Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by card_zero 270 days ago
Everything is subject to fallibility, even things that appear true by definition (if they attempt to say something about reality). Not only matters of worldview, moral values, and philosophy, but science too. It's not simply adding bricks to an edifice that is permanent and final. It's all wrong stories, of quite steadily improving similarity to reality. The goal at any point in time is to be wrong in the next way.
1 comments

That's understood. Science is never the definitive answer, but I added the "authority" bit for a reason: if you don't know what the mass of an electron is or how you could go about finding out, you end up having to accept authority. But there are many things that are (currently) not open to a similar objective scientific approach. And those are our daily concerns, and the most contentious topics. The scientific method isn't going to help there.