[arinlen]

> I think once you see how the sausage is made you start to see science for what it is: just another complicated, fallible process built by many fallible people with a wide set of perverse incentives that produce a lot of good things and a lot of garbage.

To me this sounds like a major misconception of what science is.

Scientists aren't expected to be infallible, let alone right at the first try. Science is an iterative process of building knowledge and understanding of how things work, which by definition means there's always stuff that is not known and misconceptions on how things work. The output of science is progress, hut the bleeding edge is often riddled with swing-and-misses.

As a clear example, see how the plate tectonics theory was addressed initially by the scientific community.

[wisnoskij]

Science is iterative yes, but when we say that we mean we cannot know everything all at once so of course some theories will be wrong. But, what the commented is saying is that it is not just that we do not know everything so our theories are incomplete, it is that the "scientifically derived knowledge" that we do know, is mostly false.

Their are entire disciplines with a 80%+ false results rate. This is not an iterative process, this is we did a scientific study and found with 99.999% certainty that X is true, but its not. This is not iterating towards truth, this is just claiming to have authority and being absolutely wrong. And given how science tries to be iterative, these wrong results can then be used to derive more wrong results. Iterative processes cannot function with incorrect axioms.

You cannot just hide behind science as an authority and assume it will fix everything and you can just unthinkingly trust any results it generates.

[arinlen]

> But, what the commented is saying is that it is not just that we do not know everything so our theories are incomplete, it is that the "scientifically derived knowledge" that we do know, is mostly false.

This is your personal assertion, not a fact. And a baseless one, at best.

Science is based on seeing stuff for yourself. If you ever come across something that fits your personal definition of "scientific derived knowledge that is mostly false" then you have on your hands clearly something noteworthy for the scientific community to see. If however your personal finding is something that no one but yourself is able to verify then that's something else, and it is not supportive of your thesis that everyone is wrong.

[ad404b8a372f2b9]

I don't really see a meaningful difference between the way you described it and how I described it.

[Nevermark]

> that produce a lot of good things and a lot of garbage.

Speaking for myself:

You seem to be looking at the tiny fraction at the bleeding edge, where getting good & bad results is really a miracle. Who made the universe so understandable that we can be hit & miss, as allowed to miss & miss & miss….

And away from the bleeding edge, there are far more papers but the most important an area, the fastest the junk is identified and dropped, the faster the gold is identified and spun into more gold.

—-

You really don’t want to see me code on my ikigai project.

I am constantly tossing both bad & good code out for better. Making the gold code an asymptotically small percentage of my work, but producing something I am extremely proud of.

That the sausaging works is magical! Not depressing!

[ModernMech]

The point is that you shouldn’t have been turned off by how the science sausage is made. Yes, science is a messy complicated process driven by imperfect people with human flaws. But it also works in spite of all that. If science only worked when done by the best people, it wouldn’t have changed society as much as it has. Science allows for all people to participate, and it acts as a filter for better results in the limit.

Yes at times it produces garbage, yes some scientists are holding back progress. But the iterative nature of the process is designed to continually correct for that. Science is and has always been two steps forward, one step back.

[dan_mctree]

>But it also works in spite of all that. If science only worked when done by the best people, it wouldn’t have changed society as much as it has

The vast majority of things in the sciences that have really changed the world are those that could be used to make products that just work. We need reproducibility by entrepreneurs and engineers, not academics if we want to change the world.

Maybe Academics would be better off as an idea generating group, rather than as guardians of correctness, as the latter just doesn't seem to be working very well. Evolutionary strength of ideas is what drives survival of ideas, and correctness just isn't that big of a part of an ideas survival in Academics outside of Math.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

And this sounds naive.

The other poster wasn't arguing that scientists are always right, they were pointing out that science is full of politics and that gets in the way of your ideological view of science.