Comments | moneysucks: Thoughts on science

moneysucks

Thoughts on science

Mar 07, 2005 12:01

Thoughts stemming from today's Humbio lecture, on the argument over scientific reductionism (E.O. Wilson vs. Stephen Jay Gould, to anyone like Noah who might actually know who those people are and what they say ( Read more... )

Comments 11

shotoc March 7 2005, 12:44:57 UTC

that's what i like about science- philosophy.

i don't know what i believe about causality and subjectivity and rationality and ontology and epistemology and all that jazz, and i know that sometimes it makes my head hurt. but i am starting to realize that i don't find anything else interesting, except maybe fiction.

mystful March 7 2005, 19:29:42 UTC

Applause. This formalized something I've intuited for a while. Let me know when you're arriving in Boston. =)

lizz612 March 8 2005, 07:50:20 UTC

"start not with the question "What is true?" but with the question "What do I want to learn?" or "What do I want to get out of this scientific process?""

How is this different from the diffference between basic and applied sciences?

moneysucks March 8 2005, 12:34:53 UTC

It's more a question of how we view science as an organized activity, I think. Why do we pursue it? We tend to make the assumption that knowledge is always a good thing, and will always better our lives. I'm not trying to argue that ignorance is bliss, but rather that we should target what we seek to learn more effectively, because we don't have the time or energy or capacity to know everything there is to know. Our society places a ridiculously high value on organized science conducted by experts in lab coats, as opposed to other means of discovering new knowledge. That combined with a culture that tends to assume that all technology is good technology is disastrous, in my opinion. We're less happy with our lives and understand less (at least less that's meaningful) about the world than people who don't know jack shit about atoms or DNA. There are so many easy things we could do to fix many of our modern problems that aren't going to happen as long as the majority of society sits back and waits for people with Ph.Ds to solve our ( ... )

lizz612 March 8 2005, 15:47:32 UTC

I think to both knowledge and technology I would like to paraphrase the great Homer Simpson "The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems." Saying that technology is disastrous I think is just as narrow as the reverse. I think the problem with our society expecting scientists to cure them of all their maladies with one pill is just that, a problem with society. Its not the sceintific community's main objective to change that, nor do I think it should be. Up in the top 10 sure, but what chemist do you know that wants to go out and change the way society thinks about them? Not many.

When you say "What do I want to get out of this scientific process?" do you mean "What do I want to get out of this experiment? (or set of experiments?)" or what?

Philosophy sorewaeien March 9 2005, 10:30:59 UTC

What about philosophers, who want to tell the general public that "We are the ones who know what is right for you"? What about theologians, who tell the general public, "We are the only ones who are good enough to know the truth, but we'll tell you a simplified lie to save your soul." Both philosophy and theology rely on logic, objectivity, perhaps analysis of texts. So, in defense of science, there's two things: morality and religion, that fall to the same problem science does. And model and study of the world places knowledge and power in the hands of the elite.

Re: Philosophy moneysucks March 9 2005, 14:04:19 UTC

The thing is, the general public never takes philosophy as seriously as they take science. Anything that gets labeled "scientific," especially discoveries in biology and medicine, gets this aura of mystery about it that causes people to accept it as essential truth about the world, because it came from someone with a Ph.D. And scientific reductionism is an all too prevalent ideology - if you survey a bunch of people, I think you'll find, for example, that people tend to dramatically overestimate the extent to which our genes control our behavior. People have internalized this idea that the truth about the human condition is something discovered in laboratories by experts, not by normal people. No one places the same faith in philosophers or theologians' ability to discover similar truth. If we did, that'd be just as big a problem.

Re: Philosophy sorewaeien March 9 2005, 17:18:46 UTC

Yet, this isn't a problem with the science itself, only in the way the general public sees it.

Re: Philosophy moneysucks March 9 2005, 17:51:04 UTC

It's a problem with the ideology behind science, though. You can't just blame the public, because the public perception of science is very much influenced by how scientists see themselves and talk about their own work ( ... )

What do I want to learn? sorewaeien March 9 2005, 10:34:23 UTC

I want to learn what is true.
And by truth, I mean, I want to formulate a model that describes my observations of the world.
Isn't that intuitive?
Why would I want to learn something that is false?

Re: What do I want to learn? moneysucks March 9 2005, 14:09:06 UTC

The point of learning isn't to discover truth, it's exactly what you said, to formulate models that allow us to accurately predict cause and effect in the real world. In fact, I can see an argument that the definition of knowledge is anything that has predictive value for us ( ... )