This legitimately is science, though. A scientist is characterized by their willingness to change their mind when confronted with new evidence. It's so contrary to the normal human response that we named it.
Thats how its supposed to work and in practice it kinda does, but the people with the money want positive results and the people doing the work have to do what they can to stay alive and relevant enough to actually do the work. Which means that while most scientists are willing to change their minds about something once they have sufficient evidence, gathering that evidence can be difficult when no one is willing to pay for it. Hard to change minds when you can't get the evidence to show some preconceived notion was wrong.
I once had a very special, very young colleague, who would always question everything, but was never willing to change his own mind. And of course, he believed the Bible was 100% verbatim correct and scientists were lying.
Well, one day he exclaimed, "Scientists don't know everything for certain either!".
So, I responded, "Yeah...? They don't claim to...?".
And that left him absolutely confused. I don't know how much propaganda his parents fed him, but I guess, at the very least he never considered that a possibility.
So, I told him that it's not called a "scientific theory" for nothing. And that literally everything in science will be abolished, if you can disprove it.
After that quick shock, he was already back to not wanting to believe anything that sounded logical, but his last response was something along the lines of "That doesn't make any sense. How can you live by something and not know for certain that it's correct?".
Which, like, I get it. It's scary to not have certain answers. But it makes no sense to just pick one answer and decide that this one is certain.
But yeah, that is the mindset he grew up in.
It takes a lot of those moments to experience a paradigm shift. Unfortunately a person usually won't encounter enough of them to see clearly unless they're actively searching for answers. That's why churches discourage asking a lot of questions, or reading secular material. When my walls started crumbling it was a legitimately uncomfortable experience. Realizing that you've been living by a bunch of preconceptions that aren't universal truths, and understanding for the first time how another group perceives something differently than your entire core group does, is really confusing and difficult. Most people get scared when they hit that point and retreat back to their core belief system. It's very uncomfortable to keep pushing through for answers.
I belive religions and gods came from people not wanting to admit they "don't know" certain things. They ask for stuff like how can you prove that god does not exist while there is no evidence that god exist either. Its like saying "show me the evidence that thing with no evidence does not exist"
Honestly, I don't even think, it was necessarily that someone didn't want to admit missing knowledge.
In my experience, us humans still love our false gods.
For example, how was the universe created? Well, there was the Big Bang, end of story. Most people just accept a big explosion as an explanation.
In reality, not only is the Big Bang not actually an explosion (nor finished), things happened before it, too. And we have a hard time seeing what happened before it, so we actually do not know that the universe was created. The theory with the least assumptions would be that it was not created, just spatially a lot smaller.
Of course, religion was itself involved in spreading the theory that the universe was created, but you've still got theoretically intelligent people not questioning how the void just kind of exploded for no reason and suddenly everything existed.
Another absolute classic of modern false gods: AI.
In most contexts, when a computer scientist says "AI", you can mentally replace that with "magic" and it's similarly meaningful. It's basically just a code word for them to not need to explain further.
The theory was there was no time before the big bang and it means there was no "before" at all. But yes its also questionable and we actually don't know what it is. I don't think theoretically intelligent people does not question such things. Thoose people are still trying to find evidence to prove or disprove existing notions. I think religious people are the ones act like they know it
I wish somebody had told me beforehand that a degree of enthusiastic acting was necessary to spin my miserable results into a success like the superstars in the department, though.
"We have successfully disproven the hypothesis!"
vs.
"Yeah, so I did some experiments and it turns out I was wrong."
I personally like the latter, but I guess I'm in the minority.
Yeah Mr. Investor. By blowing up the the lap I have reached the groundbreaking Discovery, that the explosives are indeed explosive! Due to this phenomenal Results I have been able to determine both the danger AND the economic possibilities of explosives! Here are some definetly reliable graphs, that prove how my explosive is super nice and (in Theory) the most powerful explosive ever discovered!
Lmao have fun publishing that kiddo
I had such a hard time explaining to my family why I was working on a project for two years, and ends up with nothing publishable...
Everyone can be wrong, solving problems is what my field is looking for (I m not sure if that is fortunate or unfortunate).
Which is stupid. Everyone can be wrong because we haven't been wrong enough times to be right. How many people have to be wrong the same way before we benefit from the paths they re-tread?
You didn't spend 2 years failing. You spent 2 years learning
Most research is funded by private corporations looking to make their money back then some. Two years of not being right is usually worse for having a sustainable career than just bsing that you're right. Case study: Alzheimer's research.
I'm not a doctor, and I'm not a researcher in any field, but I do recall reading plenty of null studies when I had access to the catalogs.
Are publishers only publishing positive stories now?
In my field they do publish results without success, but it must either be (a) something seminal in the field or (b) interesting in a notable way. General things aren't going to have the juice to get through the review process. One exception to this is the shotgun method. If you're testing a bunch of different things that get at the same question and they all miss, you might still get published, but that's because it's adjacent to (b).
Null results are results too 🥲
“The only difference between doing random shit and science is writing it down”
The legend himself.
If you made a poster out of some of my decisions it would be the ultimate science fair project
That's ideally science but you're gonna have low-impact papers if you don't do the "look at this new thing I 'proved'" song and dance. Publishing culture and self-promotion in academia make everything worse.
Incidentally, I know someone that tried publishing a paper to explain why a very common method actually led to bad results very often. It showed methodology and had verification from another group using independent materials. The paper was rejected because, "everyone knows that method X works great you must've done something wrong".
There's a lot of myth-making in how science works, following prescriptive announcements of "the scientific method". In reality it's just humans trying things out and using "good enough" ideas regardless of how well they are investigated. If the ideas are truly 100% wrong in a way that precludes further work, they'll get discarded. But wrong ideas can still persist for decades or more so long as they don't disrupt other things working well enough. That methodology earlier was "good enough" despite major flaws so the academy said, "it's actually 100% right" right up until they abandoned the method (which they did for unrelated reasons).
Like Carl Sagan wrote, we should probably teach how messy science can be to show why it is the best method. Despite setbacks, human nature, persisting wrong ideas, and whatever else, the entire process of science eventually overcomes and on average, we inch ever closer to truth.
The anti-science people make arguments that clearly show they have neither a concept of how science works nor a sufficiently flexible mind to accommodate (let alone seek) updated information.
I am just a student and this makes me worry. How the heck can be scientific papers evaluated by some publishers? How should we make this paper and give it to publishers for the citations only and publishers make money off it? What about the unpublished but correct paper? What does publishing has to do anything with science and scientific growth? I can't use a sentence from my older paper again in the new one and they accuse it for plagarism?(Please keep bs copyright laws away in science because that could possibly hurt developement of science itself(i guess))
Sorry i'm just stressed at this thing
Publishers generally use free labor from professors and postdocs to do peer review. The only work the publisher really does is basic editing and marketing (to foster "prestige", really just building demand to publish there).
The issue of the actual epistemology of science in practice is much more widespread and is a wider social issue rooted in the structure of the academy, particularly the way it promotes competition and has a marriage with practice that brings pressures of capitalism to bear on it.
Yeah I think we need some more detail chief. Ive never heard of a paper being rejected because "everyone knows X" ever in my life...
With what you said all I am hearing is someone saying "here is why we live on a pancake earth with incredible detail and multiple homebrew tests/sources to back it up"
Post-hoc analysis like: hold my beer
Is the creator of these still anti-abortion? It's marred my enjoyment of them since finding out a few years back.
Yeah. Imagine creating a comic strip of this subject, and being anti-abortion simultaneously.
The hypocrisy is mind-blowing.
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