Not to distract from your point, but I have found there was nothing more destructive to my trust in science than becoming a scientist. 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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

> 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!

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.

>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.

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.

I love seeing Sabine Fassbender whenever she comes around to pants the theoretical physicists for not having figured out quantum gravity

I don't find it a distraction. I had to think, "this is such an old idea, when did this realization struck me?". It was more than a decade ago, on my third research project, when I went abroad to visit another research institute. Before my experience was only with individuals with extremely high rigor and standards, with who we would discuss of Poincaré, Feyerabend, etc. This was not typical of everyday life in research centers.

What is not like that, in the end? The world is just messy and full of unknowns

> From the most basic inquiry such as diet to the most abstract mathematics, it is almost impossible to find a correct scientific approach

Mathematics is not a science, in the sense that it doesn't rely on the scientific method.

In that respect, I don't understand your criticism.

Well, nobody said exactly what they meant by 'science', so there are indeed many ways to interpret that statement. I was referring to education, news reporting on paper, etc. This the main subject of the article, for which there is little difference between mathematics and other sciences.

Even then, I don't think there are many mathematicians in the world who can claim they are paid to do pure mathematics without any connection to other sciences. Probability, modeling of some phenomena, programming are always supposed to be the final purposes. These different approaches are in competition with regards to grants, and thus need to argue how one or the other is better suited to tackle the real-world problems. For example in logic research, there are arguments between the two big camps of program certification and program verification; those ultimately rely on feasibility in terms of programmer training, financial cost, computational complexity. The camps have very different views and can use fundamentally different mathematical foundations. A great illustration is the HoTT project, often discussed on here.

I mean, yes, you're right that many people just parrot whatever they learned in high school even in the case of maths (somehow it's surprisingly easy to get people on Facebook to argue about whether square roots of negative numbers exist).

And if I interpret your second paragraph correctly that's more about the fact that deciding which research programs are getting grants is not a very "scientific" (or logical) matter but has a lot to do with how humans behave on a societal level. That's certainly true, although I'm not sure how to solve that. Nobody thought that we'd have any use for number theory for millenia and now cryptography is everywhere.

Mathematics still has the unique property that it is, in principle, independently verifiable by anyone, even by a (relatively dumb) computer. The validity of results is rarely in question (Mochizuki notwithstanding), and if there are disagreements, they are mostly philosophical or concern the question of whether or not we should accept certain axioms. But I don't consider the latter a problem - working with different sets of axioms makes mathematics richer, not poorer.

Where science becomes useful is in applied sciences. Applying science is ruthless: it either works or not at all. When it works, it's typically very valuable to people. Most of our recent history is a boom in applied sciences that started accelerating about 600 years ago when Galileo started publishing some notions about the earth revolving around the sun while also providing and documenting the tools that he used to come to that conclusion. Galileo was censored by the church but the cat was out of the bag as loads of contemporaries verified his results and started building on his theories.

Most of the progress in applied sciences is directly connected to progress in theoretical science. And a lot of that is of course enabled through experimentation. Which is a form of progressive insight that accumulates knowledge. But only if we publish it and build on it. And of course a lot of mistakes get published as well and there are always loose ends, alternative theories, wrong theories, etc. So, there are no absolute truths. Science is never finished, complete, or even internally consistent. Newton was on to something and then Einstein challenged some of that and after him quantum theory challenged some of his notions. Progressive insight. None of it is necessarily wrong and lots of things happened in between. Good science starts with challenging everything and then trying hard to falsify any theories that emerge from that. You look for negative evidence, not for positive evidence.

Bad science simply doesn't work when applied to reality. Flat earthers earning a Darwin (whose ideas they'd typically also reject) award by dying in apparent attempts to be scientific about their delusions is a thing. There are all sorts of crazy individuals who launched themselves using some death trap to "prove" that the earth was flat. It's not very valuable science of course because we already knew the earth wasn't flat. And there are no known flat earth theory applications that have any economical value.

There's a whole branch of pseudo science around intelligent design, flat earth, etc. that basically tries to "fix" the inconsistencies between religion and mainstream scientific knowledge by using scientific methodology. Which is of course mildly ironic and tragic at the same time.

However, applied pseudo science usually ends in tears: because it just won't work. Applied pseudo science is of course a thing. Homeopathy, and other snake oil medicine is ever popular. It doesn't work, of course. Or at least not in a way that can be verified in a way that holds up scientifically. But that doesn't seem to stop people from believing in it anyway.