SpencerKayR t1_j6ui0h8 wrote on February 1, 2023 at 11:43 PM

Reply to comment by Gripegut in How to be a sceptic | We have an ethical responsibility to adopt a sceptical attitude to everything from philosophy and science to economics and history in the pursuit of a good life for ourselves and others. by IAI_Admin

In order to agree with this, you'd have to agree with the following premises:

90% of the body of scientific knowledge dreamed up has been proven wrong or incomplete
The above trend is likely to apply to the scientific knowledge that is considered likely to be true today
The types of discoveries that show science to be incomplete mean that the old theory wasn't worthwhile and has no use
This 90% figure can be applied to all the science that laypeople encounter.

The first one is going to be a toss up, especially if you include all the theories which are disproven by testing. If this is being used to reach this figure, it doesn't do a good job of building the case for this premise because it's an example of science working properly, eliminating theories that make inaccurate predictions.

The second is uncertain. We don't know what the future holds, but we know that we're not likely to discover that quantum mechanics is pseudo science on the level of leeches to cure plague. The science that the world uses today to make medications and computers and all the material spectacles we enjoy today has been validated to the point that any new theories will likely give them greater context and not simply wipe them away, much like Einstein's theories didn't completely demolish the theories of Newton and Galileo. Which segues into:

The third premise is pretty easy to dismiss. Newtonian physics has been thoroughly demonstrated to be incomplete, yet his discoveries are still used to guide the trajectories of satellites. Some science keeps being useful even when it's no longer able to describe extremes of our perplexing universe.

The final premise is that this 90% figure, wherever it came from, will prove to be true for the science we learn in high school. This, again, is unlikely, precisely because by the time science becomes a high school topic, it has usually withstood hundreds of years of validation. The most recent science in schools is probably the standard model of the atom, which has been so impossible to disprove that they have to keep making larger and larger super colliders trying to find anything at all to threaten its validity.

So no, I don't think 90% of the scientific knowledge people are meant to have learned will be made completely useless anytime soon. But in the current climate, it's possible that a large percentage of the science people have convinced themselves is true is nonsense, only that it was already proven to be nonsense centuries ago

Gripegut t1_j6vkz4o wrote on February 2, 2023 at 4:40 AM

The 90% figure is a placeholder for healthy skepticism. Does it really matter if the correct figure is 69% or 96% when we will never, in our short lifetime, know the actual figure? Not really, no. The point is that almost everything we were taught in school about science was either completely untrue or incomplete.

If we look at what scientists have believed to be true over the span of scientific discovery, almost all of what was believed to be true was later found to be untrue or incomplete. How arrogant must we be to think that, as if by magic, that at this moment in time, we have most scientific beliefs 100% right, let alone everything right?

Let's look at the COVID-19 pandemic as a recent example. Almost everything the experts told us in the beginning was later shown to be untrue. And who knows what else we will learn with more time?

Let's look at global warming/climate change. Not a single prediction that was accepted by the majority was accurate....not one. Not a single computer model accurately predicted the temperature today. The doomsday predictions are patently absurd, yet they are widely accepted as true. Science today is so tainted by funding bias and politics that most of what is passing as science is nothing more than propaganda or drivel. Even the peer review process is largely a sham.

Let's look at dietary recommendations that have produced a hoard of unhealthy people. I can do this all day. Look at any area of science, and new discoveries are made all the time that turn what was previously believed on its head. And don't get me started on the science behind the pharmaceutical industry.

Now, of course, there are always exceptions, but exceptions don't negate the rule. At this point, it would take an incredible amount of naivete or faith to believe anything scientists say is absolutely and irrevocably true.

SpencerKayR t1_j6x76r3 wrote on February 2, 2023 at 3:11 PM

I don't think you're really engaging with what I'm saying. I think that you're introducing a flurry of new premises (in, if I can be honest, a Gish Gallop) in the hopes of tying me up dismissing them. Who's climate predictions? Which ones specifically? Because I could just as easily retort that we've outpaced most predictions from the Inconvenient Truth era of climate understanding, but I suspect that that would have no impact on you just as your casual claims have had no impact on me, because I suspect that you occupy a specific media realm that has supplied you with these talking points. Some of this is just absurd; there's no such thing as a climate model that can predict the temperature with guaranteed accuracy the next day, let alone years in advance. But this doesn't mean that our understanding of the interactions between air masses of varying temperatures and moisture content is a pseudoscience like phrenology. You're not just moving goalposts, you have selected a goalpost on casters you can scoot around at will.