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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26601 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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This is practically a definition for 'science'.

The observable defining line between Science and "science" is that the former confines itself to areas that can be thoroughly and rigorously mapped, and the latter does not. Climate is plausibly across the line to intractably complex.

The observable defining line between Science and "science" is that the former confines itself to areas that can be thoroughly and rigorously mapped, and the latter does not.

If you're of the view that physics is the only science worth of the name, perhaps. It's absolutely not the case for biology. If you could see from the inside what a mess taxonomy is, to mention one subfield...

Retinas and neurons and rattlesnake venom are real things, and they have been mapped thoroughly and rigorously enough that we can engineer off them. Oedipal complexes and Systemic Racism and restorative justice are not real things, but rather figments of the imagination.

I wish I'd saved a copy of the article I read once, where a scientist talked about how he'd pioneered his particular field for two decades, had testified before congress about his research, and now was confronted with solid evidence that nothing he'd been studying in all that time had actually existed. His candor made me presume that he himself was honest, that the error had not been intentional... but at that scale, it hardly matters. If you fuck up that badly, if your entire field fucks up that badly, if multiple independent fields can fuck up that badly for that long, then the project is beyond salvage. Especially when the fuckups are not random, but correlate strongly with social and political trends of the moment.

So no, we should not treat science or scientists with respect. We should not believe that fucking studies show. We should demand rock-hard evidence that is ready to engineer off of. If they cannot provide this, the null hypothesis should be that they are lying to us. If they can, we should be skeptical that they are lying to us very well. When the engineering hits mass production, we can maybe relax our skepticism.

When the engineering hits mass production, we can maybe relax our skepticism.

I've had a similar idea bouncing around my head for a while, though I never expressed it. Is this your formulation, or did you get it from somewhere? It feels so obvious it would a bit shocking if no one else talked about it.

This could be said in response to innumerable scientific claims. Climate science is plausibly knowable enough to model well. But I'm not making any claims what climate science says. I'm asking what, at a general level, is unique to climate science that garners a special amount of skepticism?

Its association with sweeping claims of the impending end of the world, something many people have come around to view with suspicion, and its use as justification for policies that cause visible economic harm in exchange for invisible climate benefits.

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