BF2S Forums D&ST - Science

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

Jay wrote:

The point is that they use tools like statistics haphazardly and then turn that into a thesis, which the media then picks up on and touts as fact. It's generally bad science. Something like 2/3 of the claims made in medical and science journals end up being false when further testing is conducted, and that's coming from people that do understand the mathematical tools they are using. Frankly, the rampant abuse of statistics among the social sciences is why people no longer believe any of it. You end up with stupid sayings like '99% of statistics are made up on the spot, including this one'. Or conducting experiments under the guise of the scientific method but not understanding how to remove the intrinsic biases, or accounting for them if they can't be removed. Science isn't all that hard, but people in the social sciences fuck it up constantly. But I guess that's why they get a Bachelor of Arts instead of Bachelor of Science.

well the aim of a bachelor of arts isn't to study things with total certitude and 'right' and 'wrong' answers, so the goalposts are moved a little on your "fucking it up" claims. but yes, sure. statistics are misused by everyone. from madison avenue to 'news'/factual sources, to politics and the public sphere. it's not a social sciences thing exclusively. feynman misunderstands their point and function within academia. they are not trying to get at 'scientific truths' in the same sense that physics tries to find immutable 'laws of the universe'.

Last edited by Jay (2013-03-10 20:38:41)

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2013-03-10 22:52:50)

Dilbert_X wrote:

Depends on what you mean by "knowledge".

Scientists get pissy when people mix up opinion with knowledge, and being trained in regurgitating other peoples opinions would barely count as a form of training.

The harm in using scientific methods to pseudo-validate opinion is it reduces the worth of science, because people then think every subject is a pseudo-science.

Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-03-11 04:54:51)

Dilbert_X wrote:

Depends on what you mean by "knowledge".

Scientists get pissy when people mix up opinion with knowledge, and being trained in regurgitating other peoples opinions would barely count as a form of training.

The harm in using scientific methods to pseudo-validate opinion is it reduces the worth of science, because people then think every subject is a pseudo-science.

“Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. Enlightenment’s programs was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge” (Adorno, Horkheimer, 1).

“Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly matters. Just as it serves all the purposes of the bourgeoisie economy both in factories and on the battlefield, it is at the disposal of entrepreneurs regardless of their origins. Kings control technology no more directly than do merchants: it is as democractic as the economic system with which it evolved. Technology is the essense of this knowledge” (Adorno, Horkheimer, 2).

“What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts. Ruthless towards itself, the Enlightenment has eradicated the last remnant of its self-awareness. Only that which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myths”(Adorno, Horkheimer, 2)

“The disenchantment of the world means the extripation of animism”(Adorno, Horkheimer, 2).

“For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry. Unity remains the watchword from Parmenides to Russell. All gods and qualities must be destroyed”(Adorno, Horkheimer, 4-5).

“Each human being has been endowed with a self of his or her own, different from all the others, so that it could all the more surely be made the same”(Adorno, Horkheimer, 9).

“Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown”(Adorno, Horkheimer, 11).

"Myth becomes enlightenment and nature mere objectivity. Human beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them. Their “in-itself ” becomes “for him.”

Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-03-11 05:32:37)

Winston_Churchill wrote:

My biggest issue with the pseudo-sciences is that they claim to be a science.  If they stopped trying to be science and accepted a different classification I'd have no problem with them. But when you have business classes calling their study a science there's something wrong.

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

i just think you scientists are being a little bit too precious and dogmatic over the semantics of the word 'science' being used as a label for a few disciplines that are in the 'softer' end of the scientifically-applied branches of knowledge. what harm does it do if the faculty is called the 'social sciences' rather than the 'social studies'? sciences connotes that it is based on the gathering of information, empirically, and application of certain positivist methods. does it demean physics? does it insult biologists? really, so so precious. it's like me getting irritated when airline stewards refer to their emergency leaflets as 'onboard literature', when 'literature' is only meant to be denoted traditionally as high-art and serious intellectual stuff!!!!!!! omg!!! get a fucking grip.

but then not many things in life are as mechanical as physics or engineering

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2013-03-12 05:42:07)