[neonological]

These are political flaws and flaws with human systems.

You are missing the logical flaw buried within the scientific method itself.

Nothing in science and therefore reality can be proven to be true. We can only falsify things in science.

What this means is every claim ever made by anyone or any scientist from now to eternity can never be proven to be true.

We can only make repeated attempts at falsifying things. After we fail to falsify a thing enough times we can say, hey this theory is maybe true. That is the best science can do and that is what nobody, including most of the people on hacker news do NOT understand.

There is literally no such thing as an actual “fact” in science and therefore in reality as we know it.

This flaw is the origin of most of the distrust in science it is also the reason why blind trust of the scientific method itself is wrong. No claim made by a scientist has actually ever been proven.

[kbelder]

Why do you see it as a flaw? Constantly shedding false beliefs equates to constant improvement.

We all want to get closer to the truth; science is one technique for doing so, and since there's no direct line to God, it's the most efficient one. It has the best corrective feedback loops.

[neonological]

I see it as a flaw because in logic and math, it is very possible to prove your theorems to be true. It is just not possible to do so in reality. Logic is a game with a limited domain. Reality has an unknown domain, hence the inability to prove anything.

Because this feature doesn’t exist in science it is therefore a flaw.

Additionally it doesn’t align with human intuition. Humans assume by default that things can be proven and that facts exist. The truth is that nothing can be proven and facts don’t actually exist. This is counter intuitive and therefore although science is the best tool we have, the counterintuitive qualities science possesses justifies calling these things flaws.

This relatively unknown “flaw” is what drives most of the debate in the political arena. No scientist can ever prove global warming to be true. It is fundamentally impossible. The debate would be over long ago if there was some way for science to prove global warming to be real.