The difference between conservative and progressive science explained!
(media.patriots.win)
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Indeed. It honestly frustrates me that these science worshippers have a worse grasp of its fundamentals than creationists have.
Listen, Science isn't a method of figuring out the truth; on the contrary, its a method of gradually and slowly eliminating untruths until only a limited, often untestable set of possibilities remain (Despite a scientific requirement being that a hypothesis has to be falsifiable, most scientific conclusion actually rest upon presently unfalsifiable conclusions that we simply lack the tools or resources to refine further. End of the day most things end up at a "just because" conclusion. Why does mass create gravity? Just because. Seems to be an innate function of mass and thats an assumption we must roll with because we don't know any means of testing this in a meaningful way). You take a set of things propositions that aren't self-evidently false and eliminate them until you reach one that seems self-evidently true based on the limited set of evidence you have.
Most things in science we know as "scientific fact" are things that we spent decades upon decades iterating upon to the point that we've literally reached the point where testing the propositions further require circumstances beyond our ability to replicate.
Early on however, science gets shit wrong. A lot. Its not a bug, its a feature. Pretty much any given phenomena can't have any real "scientific conclusions" behind it until about 6 months in. Depending on the complexity, ethics and logistics of testing it, this may be far longer than that.
And yes, until AT LEAST April or so, everything we knew of covid were essentially educated guesses at best and irresponsible conjecture at worst. You think the "Face masks don't work" and "No human-to-human transition is possible" were lies? Nope, that may have actually just been irresponsible idiots proposing conclusions based on incomplete early datasets.
When lay people make definitive statements based on incomplete data, they're idiots. When "experts" do it, its lying. What they're lying about is the degree of certainty backing up their claims.
I used to work in the sciences and many PHD types have huge egos to the point where they are allergic to the words "I don't know." They'd rather lie than admit any gaps in their knowledge. The big ego types also tend to crave status and have the biggest mouths, so they often end up in undeserved decision making roles (Exhibit A: Fauci)
"The fights in academia are particularly vicious, precisely because there is so little at stake." - Christopher Hitchens
I want to push back on this a little bit because "just because" implies that no attempt is being made to figure it out. I think "we don't know" is more accurate most of the time - "we don't know" if the observed physical laws and constants are the way they are because of happenstance (the anthropic principle) or because of some undiscovered mathematical truth that prevents them from being anything else.
The "just because" of the anthropic principle (if that's what we end up having to settle for) also only really applies at the level of fundamental physics - a lot of other things further up the chain might be a consequence of random events, but we can usually at least determine the mechanism that would allow something to happen given the right circumstances and enough time.
Well put! This is especially problematic in the behavioral sciences. Soooo much we have taken as Gospel in psychology and sociology has not been able to be replicated in other studies which is a big red flag, and really, who is suprised by this? Humans are weird AF.
All of this to say, one should never utter the phrase "It's settled science".
The best one should be able to say is "According to the current research we have..."
Communication sciences and behavioral sciences are extra tricky because it is completely reliant on the researchers having a near-perfect grasp of how their own behavior, the phrasing of the question, the setup of the answer and the subject being asked affect one another.
"most scientific conclusion actually rest upon presently unfalsifiable conclusions that we simply lack the tools or resources to refine further"
Those are called assumptions.
Most all "science" is based on assumptions because they just couldn't figure it out and decided that this was probably the right answer, let's move on.
I worded it better.
You sound like an apologist.
No, conclusion.
An assumption by definition is a conclusion made prior to investigation. whether you like it or not, its a scientific conclusion, not an assumption, as it was derived from an investigation in sofar practical means allowed it.
And again, its not "because they couldn't figure it out". Its because you can only break down a phenomena so far before you reduced it to the parts we only have an axiomatic understanding of. At the end of the scientific method, you are left with the conclusion in as far we are capable of refining it. We can't conclusively demonstrate that gravity is a function of mass, we can only conclude that all our present observations show a linear relationship between mass and gravity and accept this to be the most reliable baseline upon which to base our theories relating to gravity. That is to say, our understanding that gravity is a function of mass is the most reliable and accurate model of reality we have.
And that is what science strives for; refining our model of reality; but anyone with a proper appreciation for it knows that we will never actually reach a faultless model of reality. But with almost all things, we reach the axiomatic elements of it. Things we must assume because we are incapable of modeling theories without it. These are the "laws" of science, like the laws of thermodynamics, the laws of force, the laws of communication etc etc. We stick to these laws because the theories these laws produce seem to predict reality most accurately.
It is because they couldn't figure it out.
You are wrong.
Nice word salad though.
Exactly, its because they CAN'T figure it out. That is my point. They aren't guessing for the sake of guessing; it is literally impossible at the moment of speaking to ACTUALLY FIGURE IT OUT. So, as the scientific method advises, we stick with the one that we can use to model and predict reality most effectively with