[blackbrokkoli]

Your argument seems to be purely emotional disdain.

> Yet it seems to happen far less often

Citation needed. And if so, that is a reason to draw a line where on one side is "not-science"? That is just absurd. Does a car A stops being a means of transport when it subjectively breaks down more often than car B?

> very least, in less publicly impacting ways

Excuse me?

* A literal century ago someone failed to translate a German study so know about every child in the western civilization gets a good dose of distrust in science when they get indoctrinated that the tongue has separated regions for taste which is ridiculously easy to refute for yourself in about 15 seconds.

* The coup of the cereal industry to fund some studies telling everyone that breakfast is the most important meal of the day still misguiding health guides today.

* Schrödinger telling the world how stupid it would be to assume quantum principles in the visible world, still happily recited with the complete opposite meaning by about 500 media entities per day.

* Scientific entities failing to have any impact on people about the dangers of X-rays until people got impotent from having their shoes measured via X-rays in the local shopping mall

To be clear, this is not intended as some sort of smear campaign to science itself. I want to illustrate that all science is vulnerable to even dumb mistakes and that this dumb social sciences ain't real meme is only slowing down much overdue conversation!

[mbell]

You're supporting my point here, all your examples did not make an accurate prediction. Thus, they are not known 'facts'.

Your definition of 'science' is 'the best we know', mine, and I think what is meaningful for public discourse is 'this is true'.

[yifanl]

Sure, but what's your definition of "true"?

Derivable from first principles? General consensus? Observed once and seems to fit with the current model?

[johnisgood]

"One idea is truer than another if it allows us to explain and understand more of our experience.

The idea that the sun and stars move around the Earth explained only why they move across the sky, but the idea that the Earth orbits the sun while rotating on its axis is more true, because it explains also why we have seasons. Strictly speaking, however, we will never know whether the Earth really revolves around the sun; another, even truer, theory could conceivably come along.

In support of his view, James pointed out that in practice all scientific theories are approximations. Rarely, if ever, does one theory explain all the facts of experience. Instead, one theory often does well with one set of phenomena while the other theory does well with another set.

A scientific theory that explains more is truer than one that explains less, and the truer theory is preferred. Kuhn might add that even a paradigm that explains no more phenomena than a rival but explains those phenomena better is preferred—as for example Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the solar system was preferred to Ptolemy’s geocentric model, because Copernicus’ model was simpler and more elegant that the cumbersome epicycles of Ptolemy’s model, even though at the time the two models fitted astronomical data about equally well. If scientists prefer theories that explain more phenomena and paradigms that make more sense of our experience more plausibly, then the progress of science no longer seems so unreasonable. It is the result of selection, the exercise of scientists’ preference for theories and paradigms that make better sense of our experience."

Taken from the book "Understanding Behaviorism" by William M. Baum.

[mbell]

I don't really now how to make it more clear: Can I make accurate predictions from it? That's it.