Atheism and agnosticism thread

[Zju]

Have there been false sciences? Also yes.

Science doesn't mean what you think it means.
Before the scientific method there have just been "natural philosophies".

Perhaps you need to look at the history of science more. It's gone down plenty of false paths. Some were just mistakes, others less so. Scientists can be bigoted too, and yes, that produces bad science.

Scientists having wrong hypotheses and going down false paths isn't 'false sciences', it's part of how the scientific method works. Correct hypotheses are reproducible and are verified.
Some people being bigoted is part of individuals' character and not a part of the field.

[zompist]

Some people being bigoted is part of individuals' character and not a part of the field.

Absolutely wrong. Biased people make biased theories and it is "part of the field."

The obvious example is the nonsense about race that people used to write; perhaps more insidiously, assumptions about gender that were long part of biology. And I mean biology, not anthropology.

Science is a messy human practice; it has a better track record than most human practices but it can still be wrong-headed and even harmful. It does science no favors to ignore its own history and pretend that it's pure and holy.

[Zju]

Biased theories are just that, biased theories that are later proven wrong. What they're not is 'false sciences'. We have only one way to conduct science - the scientific method - and so far everything points that it's correct.

If you feel like writing about ethics of 19th and early 20th century mindsets that some people used to try to shoehorn into science, that's another topic.

An individual's badfaith postulates aren't 'a single science' or 'one science'.

It does science no favors to ignore its own history and pretend that it's pure and holy.

so it doesn't

[Zju]

Some people being bigoted is part of individuals' character and not a part of the field.

Absolutely wrong. Biased people make biased theories and it is "part of the field."

Biased theories are temporarily part of the field until they're proven wrong. Biased theories do not invalidate the method itself.

[zompist]

Some people being bigoted is part of individuals' character and not a part of the field.

Absolutely wrong. Biased people make biased theories and it is "part of the field."

Biased theories are temporarily part of the field until they're proven wrong. Biased theories do not invalidate the method itself.

No one said they did.

[Raphael]

Is Zju arguing that no true science can be false?

[Zju]

I'm arguing that a bunch of ignorant and/or racist papers of a century ago do not constitute a separate, new "instance of science". Science isn't dogma, it isn't what is currently held to be true. Science is about the scientific method, about the way to conduct it. Of which we have devised only one so far.
And science is in a different category than the natural philosophies of antiquity and middle ages, which rely on dogmas and postulates pulled out of thin air.

[Raphael]

I've seen it convincingly argued that there is not really one scientific method, but more like a collection of science-related methods, used depending on what works best for any given scientific task. Evolutionary biology, chemistry, theoretical physics, and climatology use quite different methods, for instance.

Besides, I've got the impression that the latest rounds of disagreements here is more about terminology than substance. Is a specific scientific claim "a science"? Or "a part of science"? Or "a scientific claim"? As far as I can tell, that depends on personal preference. And if you prefer the first term, there have definitely been "false sciences".

[Zju]

Besides, I've got the impression that the latest rounds of disagreements here is more about terminology than substance.

So do I, and I'm trying my best to assert that false beliefs of yesteryear aren't science.

Is a specific scientific claim "a science"?

Does anyone really interpret "a science" as "a specific scientific claim"? Even if it's in good faith and etc, I can't help feel like that that muddies the waters in the best case scenario. Going by that definition of "science = scientific claim", there'd be tens of thousands of "new sciences" last year alone, and nobody would agree with that statement.

I've seen it convincingly argued that there is not really one scientific method, but more like a collection of science-related methods, used depending on what works best for any given scientific task. Evolutionary biology, chemistry, theoretical physics, and climatology use quite different methods, for instance.

That's intriguing. Do you happen to recall where you read that?

[zompist]

I'm arguing that a bunch of ignorant and/or racist papers of a century ago do not constitute a separate, new "instance of science".

This is not a problem from a century ago. For a pretty modern analysis, see Emily Willingham's Phallacy. The idea that no more biases or problems exist is naive.

Science [...] isn't what is currently held to be true.

It is, really. That's why it's useful. The scientific method doesn't tell you how the universe began, or how to build a spaceship, or if cats are related to mice. "What is currently held to be true" does.

Science is about the scientific method, about the way to conduct it. Of which we have devised only one so far.

Raphael is right, there really are different scientific methods. See Ernst Mayr's What Makes Biology Unique, for instance.

And science is in a different category than the natural philosophies of antiquity and middle ages, which rely on dogmas and postulates pulled out of thin air.

Yes and no. The scientific method has been refined over the centuries, but it came out of "the natural philosophies of antiquity and middle ages". Arguably mathematics is done the same way as it always has been, it's never been a matter of "dogmas." Key principles of the scientific method are medieval.

You seem to be really hung up on keenir's use of "sciences", plural. But this is a completely normal use of language. You've never heard of the term "hard sciences"? "Social sciences"? Biology and physics are sciences. Particle physics and cosmology are sciences. They are parts of overall "science", sure. Words work like that.

Maybe "false sciences" got your dander up, but it seems like a completely normal way to refer to, say, phrenology or Lysenkoism.

(Lamarckianism was an honest error; Lysenkoism was a dogmatic error. Again, imagining that science is free of problems and pitfalls today is naive. E.g. there are a lot of unresolved issues in replication, access to papers, and funding. And don't tell me those aren't part of the scientific method; determining what to study is precisely part of that method.)

[Raphael]

I've seen it convincingly argued that there is not really one scientific method, but more like a collection of science-related methods, used depending on what works best for any given scientific task. Evolutionary biology, chemistry, theoretical physics, and climatology use quite different methods, for instance.

That's intriguing. Do you happen to recall where you read that?

I first ran into it on the old personal website of Steve Dutch. Now Dutch is (or was; I don't know if he's still alive) politically moderately conservative, so he sometimes writes things on politics that I completely disagree with, but I always liked his ideas on science. Unfortunately, the only version of the page I'm thinking of that I could still find online has serious formatting issues; a lot of blank spaces are missing:

What Pseudoscience Tells us About Science

https://www.stevedutch.net/pseudosc/badmodl.htm

[Nortaneous]

"Science" is a silly term that obscures more than it clarifies.

Why do we care about "science"? There are science perverts, who care about some practice under the umbrella of "science" the way foot perverts care about feet, but surely the societal "we" is not a pervert. We care about "science" because it produces things that are useful to us, like the internal combustion engine, and computers, and transistors.

The transistor is both a work of engineering and an epistemic proof: there can be no transistors without engineers who know how to build them. Sometimes discoveries are made by accident, but most of the time they're generated by a paradigm in basic research. Researchers (and engineers) make up stories about their funny little characters, such as "electricity" and "doped silicon", and then ask: assuming that these stories are true, what else would follow from them? Sometimes the transistor follows. The value of the paradigm - even if it is later disproven - is in the prediction and production of engineered artifacts. Truth claims are entirely beside the point; to say that a research paradigm "is true" is a type error.

This engineering-centric perspective solves a number of issues with the science-centric paradigm:
- The purpose of a paradigm is not to be true, but to be acted upon. A paradigm is just a story that exists for researchers to yes-and until it collapses. In domains that are not directly useful to governing bodies, this looks like predicting eka-germanium and inventing the transistor; in domains that are, this looks like Buck v. Bell.
- "False sciences" are things that don't bear fruit. You can tell parapsychology is fake because nobody's worked out a way to make money on it. (If parapsychology is real but unmonetizable, it comes from a force that resists monetization. If fairies are real, they're repelled by cold iron; if orangutans have language, they don't show it to humans, because we'd put them to work.)
- Psychology is basic research applied by the fields of marketing and policing. (The founder of the field of public relations was, infamously, Freud's nephew.) It is thus proper to be extremely suspicious of it.
- Believing in the literal truth of currently accepted scientific paradigms is a strategy that, evaluated by its own merits, would've failed at most points before today. The right side of history is the one that would not have believed in the literal truth of the four humours or the luminiferous aether, both of which are false.
- Why does "the scientific method" care about replicability? Is this something that scientists have to take on faith? In the early history of the science of chemistry, this would not have been observable; there's an anecdote in Lawrence Principe's book The Secrets of Alchemy where he recounts trying to replicate an early chemical synthesis and failing. The synthesis as written was incorrect, and under current alchemical paradigms impossible; but the alchemist who wrote it down was from such-and-such a region and would've gotten his pots from such-and-such a place, the geological properties of which are now known, so they would've contained contaminants that participated in the reaction. But replicability matters if you are a practicing engineer, trying to produce the same dye or the same transistor as part of an industrial process that could be sold to other engineers or performed in factories at any time anywhere in the world. Sometimes failures of industrial processes lead to new discoveries that impact replicability - disappearing polymorphs may be an example of this.
- "The scientific method" is the tradecraft of industrial research, which obviously varies depending on the domain.

[Raphael]

- "False sciences" are things that don't bear fruit. You can tell parapsychology is fake because nobody's worked out a way to make money on it. (If parapsychology is real but unmonetizable, it comes from a force that resists monetization.

Err, what? A lot of people seem to have made a lot of money telling people they're psychics. Certainly a lot of people have sold a lot of books describing their pseudoscientific ideas.

(That's not the only part of your post with which I disagree, but the only one for which I could quickly and easily come up with a refutation.)

[Nortaneous]

- "False sciences" are things that don't bear fruit. You can tell parapsychology is fake because nobody's worked out a way to make money on it. (If parapsychology is real but unmonetizable, it comes from a force that resists monetization.

Err, what? A lot of people seem to have made a lot of money telling people they're psychics. Certainly a lot of people have sold a lot of books describing their pseudoscientific ideas.

(That's not the only part of your post with which I disagree, but the only one for which I could quickly and easily come up with a refutation.)

OK, then those parts are real. Circuses are also real. So is cold reading. None of that has anything to do with the productivity (not "validity" or "truth") of parapsychology as a scientific paradigm, which the US military and intelligence apparatus investigated extensively. If Russell Targ really did manage to train CIA agents in remote viewing, they've done an unusually good job of keeping it secret.

[Travis B.]

- "False sciences" are things that don't bear fruit. You can tell parapsychology is fake because nobody's worked out a way to make money on it. (If parapsychology is real but unmonetizable, it comes from a force that resists monetization.

Err, what? A lot of people seem to have made a lot of money telling people they're psychics. Certainly a lot of people have sold a lot of books describing their pseudoscientific ideas.

(That's not the only part of your post with which I disagree, but the only one for which I could quickly and easily come up with a refutation.)

Consider how 2 + 2 cannot equal 5 no matter how hard one wants it to. Sure, you can delude people into believing this, but once you try to do anything practical with this assumption it will come apart at the seams. Even if your great leader declares that 2 + 2 equals 5, those designing arms for said great leader cannot actually believe this, as they will certainly fail if they do.

If parapsychology were true, we'd have psychic corps in the military and intelligence services (areas in which it would be quite useful) and like, but the matter is that no matter how much one may want it to be real, basing anything practical upon it is doomed to failure.

[Zju]

I'm arguing that a bunch of ignorant and/or racist papers of a century ago do not constitute a separate, new "instance of science".

This is not a problem from a century ago. For a pretty modern analysis, see Emily Willingham's Phallacy. The idea that no more biases or problems exist is naive.

Oh come on now. This is a borderline strawman argument. I've never claimed that no more biases or problems exist. We only discuss the topic about science's fallacies of the past is because it was opened up with:

The obvious example is the nonsense about race that people used to write;

(emphasis mine)

imagining that science is free of problems and pitfalls is naive.

again, whoever claimed that in this thread? Modern scientific experiments are mostly extremely difficult, but that is only tangent to the topic.

Science [...] isn't what is currently held to be true.

It is, really.

That's bickering about semantics as well. Science, at its core, is the scientific method. Empirical knowledge derived from is scientific knowledge. When talking obliquely about the subject we may use the two notions interchangeably, but we need precision here.

Yes and no. The scientific method has been refined over the centuries, but it came out of "the natural philosophies of antiquity and middle ages". Arguably mathematics is done the same way as it always has been, it's never been a matter of "dogmas." Key principles of the scientific method are medieval.

Science is different than past natural philosophies its origin notwithstanding.

Honestly, I don't understand why you're so gung ho ascribing individual people's fallacies as being inherent to science. The scientific method has proven to be the most useful method* to describe the world around us and if some purported researcher isn't following it strictly and unbiasedly, then what they're doing isn't science.

(*'most useful' and 'best' aren't mutually exclusive with 'free of pitfalls')

If you're willing to discuss the crux of the issue (what got me "dander up"), it's the false equivalency between religion and science that some people like to make. The former is assumptions and presuppositions about supernatural being, dogmas about how the world is (supposed to be) set up, etc. For all we know, there are as well are no gods.
The latter is the best way to discover and describe phenomena of the world that we have found out so far. It's not yet another dogma replacing other dogmas. Fundamental pieces of understanding about how the world works - models discovered by means of science - have been replaced by science in the past, they may again be replaced in the future.

[zompist]

This is not a problem from a century ago. For a pretty modern analysis, see Emily Willingham's Phallacy. The idea that no more biases or problems exist is naive.

Oh come on now. This is a borderline strawman argument. I've never claimed that no more biases or problems exist.

This is what you wrote:

Some people being bigoted is part of individuals' character and not a part of the field.

And as I said, that's wrong, nor is it limited to science from a hundred years ago.

Honestly, I don't understand why you're so gung ho ascribing individual people's fallacies as being inherent to science. The scientific method has proven to be the most useful method* to describe the world around us and if some purported researcher isn't following it strictly and unbiasedly, then what they're doing isn't science.

So "science" is things you approve of, and anything you disapprove of "isn't science." That's how propagandists think, not scientists. The scientific attitude is to find and correct sources of error, not to blindly deny them to preserve the holiness of "science."

You seem to imagine that bias means that someone is a racist at home or something. Who cares about their personal behavior? Their bias can get into their science, into their papers and textbooks, sometimes as the opinion of the majority. It affects what they expect to find (i.e. what theories they make) and what they look at.

If you're willing to discuss the crux of the issue (what got me "dander up"), it's the false equivalency between religion and science that some people like to make.

Since I'm doing nothing of the sort, you can rest easy about that.

[Raphael]

Consider how 2 + 2 cannot equal 5 no matter how hard one wants it to. Sure, you can delude people into believing this, but once you try to do anything practical with this assumption it will come apart at the seams. Even if your great leader declares that 2 + 2 equals 5, those designing arms for said great leader cannot actually believe this, as they will certainly fail if they do.

If parapsychology were true, we'd have psychic corps in the military and intelligence services (areas in which it would be quite useful) and like, but the matter is that no matter how much one may want it to be real, basing anything practical upon it is doomed to failure.

I was responding to Nort's claim that you can't monetize parapsychology, and that you generally can't monetize things that are false. In fact, monetizing fraud is one of the main ways for people to make money in this world.

[Zju]

This is not a problem from a century ago. For a pretty modern analysis, see Emily Willingham's Phallacy. The idea that no more biases or problems exist is naive.

Oh come on now. This is a borderline strawman argument. I've never claimed that no more biases or problems exist.

This is what you wrote:

Some people being bigoted is part of individuals' character and not a part of the field.

And as I said, that's wrong, nor is it limited to science from a hundred years ago.

1) Bigotry is a characteristic of people, not of fields or domains. A field itself, such as science, is not inherently bigoted.
2) That statement of mine in no way implies that problems are limited to the past and/or that they don't exist anymore.

You seem to imagine that bias means that someone is a racist at home or something.

I've been left with the impression that a major concern of yours is racism bias, so I was addressing that.

Honestly, I don't understand why you're so gung ho ascribing individual people's fallacies as being inherent to science. The scientific method has proven to be the most useful method* to describe the world around us and if some purported researcher isn't following it strictly and unbiasedly, then what they're doing isn't science.

So "science" is things you approve of, and anything you disapprove of "isn't science." That's how propagandists think, not scientists. The scientific attitude is to find and correct sources of error, not to blindly deny them to preserve the holiness of "science."

What? That's a non sequitur. I pointed out that a work has to be done with scientific rigor in order for it to be considered scientific work. You try to spin that as an opinion of mine. Phrenology doesn't offer reproducible results, so it's not considered science, is it?

Since I'm doing nothing of the sort, you can rest easy about that.

That makes me even more baffled why you're so keen on shifting the discussion away from atheism and into each and every possible shortcoming of science so far.

[Raphael]

I pointed out that a work has to be done with scientific rigor in order for it to be considered scientific work. You try to spin that as an opinion of mine. Phrenology doesn't offer reproducible results, so it's not considered science, is it?

Wasn't it considered science back in the day? And, I think it's kind of a cop-out to define a term describing something you like in such a way that things you see as bad are automatically excluded by the definition.