It is not a new form of religion. It does not give us the answers to everything. It may not even be able ever to give us the answers to everything. It does not even give us a way to think.
It does not advance in a linear way. Instead, many false starts are made before progress takes hold.
Better ideas/models do not win out over older ones automatically. Instead, many times an older generation has to die before new ideas can firmly take root.
Funding does not equal knowledge. You can throw as much money as you want at some problems and get nowhere. Many times this is because the questions are being asked the wrong way. But you'll never know -- until progress is finally made.
It's just Bayesian. Science is that study which tells us if we do something or if some state exists --- then there's a very high likelihood that something else will happen or some new state will occur. We try to create models to explain this tenuous causality, but over the generations, models have gotten us into more trouble than they have gotten us out of. If we understand science as just being the study of what most likely follows what, instead of how things work, it's easier on everybody. After all, at the end of the day, even with a model, for you to manipulate the universe around you? You're going to need to know if you do one thing, what other things will happen.
I fucking love science. But it's not what people think it is. We teach science in much too prideful a manner. If anything, the history of how science has been done should give us a deep and overpowering sense of humility.
I agree. Excessive romanticization of science in the mass media is one of the greatest problems facing science today.
Perhaps people are so used to religion that they think science works just like religion, expecting it to offer answers to questions like "what is the meaning of life?" and whatnot.
The ouroboros diagram at the end of the article is an accurate description of not only science but pretty much every human endeavor. We cannot reach "pure unadulterated reality", only a reflection of our beliefs and biases, on the basis of which we form other beliefs and biases.
Fortunately, reflections depend not only on what is reflected but also on the reflector's own properties. Nature is our reflector, so we can indeed make progress over long time scales. To think that science will help us overcome our very human weaknesses, however, is not only arrogant but dangerous. After all, the only way to realize this flawed ideal of pure science would be to eliminate all traces of our humanity. What good is a "light in the darkness", as you said, if the light is so bright it blinds the person who wanted to see?
One of the assignments in my high-school science class was to do a presentation on the history of some scientific question. This meant stating the question, explaining the early hypothesis, explaining the early tests that disproved those, explaining the new hypotheses, explaining the new tests that disproved those, ETC.
As the end of almost every one of those presentations, there was a strong feeling of "then what" hanging in the classroom, until people realized that the most recently stated hypothesis is what they had learned, and scientists have not yet discovered why it is incorrect.
It used to be that part of the magic of becoming an expert in something was learning all the 17,000 things that we still didn't know. Scientists were very proud of all the work ahead of them.
Nowadays physicists still mostly sound that way, but a lot of others, including many fields that we would consider hard sciences, are taking a "we're smarter than you" attitude when dealing with the general public. Even if they are correct in one particular instance, the idea of placing science on some kind of pedestal where it can be asked anything from "what makes a good life" to "what's the mass of an electron" is crazy. A really bad idea.
Science has always been political, but lately it's getting politicized: it's choosing up teams and playing the role of arbiter of truth. That's bad for all of us.
Science is our light in the darkness.
It is not a new form of religion. It does not give us the answers to everything. It may not even be able ever to give us the answers to everything. It does not even give us a way to think.
It does not advance in a linear way. Instead, many false starts are made before progress takes hold.
Better ideas/models do not win out over older ones automatically. Instead, many times an older generation has to die before new ideas can firmly take root.
Funding does not equal knowledge. You can throw as much money as you want at some problems and get nowhere. Many times this is because the questions are being asked the wrong way. But you'll never know -- until progress is finally made.
It's just Bayesian. Science is that study which tells us if we do something or if some state exists --- then there's a very high likelihood that something else will happen or some new state will occur. We try to create models to explain this tenuous causality, but over the generations, models have gotten us into more trouble than they have gotten us out of. If we understand science as just being the study of what most likely follows what, instead of how things work, it's easier on everybody. After all, at the end of the day, even with a model, for you to manipulate the universe around you? You're going to need to know if you do one thing, what other things will happen.
I fucking love science. But it's not what people think it is. We teach science in much too prideful a manner. If anything, the history of how science has been done should give us a deep and overpowering sense of humility.