The Problem With Science: It's Not Credible

[ERayR]

Still needs another edit- not clear

 

I will take a guess and say he is referring to government bail outs for the big bows while the rest of us have to stand alone. He may have forgotten 'earned income credit'.

[The Nehor]

I will take a guess and say he is referring to government bail outs for the big bows while the rest of us have to stand alone. He may have forgotten 'earned income credit'.

 

Nope, Earned Income Credit and other government aids for the working poor are socialism for the wealthy just as much as corporate subsidies are. It is also quite genius how it works and businesses can keep their hands clean while it goes on.

 

If I run a big business that requires a large number of relatively unskilled workers to operate what are my options? If I pay them a living wage then I make less profit. However if government can be allowed programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and EIC to exist then I can pay less then a living wage and government makes up most of the difference for me. If those programs did not exist my workforce would be hungry and have no way to deal with diseases and my productivity suffers. While those programs do help the working poor they help corporations just as much in wages now considered to be unnecessary to maintain their work force and health insurance the government will provide so they do not not need it. And our tax dollars subsidize their work force for them. Quite brilliant actually.

 

The pendulum will probably swing the other way in a few decades. My generation is not having many children and within the next 20-25 years there will probably be a labor shortage in the United States again and the employees will have increased power unless capital shoots up in productivity in a major way. Right now unskilled labor is easily replaceable in most of the US.

[ERayR]

Nope, Earned Income Credit and other government aids for the working poor are socialism for the wealthy just as much as corporate subsidies are. It is also quite genius how it works and businesses can keep their hands clean while it goes on.

 

If I run a big business that requires a large number of relatively unskilled workers to operate what are my options? If I pay them a living wage then I make less profit. However if government can be allowed programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and EIC to exist then I can pay less then a living wage and government makes up most of the difference for me. If those programs did not exist my workforce would be hungry and have no way to deal with diseases and my productivity suffers. While those programs do help the working poor they help corporations just as much in wages now considered to be unnecessary to maintain their work force and health insurance the government will provide so they do not not need it. And our tax dollars subsidize their work force for them. Quite brilliant actually.

 

The pendulum will probably swing the other way in a few decades. My generation is not having many children and within the next 20-25 years there will probably be a labor shortage in the United States again and the employees will have increased power unless capital shoots up in productivity in a major way. Right now unskilled labor is easily replaceable in most of the US.

 

Actually you may be surprised to know that for the most part I agree with you.  The only thing is I call the whole package socialism.  The techies are working diligently trying to make serfs (peons, depending on which language you use) obsolete with robotics and AI. Looks a little bleak for the future of the working man.

[Uncle Dale]

“You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or you can have democracy; you cannot have both.” The late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.

 

 

Oh, I'd say that the super-rich need a much, much larger percentage

of the world's wealth put under their control.

 

Advocates of John Calvin's teachings have let us know that we can

often identify the Elect by how successful they are in life (or what

filthy rich families they happen to be born into). And, of course the

Elect should rule -- just ask any righteous Puritan living in Salem

back in the days of Cotton Mather.

 

I say, nobody should be taxed on any income exceeding one million

dollars; and that anybody reporting a lesser income than that, should

be allowed no deductions, no exemptions, and no welfare handouts.

 

That ought to whip things back into their proper shape in a hurry.

 

Daddy Warbucks

(a.k.a. UD)

[thesometimesaint]

Johnathan Swift had a much more of "A Modest  Proposal".

[Stone holm]

Which proves the folly of communism.

 

It is supposed to be inevitable and yet capitalism triumphs every time.

Not sure I would consider China a capitalist economy. But you can if it floats your boat. But my generation was taught to fear communism because it denied personal liberty, can't see that has changed over there, but some Americans have learned how to profit off the backs of slaves once again.

[Alvino]

What I object to is being ridiculed as being ill-informed when I don't agree with the conclusions arrived at in some of the disciplines.

 

Claiming someone is ill-informed isn't ridicule. Whether you are ill-informed or not (or perhaps intellectually irresponsible or not) depends on why you object to the conclusions arrived at in the disciplines. 

[Alvino]

ERay,

 

Give it time. Age makes one wary of being fooled...again. We might be gone, but a few decades from now maybe the youthful zeal which is obvious in the dogmatic ideologues will hopefully be ashamed of their present gullibility, and remember us well for our skepticism. I mean really, could someone like our own Mormon Free Thinker maintain such a rigid ideology as to what he holds now for an entire lifetime? I doubt it. 

 

 

Remember, the rational thing to believe might very well be the incorrect one. You can be irrational (or intellectually irresponsible) even if you end up being correct. 

[Stone holm]

Now that the industrialists and large corporations have learned how to profit off the communist slavery, you don't hear criticism of it anymore -- now they attack the democracies which have adopted light forms of socialism in Europe.  Reason being it is hard to get them under your thumb since they are democracies.  We had a similar problem down in South America where it was much easier to control the dictatorships because you could deal directly with the elites and didn't have to worry what happened to the peasants.

[bcuzbcuz]

Actually you may be surprised to know that for the most part I agree with you.  The only thing is I call the whole package socialism.  The techies are working diligently trying to make serfs (peons, depending on which language you use) obsolete with robotics and AI. Looks a little bleak for the future of the working man.

I agree. In my, not so humble opinion, we are in a new feudal age. Serfs/slave labour has a new name and democracy is constantly eroded.

[Stone holm]

I agree. In my, not so humble opinion, we are in a new feudal age. Serfs/slave labour has a new name and democracy is constantly eroded.

I agree, we have been moving towards an oligarchy over the last 30 years. The use of Chinese slave labor has pretty much destroyed the American middle class and the prosperous working class. About one more free trade agreement should put the last nail in that coffin.

[Robert F. Smith]

.......................................................

................................... And, of course the

Elect should rule -- just ask any righteous Puritan living in Salem

back in the days of Cotton Mather.

........................................................................  

Which of the Salem ancestors of Joseph Smith and Nathaniel Hawthorne should we ask?  Hey, had they abandoned Calvinism by the time Joe Smith and Natty Hawthorne were playing together in Salem in the summer of 1812?

[Stargazer]

My wife says she drinks Coke to prevent glowing in the dark and Interrupting my sleep. Very generous of her don't you think?

 

Heh.  I drink Coke at least once a week to prevent being translated.

[Jeanne]

You underestimate the choices.

 

Because something cannot be proven, that doesn't mean it's "false" and what is considered a "myth" might be literal history.

 

The entire issue here is an epistemological one and has nothing to do with what "really happened" BECAUSE THAT IS UNKNOWABLE.  The issue is more a question of what one does to construct a reasonable belief system in the face of uncertainty.

 

Since what really happened becomes irrelevant in such a case, one makes the best guess that makes sense to them and then lives with the ambiguity of knowing that we really know very little about anything.

 

So for me, there's no puzzle here at all.  ANYTHING might have really happened, and in reality, my guess is as good as anyone's in the face of uncertainty about anything.

 

You might be right, I might be right, but none of it matters.  We get to pick and construct our own reality because what is not "likely" to happen actually happens all the time.

 

In 1950 who could have predicted that Kennedy would be assassinated?  And then Bobbie? That the World Trade Center would fall?  That practically everything we buy is made in a capitalist China and that their currency could eclipse the dollar?  That the sum of the world's knowledge would be on a device you could hold in the palm of your hand?  That in that same culture we are worrying about a medieval Islamic Caliphate which beheads people with swords becoming a world threat?  Who could predict that we have missionaries in Russia?  And that the climate could change?  And that we still don't have flying cars? 

If something cannot be proven false or a myth..it should also be said that it is not proven truth.

[MormonFreeThinker]

 remember us well for our skepticism

 

Scientific organizations in China, Russia, Venezuela, Japan, Mexico, all of them agree that humans are causing climate change. 

Independent scientific organizations also agree, retired climate scientists also agree. 

http://opr.ca.gov/s_listoforganizations.php

 

Are you skeptical because you did your own scientific research and concluded something different?

Or are you skeptical because some conspiracy theory guy told you to be skeptical? 

Edited March 6, 2015 by MormonFreeThinker

[thesometimesaint]

If something cannot be proven false or a myth..it should also be said that it is not proven truth.

 

All we really can say is that it hasn't been falsified yet. Myths are a different creature. IE; We do know that George Washington the first President of the US existed. But it is almost certainly false that he chopped down that cherry tree.

[CMZ]

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert and a pretty rational thinking guy, recently posted an interesting view of why many people don't trust science.  And he wonders if it is sometimes more rational not to trust "science":

 

Science's Biggest Fail

 

 

 

I post this because I usually argue strongly in favor of "science" over other more supernatural forms of knowledge acquisition, and I thought he made an interesting point.

 

Maybe it's all supernatural. When you trust in what science is telling you at a certain point in time then you are supernaturally trusting that it must be totally right at that point in time. And that takes a whole lot of faith to do that. "Science" helps us learn about the world, to investigate, categorize, attempt to explain, etc. We don't need to automatically distrust all of it just because it may not be able to tell us everything yet. And in a similar way we don't need to distrust "religion" just because it may not be able to tell us everything yet. It is unscientific to claim that we have all the answers or that there are only certain ways in which answers can be obtained when the very premise of science is to keep learning and to continually explore new possibilities. It is patently unscientific to claim, "We have figured out the origin of life. Therefore we know what the religionists say on the matter is wrong." It IS scientific to say, "Here is what we know about the origin of life at this point in time and here is one possible working model that explains the phenomenon we have so far observed."

 

When we imagine a paradigm of "science vs. religion" we imagine an utterly fallacious dichotomy. My apologies to any scientist who thinks they have it all figured out or to any religionist who thinks shunning facts (in favor of some great mystery) is wise.

[Robert F. Smith]

Maybe it's all supernatural. When you trust in what science is telling you at a certain point in time then you are supernaturally trusting that it must be totally right at that point in time. And that takes a whole lot of faith to do that. "Science" helps us learn about the world, to investigate, categorize, attempt to explain, etc. ...........................................................

..........................................

You are misusing the term "supernatural" when what you mean is subjective.  Supernaturalism (which is not an LDS tenet) has nothing to do with the scientific method, which depends on repeated experiments which are recorded and rationalized with precision.

[CMZ]

You are misusing the term "supernatural" when what you mean is subjective.  Supernaturalism (which is not an LDS tenet) has nothing to do with the scientific method, which depends on repeated experiments which are recorded and rationalized with precision.

 

I'm using the term "supernatural" not because I prefer it but because it is what the OP uses. I also know it's not much of an LDS term.

[mfbukowski]

Edited March 7, 2015 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

You are misusing the term "supernatural" when what you mean is subjective.  Supernaturalism (which is not an LDS tenet) has nothing to do with the scientific method, which depends on repeated experiments which are recorded and rationalized with precision.

"Rationalized" is absolutely the PERFECT word! The "rational" is creating a rational story that fits the experience.

It is the social construction of reality in language as we speak

Since language is all we can speak, for all practical purposes, reality itself becomes a social construction.

[thesometimesaint]

I'm using the term "supernatural" not because I prefer it but because it is what the OP uses. I also know it's not much of an LDS term.

 

Supernatural means relating to God. It is a perfectly good LDS term when used correctly.

[CMZ]

Supernatural means relating to God. It is a perfectly good LDS term when used correctly.

 

I also never said that it's a horrible term or that it should never be used.

[Tarski]

"The pattern science serves up, thanks to its winged monkeys in the media, is something like this:"

Except that it's not the pattern science serves up. It is the pattern falsely detected by a cartoonist with unsophisticated ideas about scientific truth and who gets his science from news outlets and dubious websites.

 

Here is a little test. If the following seems odd or wrong to you then you don't get the significance of science:

 

If X was thought to be true based on the best evidence in 1990 but was later assessed as not true based on better evidence in 2015, it was still irrational or at least unwise to not believe X in 1990.  Decades ago, it would have been moderately  irrational for me to deny that stress was the cause of ulcers and even weird to assert without sufficient evidence that they were due to a bacteria (H. Pylori) even though that eventual turned out to be the case.

 

Actually, it seems to me to be quite difficult to come up with examples where science was simply wrong in the sense that it was once claimed that X had the support of massive evidence and yet it turned out to be quite the opposite. Usually it is more like there was some recieved wisdom that was based on limited evidence and amounted to nothing more than educated guessing or unsupported opinion that nobody thought to test because it seemed obvious or it was assumed that there was evidence somewhere (was there ever a mountain of evidence that stress was the essential cause of ulcers?)

The other usual examples of big changes are a little trickier when one looks closer. For example, even though relativistic mechanics superceeds classical Newtonian mechanics, there is a really strong sense in which Newtonian mechanics is still true ....the evidence of the past is still good in its domain and we still use Newtonian mechanics when designing bridges, cars, trains, buildings, roller coasters, etc.

The old physics has been refined rather than simply reversed.

When in the last 50 years has science claimed to have extensively documented, statistically definitive, and theoretically compelling evidence for some putative fact that turned out to be just flat out wrong in every way?

To my mind modern hard science is less than 150 years old and outside of health and medicine (which deserve a whole separate discussion) it is hard for me to form a picture of science as a series of embarrassing reversals. Its much much better than that (pace Scott Adams).   We aren't going to find out that the flu is caused by witches nor that the earth is flat after all.

And if a decade from now evidence somehow surprisely makes a reverse trend against the AGW consensus, it will still have been the case that the typical climate change deniers were (at the time) unjustified complete loons!

[mfbukowski]

Except that it's not the pattern science serves up. It is the pattern falsely detected by a cartoonist with unsophisticated ideas about scientific truth and who gets his science from news outlets and dubious websites.

 

Here is a little test. If the following seems odd or wrong to you then you don't get the significance of science:

 

If X was thought to be true based on the best evidence in 1990 but was later assessed as not true based on better evidence in 2015, it was still irrational or at least unwise to not believe X in 1990.  Decades ago, it would have been moderately  irrational for me to deny that stress was the cause of ulcers and even weird to assert without sufficient evidence that they were due to a bacteria (H. Pylori) even though that eventual turned out to be the case.

 

Actually, it seems to me to be quite difficult to come up with examples where science was simply wrong in the sense that it was once claimed that X had the support of massive evidence and yet it turned out to be quite the opposite. Usually it is more like there was some recieved wisdom that was based on limited evidence and amounted to nothing more than educated guessing or unsupported opinion that nobody thought to test because it seemed obvious or it was assumed that there was evidence somewhere (was there ever a mountain of evidence that stress was the essential cause of ulcers?)

The other usual examples of big changes are a little trickier when one looks closer. For example, even though relativistic mechanics superceeds classical Newtonian mechanics, there is a really strong sense in which Newtonian mechanics is still true ....the evidence of the past is still good in its domain and we still use Newtonian mechanics when designing bridges, cars, trains, buildings, roller coasters, etc.

The old physics has been refined rather than simply reversed.

When in the last 50 years has science claimed to have extensively documented, statistically definitive, and theoretically compelling evidence for some putative fact that turned out to be just flat out wrong in every way?

To my mind modern hard science is less than 150 years old and outside of health and medicine (which deserve a whole separate discussion) it is hard for me to form a picture of science as a series of embarrassing reversals. Its much much better than that (pace Scott Adams).   We aren't going to find out that the flu is caused by witches nor that the earth is flat after all.

And if a decade from now evidence somehow surprisely makes a reverse trend against the AGW consensus, it will still have been the case that the typical climate change deniers were (at the time) unjustified complete loons!

This is just semantics and an irrational belief in the metaphysics of what is "rational".

 

It's the good old correspondence theory of truth, long dead, rearing it's ugly head again, substituting the word "rational" for "true".

 

 

The correspondence theory of truth states that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world and whether it accurately describes (i.e., corresponds with) that world.^[1] The theory is opposed to the coherence theory of truth, which holds that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined by its relations to other statements rather than its relation to the world.^{[citation needed]}

Correspondence theories claim that true beliefs and true statements correspond to the actual state of affairs. This type of theory attempts to posit a relationship between thoughts or statements on one hand, and things or facts on the other. It is a traditional model which goes back at least to some of the classical Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.^[2] This class of theories holds that the truth or the falsity of a representation is determined solely by how it relates to a reality; that is, by whether it accurately describes that reality. As Aristotle claims in his Metaphysics: "To say that [either] that which is, is not or that which is not is, is a falsehood; and to say that that which is, is and that which is not is not, is true".^[3]

......

Either the defender of the correspondence theory of truth offers some accompanying theory of the world, or he or she does not.

If no theory of the world is offered, the argument is so vague as to be useless or even unintelligible: truth would then be supposed to be correspondence to some undefined, unknown or ineffable world. It is difficult to see how a candidate truth could be more certain than the world we are to judge its degree of correspondence against.

On the other hand, immediately the defender of the correspondence theory of truth offers a theory of the world, he or she is operating in some specific ontological or scientific theory, which stands in need of justification. But the only way to support the truth of this theory of the world that is allowed by the correspondence theory of truth is correspondence to the real world. Hence the argument is circular.^[8]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_theory_of_truth#Vagueness_or_circularity

 

That approach to truth has largely been abandoned, and supplanted by something more like this:

 

 

There is no metaphysical world of what is "rational" out there floating waiting to be discovered, because we can never get out beyond our constantly changing theories and data that changes according to how we observe it.

 

That makes what is "rational", by that understanding, part of an unchanging metaphysical realm which will never be discovered because science is always changing and refining its previous paradigms.   The problem is that WE are always changing and language is constantly changing, so our descriptions of observations are constantly changing as well.  What is observed depends on the observer as much as the "data".  It's the good old Copenhagen Interpretation.

 

So the view that what is "rational" is unchanging makes all that we presently believe in science "irrational" because it will all change one day. 

 

This view makes the definition of what is "rational" unknowable in principle and therefore totally irrelevant.   The word becomes meaningless.

 

Seeing scientific change as "embarrassing reversals" is just- as you say- your embarrassment, which is itself "irrational" emotionality. 

 

Besides all that- how have you been?   Good to see you!! 

Edited March 7, 2015 by mfbukowski