left's common enemy is the Right, and vice versa
|
| The common enemy of both is the moderate in the middle who
| prefers rational discussion to confrontation.
| watwut wrote:
| Moderate center prefers status quo and dislikes
| confrontation. But, it does not actually prefer rational
| discussion, rational discussion only sometimes favors
| statis quo.
|
| Which is why center is loosing alot. Except in presidential
| elections, IMO both Biden and Obama are center by any
| reasonable definition. Even Clintons were center, but she
| lost, so.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| I don't think moderates favor rational discussion so much
| as they disdain conflict.
|
| In my experience, a moderate is a conservative in all
| things that effect them, and a liberal for anything else.
|
| Most moderates I know revile anything that might effect
| change, until it effects change. And once the change is
| implemented, they bristle at anything that might change
| that.
|
| No political block gets to claim the province of
| rationality in a world where political disputes are as much
| about values as they are about coherent policies.
| names_are_hard wrote:
| > In my experience, a moderate is a conservative in all
| things that effect them, and a liberal for anything else.
|
| While obviously a generalization, this is very
| insightful. I never thought of this before, and I admit I
| might be a moderate.
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| There's research showing (at least in the US) that the
| "archetype" moderate, who believes all things in
| moderation, is basically nonexistent. Moderates instead
| are made up of people who have perhaps a few "moderate"
| views, but mostly have a roughly even mixture of left-
| wing and right-wing views, with no particular
| combinations being particularly common.
|
| A hypothetical moderate might believe all of the
| following:
|
| * Gay marriage should be illegal
|
| * Abortion should be legal
|
| * Firearm rights are important
|
| * Taxes on large businesses and wealthy people should be
| much higher
|
| * NATO should be scrapped
|
| * The USA should bomb Iran and Syria
|
| * Free markets are good
|
| * Free trade is bad
|
| This person has too many strong and politically diverse
| viewpoints to consistently back either major US party,
| and ends up voting based on whichever candidate most
| effectively signals alignment with the small number of
| policies the "moderate" voter currently feels most
| strongly committed to.
| randomsearch wrote:
| This has very much become the case, and what a wide centre
| it has become - I'd have said I was left wing until the
| poles pushed so far apart I fell into the central void.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| War indeed creates a lot of requirements on science and tech.
| grecy wrote:
| Imagine if the current situation was framed the same way.
|
| "American can BEAT Russia on Coronavirus numbers" - we just
| have to all wear a mask. Soon we'll have no cases and life (and
| economy) will get back to normal and we'll BEAT everyone in the
| WORLD!!! "
|
| Instead America is virtually dead last.
| pm90 wrote:
| Not sure why you're being downvoted. Historically, a
| competitive framing has made it much easier for States to
| motivate their populace. A friendly competition over who does
| better in fighting a common enemy would absolutely have made
| everyone be more careful and wear masks more often (it would
| be seen as a patriotic duty).
|
| Instead we have a POTUS constantly downplaying the threat,
| accusing China of being responsible for deliberately
| infecting the rest of the world with this (supposedly
| nonexistent?!) threat and masking is seen as treading
| "freedoms".
| mrtksn wrote:
| That's probably because of Sputnik.
|
| I'm not old enough to remember but from what I've read, when
| the Soviets launched Sputnik, the American public was shocked
| having SSSR machine passing over them and they can't do
| anything about it and don't have anything to match the soviets.
| They believed that the USA was the frontrunner in technology
| but the Sputnik demonstrated that this may not be the case.
|
| So from my understanding, the technology become a populist
| agenda as a result of that.
|
| It's also interesting to watch old American movies like Rocky
| or Top Gun where the Soviets are portrayed as the more
| technologically advanced nation but Americans prevail thanks to
| their spirit and courage.
|
| Maybe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, science and
| technology got a pushback in popular culture? When you come to
| the end of the 90's and the beginning of the 2000's you have
| movies like Fight Club and Matrix denounce technology as the
| destroyer of the society or humanity. You even have Lord of the
| Rings trilogy that tells an epic story about an industrialist
| who dares to start a mass production and tech research,
| meritocracy instead of race but "the good guys" are those who
| are deeply involved keeping the world as-is for thousands of
| years and value separation between races, masters and servants.
|
| And what we have now? Red pills, blue pills, black pills from
| the Matrix, quest to restore the manliness from Fight Club,
| race separation, leader worship and and looking down to
| technology and multiculturalism from Lord of the Rings. Half
| Joke, half serious of course :)
| an_opabinia wrote:
| > When you come to the end of the 90's and the beginning of
| the 2000's you have movies like Fight Club and Matrix
| denounce technology as the destroyer of the society or
| humanity.
|
| Really depends who's in power. By the 2000s, film people were
| obsessed with litigating 9/11, the Iraq war, etc. Avatar
| comes to mind. Looking at ultra big name top budget stuff,
| it's going to be a product of its time because that's what's
| marketable.
|
| M.I.A. has some cuckoo beliefs, but her performance
| aesthetics and her harping on giant Internet and media
| companies was wildly ahead of its time. Was that anti-
| technology?
|
| YouTube _is_ the populist agenda, it is the #1 Internet time
| sink, did people want technology or did they want free music
| and TV? How are you supposed to advance an anti-audience
| agenda?
| bsanr wrote:
| >When you come to the end of the 90's and the beginning of
| the 2000's you have movies like Fight Club and Matrix
| denounce technology as the destroyer of the society or
| humanity.
|
| No, the late 70s-80s gave us Terminator, Alien, The Day
| After, War Games, RoboCop, Cyberpunk, and on and on. There
| was definitely a palpable distrust and fear of technology
| even back then. Under the shadow of the bomb, you had people
| coming to terms with more and more of their world being run
| by big mainframes in far-away office buildings, whose arcane
| workings you could maybe get a glimpse of through text on a
| abyssal screen. I actually wrote a short essay exploring this
| and the notion that people haven't actually become any more
| comfortable with technology as it really is, only the
| increasingly friendly interfaces we interact with. I'd post
| it, but a few months after I wrote it, I realized that the
| file had become corrupt and that the first weekly back up of
| it had come a couple days after when that corruption was
| likely to have happened.
| mrtksn wrote:
| There are always counter examples but what sticks most?
| Terminator 2 in 1992 was way more successful maybe because
| in 1984 it was the soviets who were supposed to drop the
| bomb but in 1991 there were no more soviets so it's was
| more plausible to fear from the machines?
|
| Robocop did question the technology but also the good guy
| was a half robot.
|
| Blade Runner is a good example about a tech dystopia but
| the story is ultimately about the machines quest to be
| humans, not to destroy them.
| bsanr wrote:
| Well, Terminator 2 was 1991, and obviously filmed before
| that.
|
| If we're being honest, there's a small confluence in that
| Soviets were often portrayed as robotic, and anxieties
| about Communism were often pushed onto various movie
| monsters: robots, aliens, zombies. I think the common
| denominator is "Future Shock," fear of radical changes in
| society (that book was 1970).
| mrtksn wrote:
| I think the reception of the work by the public gives it
| away, not the work itself.
|
| There are people who do work of all kind all the time but
| when the public is ready to take it it becomes iconic,
| that is, it represents the psyche of the popular culture.
| Sometimes when the public is ripe and there's no current
| work of art to match the public, you can see old movies,
| books and music that went mostly unnoticed for years
| suddenly become popular.
|
| So, it's not like movies/books/music push public opinion
| but they can become icons of an idea. A materialisation
| of a thought that people were trying to put into words
| but they couldn't until they read a book, watch a movie,
| listen to music.
|
| Sometimes the creators of the art hate it when their work
| becomes an icon of something they do not support.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Dig a little deeper into the LOTR backstory. It was not so
| much a conflict between men but between supernatural forces,
| angels. It is a biblical metaphor, a story of higher powers
| settling bets by sending agents to earth to promote various
| agendas.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_(Middle-earth)
| [deleted]
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Wait, Sauron or Suman supported meritocracy? Or opposed
| racism? How, why, what, wat?
|
| Maybe in the movie, but as far as I know LOTR movies did no
| changes related to that.
| laretluval wrote:
| Seems to be a reference to
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
| matkoniecz wrote:
| If it is a reference to The Last Ringbearer then it is
| quite weird as depicted world in that book takes some
| names from LOTR. With nothing else matching between this
| books.
|
| And in LOTR Sauron was neither promoting meritocracy nor
| against racism.
|
| While in TLR more industrialised side was not depicted
| negatively.
|
| So even if it is referring to TLR then it still makes no
| sense.
| eznzt wrote:
| Supporting meritocracy and opposing racism are
| incompatible.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| The orcs were deeply meritocratic, born as equals from the
| mud and distinguishing themselves through tooth-and-claw.
| The same can also be said of Saruman at a different level.
|
| All the good-guy societies are deeply hierarchical. Even
| Frodo and Samwise, who _ought_ to be equals, immediately
| fall into "gentleman with his valet" patterns: "Please, Mr.
| Frodo, sir."
|
| Anyway, I'm not totally convinced, but with just 5 minutes
| of remembering I'm finding plenty of material, so you could
| probably find a counter-narrative with study.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| LOTR goes into enough detail about Orc society about as
| much as knowing the tax policy of Aragorn as King of
| Gondor.
|
| But even then, this analogy falls apart immediately. The
| uruk-hai were designer soldiers that were the best troops
| in the army because, you know, they were designed to be
| the best class of troops.
|
| I do not know of any details in LOTR that goes into the
| promotion policies of the officers of Sarumans military.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| I do not remember anything that would indicate that orcs
| selected leaders or anything else based on merit.
|
| Parts that were shown included plenty of violence,
| treachery, oppression including slavery and other
| mistreatment (all included also orcs as victims).
|
| With basically no reward for merit.
|
| > All the good-guy societies are deeply hierarchical.
|
| Yes, but the same is true for evil ones.
|
| And if anything, good guys have less extreme hierarchies.
| Especially hobbits.
| [deleted]
| grogenaut wrote:
| Rocky 4 is 100% propaganda. But it's not really the Russians
| have better science. But rocky movies are about the underdog.
| You can't have 3 time world champ rocky be an underdog unless
| it's one dude vs a country. AKA rocky 4. That at the constant
| american beef at the time w the olympics that the Russians
| were using unholy science like doping and roids in their
| state run sports programs, while the Americans were all 'real
| scrapy amateurs'. Then of course the dream team.
|
| I do find it funny you reference movies almost entirely from
| the 90s in you conclusion, movies over 20 years old.
| tehchromic wrote:
| What's completely senseless to me is how absolutely proponents of
| the scientific world-view reject it's similarity to religious
| culture. To me it looks exactly the same, and this article while
| excellent and amusing fits perfectly in that dominant theme of
| science as a above and apart from mythology.
|
| Here's an amusing quote:
|
| "Mr. Peale's animals reminded me of Noah's Ark, into which was
| received every kind of beast and creeping thing in which there
| was life. But I can hardly conceive that even Noah could have
| boasted of a better collection."
|
| The idea that a there is a golden age of pure truth and reason
| against which the forces of chaos rallied is as old as time. That
| itself is the myth of excoriation by which we organize classes of
| the cognoscenti: there are those who know the original truth and
| those who do not.
|
| I think rather than pit reason and truth against the circus of
| spectacle we have to embrace the latter as the former and include
| everyone in the know, with a laugh.
| cle wrote:
| I don't understand this argument. Because science enthusiasts
| show a similar zeal as religious enthusiasts, then science
| itself is a circus of spectacle? That makes no sense to me. I'm
| struggling to understand how science as a method for building
| knowledge is invalidated by the behavior of zealots.
| tehchromic wrote:
| Wwll, same for religion. What I'm saying is, what's wrong
| with a circus? I think they are pretty interesting.
| Aperocky wrote:
| This is a false equivalence.
|
| When someone say they believe in Science, it means they
| subscribe to fact and evidence based reasoning. And that if
| there are evidence or facts that overturns their current
| belief, they'll gladly accept it.
|
| There are no such equivalence in religion.
| tehchromic wrote:
| True in a very general sense, although you'd have to exclude
| religions where such things are allowed to say that
| accurately.
|
| Agreed that this is the dominant narrative in global culture.
| However my point is that science appears to be fairly poor at
| building universal belief, which is something religion
| excelled at with scientific precision. There are advantages
| and disadvantages to both cultures. One disadvantage is
| organizing ourselves around something like global climate
| change where scientific consensus is near unanimous, but the
| culture at large is very slow to heed. Religion is very good
| at getting masses of people to do what they are told
| regardless of their best interest. Look at the American
| religious voter for example.
|
| My point is that if science is more than a methodology, if it
| is a cultural spectacle, then it's probably wise for us all
| to admit that it is in fact very much like a religion. I am
| saying that science as a cultural reality can benefit from
| dropping the claim to be better than, or something other than
| a religion.
|
| Don't stone me for saying so.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| I think you should look into the differences between
| "science", and "scientism".
|
| The latter is what happens when scientifically illiterate
| people are spreading scientific news. Scientism is treating
| science as religion, as infallible, as the bringer of
| truth, while forgetting what science really is; the doubts,
| the uncertainties, the falsifiability, the hypotheses, the
| process.
|
| I think this XKCD illustrates it nicely:
| https://xkcd.com/882/
| imtringued wrote:
| >However my point is that science appears to be fairly poor
| at building universal belief, which is something religion
| excelled at with scientific precision.
|
| I don't think so. Science has far less variance between
| cultures than religion. Math, physics, chemistry, etc are
| largely the same across cultures. Meanwhile diversity and
| antagonism between religions is extremely high.
|
| The biggest difference is that with science only experts
| get to truly participate in science. With religions every
| believer is participating either through prayers, religious
| gatherings, religious holidays, etc.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| > science appears to be fairly poor at building universal
| belief, which is something religion excelled at with
| scientific precision
|
| Can you elaborate on this? What, exactly, is this universal
| belief?
|
| On your statement of scientific precision -what do you mean
| by "scientific" and "precise"?
|
| I'm trying to follow what you're saying in this discussion,
| but it's difficult because we do not share the same
| definitions. EG, you seem to be using science in place
| where I would use "process for iterating to meet a goal".
| To me, science is trying to prove yourself wrong a million
| ways, so you can sort of accept that the null hypothesis is
| wrong.
|
| Put another way - I would be ecstatic to see undeniable
| objective proof of a deity. Religious believers would not
| be similarly happy to have one of their core beliefs
| destroyed. The difference is religious beliefs are fragile
| to disorder; scientific beliefs are anti-fragile.
| thotsBgone wrote:
| Hacker News is not a humanities essay.
| tehchromic wrote:
| Hahahaha! Ok, I'll fall in line and quit thinking along
| humanist lines, sir! ;)
| thotsBgone wrote:
| It's not your thinking I have an issue with, it's your
| masturbatory writing style.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't be a jerk in HN comments.
|
| " _Be kind._ "
|
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us
| something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| pdonis wrote:
| _> proponents of the scientific world-view reject it 's
| similarity to religious culture. To me it looks exactly the
| same_
|
| Really? I think you are confusing the scientific worldview,
| which is diametrically opposed to religious culture--religious
| culture says certain beliefs are declared to be not open to
| question at all, no matter how much your intelligence wants to
| question them; the scientific worldview says _all_ beliefs are
| open to question, no matter how much you think they 're right--
| with pronouncements made by particular scientists to lay
| people, which often do seem like certain beliefs are being
| treated more like religious beliefs.
| tehchromic wrote:
| Respectfully I'd say you've underscored my point. Your
| statement that "scientific worldview, which is diametrically
| opposed to religious culture" is itself a dogma, which is one
| of the features of religion you claim to have surpassed as a
| scientific person.
|
| It is true that modern society contains pretty fundamentally
| opposed religious vs scientific factions. My point isn't to
| take sides but to point out that what you are calling
| religion is some kind of oppositional faction defined by
| rejecting scientific fact. It wasn't always the case. But you
| should judge the nature of religious culture objectively and
| scientifically, not by it's worst modern manifestations.
|
| Religious reality was originally and for thousands of years
| the only reality, and it's proponents would have argued as
| strongly against any alternating philosophy, just at you
| proclaim that scientific realism is reality and reject any
| other.
|
| My argument is that scientific culture resemblance to
| religious culture isn't coincidence, it's the nature of
| belief in social systems. Meanwhile science culture could
| learn worlds from religious culture which in my view was very
| much a science of authority and social unification. That's to
| say that religious cultural realism was more effective at
| generating belief and that's because it was a science of
| generating belief.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Your statement that "scientific worldview, which is
| diametrically opposed to religious culture" is itself a
| dogma_
|
| No, it isn't, it's a description. I _described_ what I mean
| by "scientific worldview" and by "religious culture". It
| should be evident from my descriptions that the two things
| I described are diametrically opposed. I think my
| descriptions have fairly captured the two world views in
| question. If you disagree, by all means make an argument;
| but just calling my descriptions "dogma" is not an
| argument.
|
| _> which is exactly the feature of religion you claim to
| have surpassed as a scientific person_
|
| I have made no such claim. I explicitly contrasted the
| scientific _worldview_ with the behavior of individual
| persons. I also said nothing about "surpassing" anything.
|
| _> My point isn 't to take sides but to point out that
| what you are calling religion is some kind of oppositional
| faction defined by rejecting scientific fact._
|
| Again, if you disagree with my description of "religious
| culture", by all means make an argument for a different
| description. My description certainly does not describe all
| aspects of religion; but I think I have focused in on a key
| aspect that makes religious culture different from the
| scientific worldview.
|
| _> Religious reality was originally and for thousands of
| years the only reality_
|
| The level of historical ignorance in this statement is
| staggering. A true statement would be that humans have had
| religions for as far back as we have historical evidence.
| But that is a much, much weaker statement than your claim
| here.
|
| _> just at you proclaim that scientific realism is reality
| and reject any other_
|
| I have said no such thing. I have no idea what you are
| responding to, but it isn't anything I said.
|
| _> scientific culture resemblance to religious culture isn
| 't coincidence_
|
| Before you start making claims about why such a resemblance
| exists, you first have to establish _that_ it exists. You
| have not done that.
| tehchromic wrote:
| I don't mean to argue with you. If you say religion can't
| be fact based and aren't open to any alternate view
| that's scientific cultural dogma, in my opinion but also
| that's dogma by definition. If science can have dogma,
| then it has at least one similarity to religion which
| establishes a resemblance.
|
| I'll give an alternate definition of religion that I
| think is compatible with a scientific world view rather
| than oppositional: religion is an ancient applied science
| of managing authority and consent in large groups of
| people. That's the reality it dealt with, just as modern
| science might deal with materials or biology.
|
| I don't mean to give you a hard time. This topic is very
| difficult to talk about given the intense factions around
| it. But that's why it's important to talk about it even
| if it makes folks mad at you initial. Sorry if I
| irritated you.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> If you say religion can 't be fact based_
|
| Where have I said that?
|
| I have said that science has a much better track record
| of generating true beliefs than religion does. That is
| not the same as saying religion never generates true
| beliefs or never looks at facts.
|
| _> religion is an ancient applied science of managing
| authority and consent in large groups of people_
|
| This is an interesting hypothesis, but note a key
| implication: that this "applied science" involves
| generating and propagating false beliefs. And given that,
| an easy alternate way of contrasting the religious
| worldview with the scientific worldview would be that the
| scientific worldview does not consider generating and
| propagating false beliefs to be a good thing. That's not
| to say science never does that, just that in science,
| it's considered a bug, whereas in religion, by your
| description, it's considered a feature.
|
| Also, the term "applied science" implies that there is an
| actual scientific theory that is being applied. Religion
| does not have any theory at all about "managing authority
| and consent in large groups of people". It _does_ that in
| practice, but it doesn 't have any _theory_ about it. So
| "applied science" is a misnomer in this case: a better
| term would be "art", as in "religion is an ancient art of
| managing authority and consent in large groups of
| people".
| pdonis wrote:
| _> religious cultural realism was more effective at
| generating belief_
|
| If "generating belief" allows the beliefs generated to be
| false, yes, I agree. Science is much more cautious about
| "generating belief" than religion is, so it generates fewer
| beliefs; but it also has a much better track record of
| generating _true_ beliefs.
|
| _> that 's because it was a science of generating belief._
|
| You must be joking. Religion's way of "generating belief"
| is not informed by any kind of scientific study of how to
| "generate beliefs".
| tehchromic wrote:
| Well I'm not joking.
|
| Religious methodology in building a belief generating
| technology was more organic than we like to think of
| science today, however it followed the same format as all
| scientific methodology: observation, question,
| hypothesis, experiment, modification and repeat. It also
| was recorded, often in aural memory but also in text,
| which I would say is the critical feature that
| differentiates modern science from more traditional
| scientific practices which we tend to dismiss as not
| science but which meet the criteria in strict
| methodological terms.
|
| I don't think I'll be capable of convincing you or anyone
| who has built their idea of science on the rejection of
| mythology, however it's worth considering that religious
| believers made the same assumption about previous
| cultural realities: theirs was the only right reality.
| pm90 wrote:
| > however it's worth considering that religious believers
| made the same assumption about previous cultural
| realities: theirs was the only right reality.
|
| Science doesn't make that assumption about Reality. In
| fact it makes a rather weak assumption: reality is only
| that which we can demonstrate and prove using the
| scientific method.
|
| Science only lays down the principles by which scientific
| discovery might be made, and leaves the description of
| reality as whatever the outcome of that process might be.
| It's something that rational human beings enjoy because
| it has offered great predictive power which has benefited
| humanity immensely, in addition to providing theories for
| how the world works.
|
| The best thing about science is that it allows you to
| completely change the description of reality if a better
| theory comes up. This is one of the main reasons why this
| framework has been successful: it is adaptable and
| accepting of new realities.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> reality is only that which we can demonstrate and
| prove using the scientific method_
|
| I don't think science even makes this weaker claim.
| Science does not claim, for example, that my preference
| for vanilla over chocolate ice cream is only valid if I
| can demonstrate it and prove it using the scientific
| method. (Science might claim that the scientific method
| can be used to gain understanding about how my body and
| brain work that would help to explain the processes in me
| that underlie my preference, but that's not the same
| thing.) Nor does science claim that nothing can be known
| about "reality" in domains, such as law or politics,
| where our ability to use the scientific method is
| extremely limited at best.
| tehchromic wrote:
| Spoken like a true believer!
|
| I'm teasing you and I'm sorry if it is offensive. But
| your are right that a characteristic of scientific
| culture is relative flexibility. What I'm saying
| attention to is where that famous ability to reflect and
| change fails, and nowhere is that more evident than in
| confronting the evidence that scientific culture behaves
| a lot more like religious culture than otherwise. And
| nowhere is that similarity more evident than in the piles
| of scientfic cultural proponents who attack anyone who
| dares to point out the commonality.
|
| In fact, to me the most radical characteristic of science
| as a cultural reality (a religion) and the most clear
| proof of it is science's ability to deny that it produces
| cultural realism. I can sum it up:
|
| Science is the god that claims to not exists.
|
| So when I say something like "your science produces
| monsters", which is a mythological type language, a
| science proponent will often freak the fuck out and hide
| behind the fact that science is only a method. Yet
| science has birthed multiple technologies with the power
| to obliviate the planet, and mythology predicted it.
|
| All I'm saying is that it's time to call science what it
| is: a god.
| pm90 wrote:
| Asserting that scientific culture has some similarities
| to religion isn't some deep insight. All human scholarly
| cultures have things in common. We don't use that
| commonness to argue that they're all the "same", it's not
| an assertion that provides much value.
|
| Your other arguments about science zealots arguing
| doesn't provide any novel insight either. There are
| zealots everywhere, using them as the focus for
| describing the culture seems like a rather silly thing to
| do.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Religious methodology in building a belief generating
| technology..._
|
| You are making huge historical claims here that, as far
| as I know, have no basis in actual fact.
|
| _> anyone who has built their idea of science on the
| rejection of mythology_
|
| Where have I said that science rejects mythology?
|
| Science acknowledges that mythology exists, that its
| ubiquity in human cultures is evidence that it meets some
| common human need, and that that human need itself is
| genuine even if many of the specific mythologies that
| have evolved to meet it include many false beliefs.
|
| What science does _not_ do is accept mythological claims
| at face value, any more than it accepts any other claims
| at face value.
|
| _> theirs was the only right reality_
|
| Science makes no such claim. Science does make particular
| claims about reality, when it has particular theories
| that have a strong track record of making correct
| predictions. But science makes no general claim whatever
| about its "reality" being "the only right reality".
| Science does not even make the weaker claim that the
| scientific method is the only possible way of gaining
| knowledge about "reality". Particular scientists might,
| but science as a worldview does not.
| clairity wrote:
| it's still a pretty good show, maybe the best by some measures.
| we have fascinating scientific discoveries and novel
| technological progress made every day.
|
| but that show has so much more competition nowadays, with the
| scope of information exploding from local communities to the
| whole world (and beyond), because of technology, that exploits
| our natural social tendencies to peer at each other to see where
| we stand. now we're trying to hopelessly keep track of so many
| more people than we can keep in our heads, which creates the
| winner-take-all mechanics we see around us everywhere and that
| traps our collective attentions. whether we like it or not, we're
| building a global social hierarchy to replace millions of local
| ones.
|
| how this is good or bad in the long run is a fascinating show in
| itself (even if each atomic unit of attention-seeking is trite).
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