Why mainstream science works
Many people think that things like empirical tests and mathematical logic make science special. This is not true. Everyone has been using empiricism and logic to some extend since forever. Science has become the most reliable source of information because of the way it fights against human error and corruption.
There are many ways science does this, but I'd say by far the most important is peer review. If someone publishes something as "science", it will get scrutinized by other scientists. If it's an unimportant claim in an unimportant paper, something quite obviously unscientific might get through the scrutiny, since no one cared enough. But this is a small problem, since once any claimed "science" gains any importance, it will get the full attention and scrutiny of the scientists. Therefore, while science will never be perfect, it will never get corrupted in the big questions.
And why mainstream science? Because in peer review, mass matters. A fringe community of people might all use the scientific method correctly and peer review each other with good intent, but they have a high likelihood of making the same mistakes and having the same biases, since they are this fringe group. Whereas in the mainstream science a scientific claim will get scrutinized by people of many different groups, religions and ideologies, which makes it unlikely that they have the same biases or make the same mistakes.
Thus, the bigger and more important the scientific claim, the more reliable the mainstream science is.
There are many ways science does this, but I'd say by far the most important is peer review. If someone publishes something as "science", it will get scrutinized by other scientists. If it's an unimportant claim in an unimportant paper, something quite obviously unscientific might get through the scrutiny, since no one cared enough. But this is a small problem, since once any claimed "science" gains any importance, it will get the full attention and scrutiny of the scientists. Therefore, while science will never be perfect, it will never get corrupted in the big questions.
And why mainstream science? Because in peer review, mass matters. A fringe community of people might all use the scientific method correctly and peer review each other with good intent, but they have a high likelihood of making the same mistakes and having the same biases, since they are this fringe group. Whereas in the mainstream science a scientific claim will get scrutinized by people of many different groups, religions and ideologies, which makes it unlikely that they have the same biases or make the same mistakes.
Thus, the bigger and more important the scientific claim, the more reliable the mainstream science is.
Comments (72)
When it comes to prescriptive matters, we have basic ethical theories about what makes a state of affairs good and how to conduct our own behavior, but we also have the field of political philosophy which is all about the social arrangements of who if anyone gets to decide those things and what if any kind of authority they have over other people and so on.
But when it comes to descriptive matters, we have ontology and epistemology to tell us to do things empirically and critically, but there isn't a lot of philosophy, certainly not a whole field of it, about the social arrangements of who if anyone gets to make the decisions about what is real and true and what if any kind of authority they have over other people and so on. Bacon talked a bit about it, but for the most part it seems like it's just done, and not philosophized about. Not that I know of at least -- I'd love to hear if it has been.
I wrote my own essay On Academics, Education, and the Institutes of Knowledge entirely about this subject, and if there are more well-know philosophers who've written about it that I should read, I'd like to hear about them.
However, not everything is made public and peer reviewed. For example, the production of nuclear weapons is a trait that isn't widely marketed and isn't knowledge widely published around the World even today, even if the actual technology is basically totally ancient: something that has existed for 75 years. When after Operation Desert Storm the UN inspectors inspected Saddam Hussein's actual nuclear weapons program (or it's remnants), not the utter fantasy project that George Bush later used as a lie to invade Iraq, they noticed that Iraq at that time was using (or trying to use) the technology of the 1940's to produce it's plutonium. Not the present technology that the Superpowers used during the Cold War (and still use). Details of that technology are still actually enforced quite well: any scientist having the knowledge of nuclear weapons technology will think twice before he or she sells know how to some willing party. Not only can you end up in jail, you can get literally killed for even trying.
Yet as technology is based on science and all that math and logic, same things can be invented even without prior knowledge from others and procurement of nuclear weapons and other valuable technologies can happen around the World without any interaction by the various secluded research communities. For example the Space Race between the US and Russia shows clearly how different technological solutions were used to overcome the same obstacles.
Nuclear physics is quite at the core of physics and totally mainstream, actually. And is just as reliable as anything else in science.
And it isn't "mainstream science" vs. "fringe science". What you have are "mainstream schools of thought" and then other schools of thought. You can have in Quantum Physics the "Copenhagen Interpretation", but that doesn't mean at all the science itself would be different.
Religion, Homeopathy and Acupuncture do work. It's effects are psychological and therefor very difficult to quantify scientifically. The mind has a healing power of which we still no very little.
Science is what can be proven. All the rest is educated guesswork.
The fact that your GPS works proves it.
Whatever the absolute truth is, it has to be consistent with my GPS working, but there's always wiggle room for multiple alternatives consistent with that.
If it is the absolute truth you are looking for, might I suggest you try one of the many religions?
You are confusing a scientific subject like nuclear physics with what the mainstream science says about nuclear physics. I'm saying that a theory that has been evaluated and accepted by mainstream science is more reliable than a theory that has only been evaluated and accepted by a fringe group (like a selected group of contracted scientists who will keep their studies secret) simply because peer review does become more reliable with a larger mass of more diverse peer reviewers. Mainstream science is not the only way of getting reliable information, but it is usually the most reliable if one does not want to become an expert himself.
Of course they work! And you didn't need to post that on sciences' machines to inform me; your psychic fluence had already informed us before you pressed the first key.
Not.
Your GPS working proves that engineers kick ass. Science and engineering are good friends, but they aren't the same.
Again, I would emphasize that there are schools of thought in science, not mainstream and fringe science itself. The foundations of science are the same. The experiments are the same, publish them or not. You either have science or then you have non-science, humbug. You can have scientist disagreeing on a variety of issues, but either one is right and another is wrong or they are talking about different issues.
The fact that your GPS works is thanks to Einsteins relativity theory being correct. Without science, you would have very little engineering.
For aiming a cannon Newton's laws are correct enough but that doesn't make them correct simpliciter.
I also use the analogy of building a house or a very long bridge. With a house you can consider the earth to be flat and for a bridge you have to take account of the curvature of the earth.
Absolute knowledge does not exist (for us). We always work with relative knowledge.
We don't need any info about relativity to make the GPS work. We'd just adjust the time when necessary, maybe build it into the software to adjust it without knowing why it's happening. Happens all the time.
The GPS does require knowledge of something else though: not from a scientist, but from a mathematician by the name of Descartes.
I didn't say that you need relativity to make GPS work. This is what I said.
Quoting ovdtogt
I like your explanation of relative knowledge. I found an explanation of it in a very old book "The Science of Logic" along with an explanation of why this demands we remain humble and not be too sure of ourselves. Understanding that is of cultural importance. I think education for technology has taken us down a fool's path with a greatly over-exaggerated opinion of ourselves.
I do agree that there are many schools of thought within science. For example quite many of the interpretations of quantum mechanics are so widely accepted that they are all part of mainstream science. This simply shows us that mainstream science has not concluded the issue yet to a single theory and mainstream science clearly acknowledges this. And that is a reliable position to take from mainstream science - that the issue is controversial and no single position has yet been definitively proven.
I disagree that everything either is or is not science - there are degrees of how scientific something is. An unpublished experiment that has not been peer reviewed is not very scientific. An unpublished experiment peer reviewed by a small fringe group is more scientific. And a published experiment peer reviewed by a large and diverse group is very scientific. It's not black and white.
Oh. Yea, there's a huge amount of data that suggests that relativity is correct.
Yes I agree. All these wonderful marvels science and engineering have brought us has left us with an ecological disaster (an extinction rate almost unprecedented in history) and global warming.
I think you need quite a lot more than just a mathematician to get a satellite orbiting around the earth. It is not called rocket science for nothing.
Well, any engineer knows that this is not true - one can simply read wikipedia for engineering issues and their engineering projects based on this easily available scientific information reliably end up working.
And while I do acknowledge that mainstream science will never be perfect and that some level of corruption will always exist... mainstream science with its peer review from large diverse sources which can't all be controlled by any power on earth does the removal of errors and corruption better than any other large source of information on earth.
Of course one can with effort and persistence become an expert and get even more reliable information that way, but that has no bearing on how reliable mainstream science is.
Ah, you bring up a good point. Not all branches of science are the same. For an engineer, it is pretty black and white. Either it works or it does not. Some wouldn't even call psychology a science, however recently brain studies are more scientific than Freud's speculations and "knowing" which was culturally biased.
A problem with modern age science is specialization. It is like studying the universe with a telescope that can focus on one light in the sky but is so limited it can not explain the universe.
And I think our materialism has also created a blindness that may set the US behind the pack of progressive technology. Reality is not limited to matter, but is energy and I don't think we have a good grasp of the forces. Our linear logic got us to where we are now, but nonlinear eastern logic could pick up the ball and maybe leave us in the dust?
That’s the same as what I said earlier: you cannot prove anything, only disprove. The fact that you can aim a cannon using Newton’s laws doesn’t prove them correct. You can’t point at cannons to show that Einstein was wrong and Newton was right instead, because both theories are consistent with that phenomenon. But Newton is inconsistent with other phenomena, so he’s technically wrong in an absolute sense. Einstein is compatible with GPSs, but GPSs don’t prove him right, because other possibilities are also compatible with GPSs (and the rest of Einstein’s successful predictions) and we don’t know if or when an observation will be made that favors one over the other. And that is perpetually true. Nothing is ever proven, just not yet disproven.
If A is false then non-A is true, so to disprove is to prove something...
Falsifying a theory doesn’t mean proving it is false, almost any theory can be saved from falsification by invoking new phenomena when observations do not match the theory (dark matter, dark energy, ...).
Even Newton’s gravitation is not disproven by observations, it can also be saved by invoking unseen matter.
People decide when they stop working on a theory, and when they decide that they call the theory falsified, that doesn’t mean they have proven it is false, they could make it compatible with observations but they more or less arbitrarily decided to stop and to continue developing another theory.
I’ll eventually post a long thread about science and pseudoscience, I’ve been working on it for a while and I want it to be as clear and thorough as possible, so that people can see why they should idolize mainstream science less and respect so-called pseudosciences more (I will show that there is no fundamental difference between science and pseudoscience).
I think there are 2 kinds of logic. Logic and ill-logic. You can't have 2 'truths' that are mutually exclusive.
However, as should have been the case with all fields of study being equal, as a challenge and in value, it's the sciences that are always in the limelight. Other fields do get attention of course but the focus on them is proportionate to their closeness to the sciences.
There is something about science that attracts the crowds. As I mentioned other fields get a share of the peoples' adoration based on how similar they are to the sciences. Finding out this similarity may shed light on this "mystery". In my opinion science has a method, the so-called scientific method, that is a refined form of fact-finding system that is innate, reliable and universal. This innate, reliable and universal fact-finding system is rationality. I think it's rationality, the fact that it reaches it's zenith in the sciences, that makes science such a favorite of the masses.
That would mean that all that needs to be done to make other fields equally worthy of our attention would be to inject them with the right dose of rationality. I'm not saying that this isn't the case and that everything not-science is irrational. However, non-science subjects tend to have a higher percentage of opinion rather than anything in the sense of a scientific fact. Some, who're so inclined, may actually find this a more satisfying world where their own personal opinions join those of others to form an intricate web of views that homes in on the truth.
There then is a need for assurance that science is in fact rational. I think it is here that the scientific method, by itself, is inadequate. Scientists are, after all, people and people have flaws that make them as liable to errors as the next person you meet. It's at this point that we need peer review which separates the wheat from the chaff, science from non-science or, more accurately, good science from bad science.
:joke:
There is no such thing as “the scientific method”.
http://rkc.org/bridgman.html
”In short, science is what scientists do, and there are as many scientific methods as there are individual scientists.”
There are plenty of opinions in ‘science’. Considering that countless theories can be made compatible with a given set of observations (see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-underdetermination/), picking any of these theories as the “more correct” one and as the one to develop is a matter of opinion based on subjective criteria, such as ‘simplicity’, ‘beauty’, ‘appeal to authority’, ...
There are plenty of problems with peer review, it lets through many papers with logical and methodological flaws when their results agree with the consensus, and it blocks many papers without such flaws simply because they go against the consensus. The problem isn’t the process itself but the reviewers and more generally the lack of critical thinking about the whole scientific enterprise.
Meanwhile activities or ideas that are labeled ‘pseudoscience’ or ‘non-science’ can have more rationality in them than other ones labeled ‘science’.
Then I know the kind of reply I’ll get, “it’s the best thing we have” or “the best we can do”, no it’s not, these flaws could be fixed if only people cared to listen more and idolize Science less. So I’ll make a thread about that, until then I should probably stop replying to these kinds of posts venerating Science.
While I do agree that we could always do better, I disagree that people that do science, idolize science. Not that this has been studied, but all scientists and potential scientists I know are fully aware of the flaws in the system and they consider it a high priority to solve them. Removing corruption completely is just a very hard thing to do. Scientists are working hard on it all the time and that's why mainstream science gets better all the time and that's why it is the best we have and will continue to be the best we have for the foreseeable future.
Wishful thinking. That problem would already be solved if that system was as amazing as people claim it to be. It doesn’t get fixed because many ‘scientists’ don’t see the problem, and those who do don’t have the power to change things. Mainstream science is political, it involves prejudices, personal preferences, authorities, it isn’t the purely rational and objective endeavor that people make it out to be. Most scientists believe there is a fundamental distinction between the activities/theories labeled ‘science’ and those labeled ‘pseudoscience’ or ‘non-science’, I’m sure you believe in such a distinction too, and as long as they will believe in that the problem won’t get fixed. So sometime this month I’ll make a long thread about that and make it as clear as possible what the problem is and why it is a problem and why it isn’t fixed and how it can be fixed, how we can do much better than what we have now, and then the only thing that might prevent it from being fixed in the “foreseeable future” will be the people (scientists included) who want to keep forcing their own beliefs onto others.
They do prove him right. His hypothesis/theory was that time sped up in a lower gravitational field. The fact that we have to compensate for that aberration shows his hypothesis was correct. He also predicted gravitational waves. This year we have detected them proving that his hypothesis was correct.
Because we know the earth is round does not make the flat earth theory obsolete. The flat earth theory is applied every day in construction.
"A plumb bob, or plummet, is a weight, usually with a pointed tip on the bottom, suspended from a string and used as a vertical reference line, or plumb-line. It is a precursor to the spirit level and used to establish a vertical or horizontal datum."
Of course.
Let me put it this way: there is the intent to use the scientific method to get an objective answer. How well a person or a group of researchers succeed in this is another matter. Also the intent to be objective is important: that the agenda is to know more about reality, not to push some other agenda. It happens quite often, very unfortunately, that people push an ideology, a normative idea or something that is inherently subjective as "simply being a scientific fact". Or vice versa, scientific facts are depicted to be just social constructs and totally subjective opinions.
Ask 100 people how many balls there are in a jar and you will get give or take 80 different answers. If you want to know the most accurate answer, add these 100 answers and divide by 100.
Take all scientific opinions on a subject and find their common denominator and you will be pretty close to the truth.
Definitely truth in that. The more science reveals the more the mystery deepens. Dark matter/energy is what...95% of all known stuff? Thats a lot of unknown forces out there....
Technically correct, but beside the point. If you have a model of the world that says it works exactly some way, observations can prove that it works some other way or another, but cannot prove that it works any particular specific way. It can rule out some segment of the possibility space, and prove that the correct model is somewhere in the remaining part, but never pin it down to one particular possibility.
Quoting leo
That depends on what you mean by "the theory" I guess. You're basically invoking confirmation holism, and I'm totally on board with that, but "invoking new phenomena" is still changing your model of the world. If you think planets orbit the Earth in circles, observation will prove you wrong, and you can either abandon that for heliocentric ellipses, or save geocentrism by invoking epicycles, but you've still made a change to your model either way.
Quoting ovdtogt
Ask any working physicist and they will tell you that both GR and QM are incomplete, and will some day be supplanted by a better theory. When such a better theory comes along, you can't point at a GPS and say that that proves GR right after all (and the new theory wrong). The new theory also has to explain why your GPS works, of course, but the fact that the GPS works doesn’t decide between the infinitely many theories that are compatible with that observation. Just like, as I said, cannons don’t prove that Newton was right and anyone who disagrees, like Einstein, is wrong; it just puts a constraint on which theories are still possible, by ruling out those that are inconsistent with cannons working.
Venerating science? I don't venerate science but the word "venerate" is a big hint as to what science is NOT, a religion and unlike religion, which is simply book after book of argumentum ad baculum, science encourages free thought, is aligned with our innate curiosity, is open to well-reasoned criticism, and is always about knowledge and not about how closely we regard a particular belief. Granted that there are unscrupulous scientists but, given the the stringent requirements for belief in science, it is easier to discover dishonesty in the sciences than in any other field.
You say there is no such thing as a scientific method? Did Einstein not have data and then did he not formulate a theory and did that theory not get tested?
Actually sometimes he worked with math and thought experiments and only decades later what he worked out in his mind and on paper was verified empirically. Data came late as confirmation.
I disagree, yes there is plenty of reliable information that comes from mainstream science, but also plenty of unreliable information. Plenty of published peer reviewed papers with logical/methodological mistakes, experimental results accepted as true while no one attempts to reproduce the experiment, and then a long time later someone decides to do the experiment again and gets contradictory results which don’t get published for various reasons (“I must have made a mistake”, or peer review considers that the original result is established science and so that there must have been a mistake, ...).
People look to mainstream science to get answers about the nature of existence, about what we are, where we come from, where we are going, yet mainstream science only focuses on a small part of existence. As I said in another thread, there is no evidence that a living being is made solely of elementary particles, yet mainstream fundamental physics arbitrarily assumes that this is the case and then famous physicists tell as many people as possible that this is what we are, a bunch of particles, that love is nothing more than a chemical reaction, that there is nothing after death, and this message gets spread in books, news articles and so on to the whole of society, people are told that this is settled science, and those who want to believe differently or who have personal evidence that contradicts these conclusions are ridiculed, dismissed as cranks.
Any conclusion stems from assumptions, and there are plenty of conclusions in mainstream science that stem from assumptions that haven’t been tested at all, I just gave one example, the assumption “a living being is made solely of elementary particles” hasn’t been tested experimentally, it’s a belief, and so the conclusions derived from it are not reliable information, they are beliefs, which are spread under the pretense that they are reliable and well-tested information and that anyone who disagrees doesn’t understand science or is a crackpot. See the problem? And that’s barely scratching the surface of the problem.
When scientists themselves are not aware of which untested assumptions their conclusions are based on, they believe their results are more universal or certain than they are, and that’s when they feel justified to force society to believe like them. Sure not all scientists are like that, but many are, and especially the more vocal ones who spread their beliefs through all media under the guise of Science as if that conferred more validity to their beliefs than other beliefs. Anyone can pick different assumptions and reach completely different beliefs that are compatible with the exact same empirical evidence.
There are plenty of beliefs in mainstream science, which aren’t reliable information, and when most scientists themselves can’t tell what is belief and what isn’t we have a problem, a big problem. In order to find out you have to critically analyze research papers to uncover their implicit assumptions, because they’re not doing it themselves. If you don’t do that, well you can’t tell if you’re dealing with reliable information or with beliefs based on untested assumptions. That’s why it’s dangerous to blindly trust the ‘experts’.
Observations can’t even rule out that planets orbit the Earth in circles, because you can invoke ‘illusion’ to explain that they really orbit the Earth in circles even though they don’t appear to. The argument of illusion is routinely invoked by mainstream scientists to dismiss personal reports that don’t fit their picture of the universe. So in this example we could say that light travels in some convoluted way and this is why the orbits don’t look like circles, or we could say that the optical illusion takes place somewhere in our eyes or brain. We can save the theory “planets orbit the Earth in circles” in many ways, that’s why I said almost any theory can be saved from falsification.
I do agree that even if we save “planets orbit the Earth in circles” we’ve still made a change to the whole theory of everything (for instance we’ve changed the part of the theory regarding how light travels or how the eye works or how the brain works), but any specific part of the whole theory can be saved in countless ways. So when you said that Newton has been proven wrong in an absolute sense, that’s wrong, his theory of gravitation can be made compatible with the empirical evidence in many ways, by invoking invisible matter for instance. If you think that invoking invisible matter is far-fetched, consider that invisible matter is precisely what is invoked to save general relativity because without it the empirical evidence is inconsistent with the theory.
So in order to save general relativity they have to assume that the universe is mostly made of dark matter and dark energy, which have never been detected despite decades of experiments, there is zero evidence for them, they only say that dark matter and dark energy exist because they really want the theory to be correct or very nearly correct, because they want to save that particular theory. We could have done the same with Newton’s gravitation if we really wanted to.
See my last reply to Qmeri regarding beliefs in mainstream science.
Regarding scientific method, I’m not saying that mainstream scientists do not think, that they do not make observations and that they do not make experiments, but all people do that. We all think, we all make observations, we all make experiments. Practicing any activity is an experiment, through practice we see what works and what doesn’t work and that’s how we get better at whatever we focus on. Thinking, observation, experiment is carried out by all people, not just by mainstream scientists. If you say that this is the scientific method then we are all scientists. If you try to formulate a scientific method more precisely, you will realize that plenty of mainstream scientists do not follow that method, as Percy Bridgman said, there are as many scientific methods as there are individual scientists.
The truth is we are all scientists, mainstream science is simply a community of people who mostly erroneously believe that only them can advance towards truth, and who erroneously believe that their conclusions are free of beliefs.
You rightly pointed out: "Thinking, observation, experiment is carried out by all people, not just by mainstream scientists.". I'm going just a little further than that by suggesting this commonality in modus operandi to gain knowledge as a reason why people have a favorable view of science. After all this method is maxed out in the scientific method.
If you define the scientific method as thinking, observation, experiment, are you saying that the people we usually call scientists have the particularity of thinking more, observing more and experimenting more than other people? But all people are constantly observing and reacting based on what they observe, learning from their past experiences, so the degree of observing and experimenting does not distinguish so-called scientists from other people. We might say that the people we usually call scientists think more than other people on average, but philosophers think a lot too and even more so than so-called scientists.
As you can see mainstream science does not have the justified authority that it purports to have. All people constantly observe and experiment, and philosophers usually think more than mainstream scientists. The separation of mainstream science from philosophy and from what all people do is not justified. Mainstream science would benefit from the thoughts of so-called philosophers (who are people who think a lot) and from the observations/experiments of all people, while philosophy would benefit from the observations/experiments of mainstream science and of all people, and more generally all people would benefit from the observations/experiments/thoughts of all other people.
We all have something to learn from one another, observations, experiments, thoughts, each of us only sees reality from one small point of view, and we need to put all that together in order to advance towards truth, we need to stop believing that the people we usually call scientists have fundamentally different abilities from other people or that they can reach truth that applies to everyone while they ignore or dismiss the observations/experiments/thoughts of countless other people. We are all scientists and philosophers, we all observe, experiment and think from our own vantage point, we all have something to bring to the table and we need to start realizing that.
We need to stop blindly believing what some people say simply because they have the label ‘scientist’, and we need to stop blindly dismissing what some other people say simply because they don’t have the label ‘scientist’. We all have that label, we all are beings who observe, experiment, and think. Some people think more than others, but they don’t see or experiment everything, they need inputs from other people, especially since the more we focus on thought the less we observe and experiment. We all need one another.
Scientist do not think more. They observe and experiment more.
Most people are following a 'comfortable' routine most of their lives. They observe rules and regulations and football on tv. Trial and error doesn't figure high on that list.
AS I mentioned in my previous post,
try to limit the variables and repeat exactly to draw conclusions
but they are constantly choosing (often to do the same things) and these choices will have effects. And it is an experiment, even if they think they are just following common sense or fashion.
In today's supermarkets people are overloaded with choice because the merchant believes that is what the consumer wants. Apparently research has shown this only make people unhappy. People don't like superfluous choice and end up going for the same item over and over again ignoring all other choices. Trial and error is something we want to avoid psychologically. Thankfully we have advertising that makes the choice for us.
It seems to me you are conflating experimentation with trying a lot of different stuff, when in fact scientists are often extremely conservative in the range of choices they build their experiments around, even over long careers.Quoting ovdtogtI think that's way too general. People get habits and then they have goals which they will attack via trial and error, limited of course by their creativity. Yes, people do try to streamline and tend not to SHORT-TERM! experiement with trial and error in the sense of trying a whole bunch of methods (note, not products). But where it seems to them their method is nto working and they care, they will try other things. To get jobs, to win over a particular romantic interest whatever. Most people have already experimented, in the specific sense you mean, and now have a pattern -w hich is the same for scientists, both in their personal lives and their professional lives (for example, heuristics for advancing within an organization). In the specific area where they do research, yes, they may use trial and error, though not necessarily at all. They may pursue one method to solve pulmonary embolism quick testing. Then when their hypothesis fails, try to find a less expensive pap smear. Rather than spending 10 years dealing with every possible method for a quick pulmonary embolism test.
To say scientists use more that other people trial and error approaches is something I would need to see research backing up.Quoting ovdtogtWhich, for those who choose it, is a choice. And it is an experiment with their quality of life in the balance.
Trial and error is exactly what people get with choice and is exactly what people don't want but what is forced on them. Our ability to choose has never been more abundant and lies at the root of much misery. We hate uncertainty, we hate experimentation. Therein lies the power of advertising.
Scientists and engineers do trial and error under proscribed circumstances and thereby advance our knowledge. It is not something we (mere mortals) do naturally. We prefer routine and the familiar.
But I'll not wait around to find out.
Have you heard of the Lidl and the Aldi? They do exactly that. Limiting their choice. They are the fastest growing supermarket chain at the moment.
And yes people often choose things that make them unhappy. It is called drugs. They give a temporary high and a long lasting low. And that happens to be most of the things people buy.
I am a bit horrified with that black and white thinking. "If A is false then non-A is true, so to disprove is to prove something...". Reality is not just this or that but is a complexity of this's and that's and a matter of conditions and degrees. A president can make both decisions we like and ones we do not like, and that makes arguing if he is good or bad president a fool's game, but we do that all the time as if one argument cancels out the other. Water is not a liquid when it is cold enough to become ice or warm enough to evaporate. Our truths can be conditional not just true or false.
Thank goodness, someone who doesn't think we already know everything important, and if someone questions our understanding of reality it is not a sign of being an idiot. I appreciate that so much.
Okay, it appears we have agreement.
May we say our planet is as aminated as primitive people believed? Might it change our concept of reality if we thought everything as of the spirit instead of as matter with no spirit?
Whoo who is "we"? I decidedly do not want to end up in the Christian heaven. I do not want a reality where there are no risks and I have no sense of being needed and affecting the world. Neither heaven or hell is a desirable reality to me. Surely the popularity of gambling seems to disprove what you said about people, not loving uncertainty. Life is hard because no one would want to play the game if it were not challenging.
I am listening to an explanation of what liberty has to do with our progress, and liberty gives everyone the chance to discover things and to be inventive. This is the fun of being human. You appear to be as authoritarian as a Christian. If you were born in the US that is unavoidable because Christianity permeates our cultural understanding of reality. I think life on earth would be better without Christianity.
On my book shelve is a 1930 book titled "Science of Citizens" by Lancelot Hogben. Education for technology is not education for science. It is authoritarian and harmful to our liberty and democracy. Liberal education was education for science when we had a better understanding of what science has to do with good moral judgment and democracy. That is a little more political than the intention of this thread, but it is just wrong to buy into the authoritarian system we put over ourselves when we replaced the education we had with education for technology.
You might not have much choice in the matter. It might have to be either Heaven or Hell.
But as we achieve Godlike powers it is obvious that our ideas about God creating a Heaven and Hell to reward or punish us is very primitive concept cooked up by stone age people.
Zeus feared once we learned the technology of fire we would learn all other technologies and rival the gods. He created the first woman and gave her to the first man, and he gave them a wedding gift. The man and woman were warned by another god, not to open the gift but when the woman was left alone curiosity got the best of her and she opened the gift. Out flew the miseries that Zeus gave them to slow down their progress for as long as possible. However, today we are technologically smart and without reverence for the gods, we lack the wisdom to use this technology wisely. :wink:
I know lidl. The offer a reduced selection because they snatch products they can, at the moment get cheap. They have reduced labor and cut costs everywhere they can. So people,with their ever lowering salaries go to LIDL not because of the reduced selection, but because of the lower prices. And, as I pointed out earlier, this isn't really a response to the point I made. But it doesn't stand as evidence, as least LIDL doesn't, I don't know the other store.