Comment by DoreenMichele
3 years ago
Good read, though the food bits are trigger-warning worthy.
Science is about describing reality accurately, often describing an aspect of reality not easily and readily seen with the naked eye because it plays out over a long time or it's on a huge scale too large to view directly or a scale too tiny to see directly. It's about testing mental models to see what fits the facts and people want to be cautious about it because betting on an inaccurate model can have serious real world consequences.
Those consequences often cannot be undone.
I don't think it works to view it as one of these two models. I think science needs to both protect against quackery and also allow for innovation, even though those goals somewhat conflict.
Watching Sabine on YT for a time now I get the feeling that science can debunk quackery on the long run, sometimes in decades. Old guards who are gatekeepers of some of these misdirections have to die out. ~30-40 years to drop a major trend. Sooner or later the scientific method and the fallible humans operating it wins.
> Science is about describing reality accurately
Disagree with how you've generally phrased it. Science is much more about provability, given enough evidence. The evidence could be invented, or not. I would agree that it is about observing reality with many given limitations.
I don't believe science cares that much about being 'accurate', mainly because we use fundamentally flawed models of the universe to justify our research, and then go on to abusing 'p' given the outputs of those models.
I am of course, being a little of a hardass here, but until we invent/discover something better than models, I will always hold this opinion.
That sounds like you are talking about academia, not science.
Mendel, a man remembered as the father of genetics, was a friar who failed to pass his exams for becoming a certified teacher, so he became an abbot. At that point, his scientific work languished because his duties were too burdensome to allow time for it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel
I don't think I am focusing on academia, really.
I've made two major points, first about evidence or the invention of it, the second about models. I also inserted a smaller point on the usage of 'p'.
Evidence does not need a seal of approval from an institution to be considered 'good', just that statistically, using whatever tools we have, evidence has some semblance of validity that could represent something, potentially reality.
Models are those tools in pretty much all of science. Models are all broken, some fundamentally, others in just the nature of cost to develop one that can represent reality. But that's the crux, representing reality must be done cheaply and efficiently as you can, because accurately representing reality has way too much cost in just discovering all the variables to tweak. There will be no time for experiments if that is all you do. So you only have approximations to work with. Basically, you're never actually dealing with reality.
My smaller point of 'p' is just about how we firmly treat confidence intervals as measures of 'solid' research, which I guess can be extrapolated to academia, but I certainly don't think it's limited to academia.
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