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Jaqen 63 points ago +68 / -5

The result of science is models, not answers.

Those models may or may not be useful. Do more science if unsure.

If you want answers, chat with theologians and philosophers.

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randomusers239874 -5 points ago +12 / -17

That's not true, it depends on the field. Also, theologians and philosophers are just the people too stupid to do real science.

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PepeFarmsRemembers 15 points ago +19 / -4

It is precisely true. Your ad hominem argument against theology and philosophy as "too stupid" says all we need to know. The real enemy is dogmatic idolatry and the belief that "science" makes you smart.


Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

Another of the qualities of science is that it teaches the value of rational thought as well as the importance of freedom of thought; the positive results that come from doubting that the lessons are all true.  You must here distinguish–especially in teaching–the science from the forms or procedures that are sometimes used in developing science. It is easy to say, “We write, experiment, and observe, and do this or that.” You can copy that form exactly. But great religions are dissipated by following form without remembering the direct content of the teaching of the great leaders. In the same way, it is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudo-science. In this way, we all suffer from the kind of tyranny we have today in the many institutions that have come under the influence of pseudoscientific advisers.

We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on, but these do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science analogous to the South Sea Islanders’ airfields–radio towers, etc., made out of wood. The islanders expect a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners’ airfields around them, but strangely enough, their wood planes do not fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are. [But] you teachers, who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, can maybe doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

[and] When someone says, “Science teaches such and such,” he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, “Science has shown such and such,” you might ask, “How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?” It should not be “science has shown” but “this experiment, this effect, has shown.” And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments–but be patient and listen to all the evidence–to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at. … [A] man cannot live beyond the grave. Each generation that discovers something from its experience must pass that on, but it must pass that on with a delicate balance of respect and disrespect, so that the [human] race–now that it is aware of the disease to which it is liable–does not inflict its errors too rigidly on its youth, but it does pass on the accumulated wisdom, plus the wisdom that it may not be wisdom.

[Feynman]

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ProudWhiteMan 4 points ago +4 / -0

reading this makes me feel like telling a liberal to leave a car running in their garage for 2 hours and measure the temperature in that garage versus another garage where a car isn't running. If it's warmer in the garage with the running car then he should email scientists with his irrefutable proof that carbon drives global warming.