Current Events > Scientific Facts are Social Constructs

(+) Yeah! (+)

COVxy posted...

P4wn4g3 posted...

No. What you're saying is flat out wrong.

Naw, he's pretty close in traditional Popperian philosophy of science.

You literally just said the scientific method does not exist. You may as well just shout out "I'm a dumbass, don't take me seriously"
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P4wn4g3 posted...

COVxy posted...

P4wn4g3 posted...

No. What you're saying is flat out wrong.

Naw, he's pretty close in traditional Popperian philosophy of science.

You literally just said the scientific method does not exist. You may as well just shout out "I'm a dumbass, don't take me seriously"

I had a feeling he's a fraud tbqh

P4wn4g3 posted...

You literally just said the scientific method does not exist. You may as well just shout out "I'm a dumbass, don't take me seriously"

Dont wanna take my word for it, how about a paper in science discussing different scientific methods?
http://ecoplexity.org/files/Platt.pdf
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COVxy posted...

P4wn4g3 posted...

You literally just said the scientific method does not exist. You may as well just shout out "I'm a dumbass, don't take me seriously"

Dont wanna take my word for it, how about a paper in science discussing different scientific methods?
http://ecoplexity.org/files/Platt.pdf

See my statement above.
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Anyone who knows how modern science works can understand why this is a very true statement. That doesn't mean that science is fake news and you can become a "whatever I want to believe is true is true" redhat but like everything in life, things can be very complex.
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Stay ignorant then, if you'd like. Can't force you to learn.
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its weird how indignant people get when they find out there's more complexity to things than they learned in grade school
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hortanz posted...

its weird how indignant people get when they find out there's more complexity to things than they learned in grade school

postmodernism is not complex

COVxy posted...

Stay ignorant then, if you'd like. Can't force you to learn.

Some rage intensified irony here. Not that it matters, your salty tears are just a social construct.
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I mean, you're literally choosing to stay ignorant. I provided you a publication in one of the most prestigious scientific journals regarding it.
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Are you trying to argue that your salty tears aren't a social construct? Do I need to provide some sham to back up my claims?
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You calling Platt's paper a sham?
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I'm calling your obvious inability to create an argument a sham. You are the sham here. I could detail why, but I see no point since you're a notorious libtroll anyway. It should be telling enough to you that you're seriously trying to use an academic paper to disprove academia, but no, you simply have no ability to self analyze. Must suck.
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"Disproving academia"? Lmao, what?
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From a very abstract perspective that statement is true. Science, so far, is a human-construct we use to help us explain the physical world.
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P4wn4g3 posted...

I'm calling your obvious inability to create an argument a sham. You are the sham here. I could detail why, but I see no point since you're a notorious libtroll anyway. It should be telling enough to you that you're seriously trying to use an academic paper to disprove academia, but no, you simply have no ability to self analyze. Must suck.

You're allowing what you've been taught about the basics of science and scientific idealism to form into dogma.
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Dragonblade01 posted...

P4wn4g3 posted...

I'm calling your obvious inability to create an argument a sham. You are the sham here. I could detail why, but I see no point since you're a notorious libtroll anyway. It should be telling enough to you that you're seriously trying to use an academic paper to disprove academia, but no, you simply have no ability to self analyze. Must suck.

You're allowing what you've been taught about the basics of science and scientific idealism to form into dogma.

Not really. I'm using common sense. I could play the philosopher, but you guys aren't making any groundbreaking statements here and neither is the person in the OP, nor would I. Science admits to its own bias and builds in checks for it much better than say anthropology, or social sciences, or humanities.
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For what it's worth, I have a PhD in the sciences and I'm closer to agreeing with @COVxy. Science isn't some unquestionable, unassailable thing which people should put all-trust in. Science is a creation of humans, and as such, our human biases are reflected in it.

The scientific method is an attempt to avert that vis-a-vis empiricism, yes. But if you take in the full scope of science using the long lens of history, you'll find no shortage of instances when it too has been perverted. Science has been misused as a tool to dehumanize humans going back to Jean Baptiste Lamarck; the classification of racial hierarchies in tandem with the ordering of the animal kingdom, with Africans placed inferior to Caucasians. And not just Africans, but Native Americans, Roma, Jews...

I'm an advocate for science, but too many people go to far by trying to wall-off these historic missteps. Science was used to justify IQ tests at polling places, to deny African Americans the vote... It was used to disparage homosexuals as mentally-disordered and ship them off to re-education camps, and continues to be deployed similarly against transgender individuals. Eugenics... phrenology... Social Darwinism... each of them, in their day, were viewed as sound science. Some of the greatest tragedies in human history, including the Holocaust -- people justified them at the time using the scientific method.

The same is true in the modern-day. Consider barely a month ago, when James Damore's Google manifesto circulated citing half-baked reasons why women in tech were inferior to men. Science is still misused all the time. Undercooked research put forward to justify systems of oppression.

Science is not infallible. Science is just one of many facets of the human condition; and as such, it reflects our own capacity for corruption. Moreover, science needs the humanities to inform it. The humanities without science are hollow; science without the humanities is blind.

P4wn4g3 posted...

Dragonblade01 posted...

P4wn4g3 posted...

I'm calling your obvious inability to create an argument a sham. You are the sham here. I could detail why, but I see no point since you're a notorious libtroll anyway. It should be telling enough to you that you're seriously trying to use an academic paper to disprove academia, but no, you simply have no ability to self analyze. Must suck.

You're allowing what you've been taught about the basics of science and scientific idealism to form into dogma.

Not really. I'm using common sense. I could play the philosopher, but you guys aren't making any groundbreaking statements here and neither is the person in the OP, nor would I. Science admits to its own bias and builds in checks for it much better than say anthropology, or social sciences, or humanities.

No one has said there's no attempt to combat bias in the various scientific fields. And it should be noted that none of this is actually meant to undermine the achievements of scientists and their methods.

It's simply the case that bias is an undeniable reality in science, and there's no "one method fits all" solution to scientific endeavors.
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These sorts of things are such shit. Taking one slide out of a slide show demonstrates literally nothing.

For all we know, the preceding post was, "Things that only idiots believe;".

Dash_Harber posted...

These sorts of things are such shit. Taking one slide out of a slide show demonstrates literally nothing.

For all we know, the preceding post was, "Things that only idiots believe;".

@Dash_Harber No, I'm closer to agreeing with that slide that I am to disagreeing with it. And I'm pretty sure I'm not an idiot.

Imagine, if you will, an alternate universe where Adolf Hitler won the second world war and conquered the Earth. In that bleak world, the academies, universities, and municipal schools might teach it as scientific fact that the Jewish race is inherently greedy, subversive, and unscrupulous, purely on account of their ethnic heritage. You and I would consider that to be ridiculous, but in such a world, it might very well be held up as scientific fact. And who would there be to argue with it? The populace might be so thoroughly indoctrinated, denialists of Jewish nefariousness might be looked on the same as flat earthers and people who believe in a geocentric solar system.

Glass_Phantom posted...

Dash_Harber posted...

These sorts of things are such shit. Taking one slide out of a slide show demonstrates literally nothing.

For all we know, the preceding post was, "Things that only idiots believe;".

@Dash_Harber No, I'm closer to agreeing with that slide that I am to disagreeing with it. And I'm pretty sure I'm not an idiot.

Imagine, if you will, an alternate universe where Adolf Hitler won the second world war and conquered the Earth. In that bleak world, the academies, universities, and municipal schools might teach it as scientific fact that the Jewish race is inherently greedy, subversive, and unscrupulous, purely on account of their ethnic heritage. You and I would consider that to be ridiculous, but in such a world, it might very well be held up as scientific fact. And who would there be to argue with it? The populace might be so thoroughly indoctrinated, denialists of Jewish nefariousness might be looked on the same as flat earthers and people who believe in a geocentric solar system.

I don't really have a comment on what it is actually stating, I'm saying that taking something out of context like that and making a joke about it is pointless.

P4wn4g3 posted...

[COVxy] literally just said the scientific method does not exist. You may as well just shout out "I'm a dumbass, don't take me seriously"

No, not really. Nuance is kind of lost on you, huh?

FLUFFY's posts were babby's first research methods class. He's being pedantic about idealistic principles when he doesn't even know his audience (a grad student who obviously already knows that).

Having been around academic circles myself, COVxy isn't wrong. Economic limitations/funding, pressures to publish/put out newsworthy research, societal trends, these all impact how science is carried out. If I had a dollar for every colleague who joined some research team to simply get published for their CV and couldn't give a shit about putting out quality research, my medical degree would be paid off already. Mistakes slip through the peer review process. It happens. My wife does a lot of work with computational biology. Seems like every week or two she reads a paper that she notices a mistake in.

And don't even get me started on medicine. Even a simple question like "does atelectasis cause fever?" that has a lot of literature behind it saying it doesn't still has a huge barrier of tradition fighting tooth and nail to avoid it being accepted as a fact as fierce "debate" continues. Just one of a million examples.

That isn't to say science is doomed to always be faulty. More so, we just need to recognize that we cannot ever remove the human condition from it 100% and place things in the appropriate context. We can do our best to minimize it, and over a long enough time line it'll sort itself out.

The notion that scientific facts can change always seems to be misinterpreted so much. One extreme takes it as evidence it is entirely unreliable, but there is a danger with being too concrete in thinking on the other end of things.
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Well the point I'm speaking to and I don't think came across very well is where there are too many opinions, not enough people accepting facts. And pretty much anyone will know how to fix an unfixable problem, just ask the first person you meet. The issue gets complicated by debasing the validity of the scientific method, where when it is done with strict controls, is largely quantitative, and is performed without interference from people with an agenda, the method is accurate a good 99% of the time. I think that even holds true with qualitative data, though granted you can twist qualitative analysis into many things. Math is solid.

I'm not arguing that corruption or evil scientists or whatever doesn't exist because not only is that far from true but it's basically par for the course for the human race.

Furthermore I'm not saying that the humanities are somehow worthless, just saying they won't be able to fill in the blanks where the scientific method fails.
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P4wn4g3 posted...

Furthermore I'm not saying that the humanities are somehow worthless, just saying they won't be able to fill in the blanks where the scientific method fails.

Nobody has said any such thing. I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. That would make my job impossible. But this absolutely is something important to think about when evaluating the literature. There's always a question of "are there more positive results for this theory than the other because one is more likely to be accurate, or is one simply studied more often?"
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Even republicans who claim to be for the hard sciences believe this. See AGW for example.

Also, you can see what happens at the national labs. Under Obama, at Oak Ridge National Labs, a lot of the biological researchers were replaced with environmental research. Many researchers were trying to reinvent themselves lest they become replaceable.

In many ways, I love the duality that is engineering. My PhD is in chemical engineering. You have these incredibly complicated problems that nobody will let you address until you can come up with a closed form solution strategy. Sometimes you never get to address the fun stuff, but you at least understand why you did what you did every other time.

People are way over-complexifying this.

Rough definition of Scientific Fact: "Any observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and accepted as true; any scientific observation that has not been refuted."

Rough definition of Social Construct: "A social mechanism, phenomenon, or category created and developed by society; a perception of an individual, group, or idea that is 'constructed' through cultural or social practice."

Whether you subscribe to fluid or concrete notions of truth, is it perhaps as simple as claiming that you cannot remove humans from the process of identifying scientific facts, thus they are in some way inextricably socially constructed?
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Soviet_Poland posted...

FLUFFY's posts were babby's first research methods class. He's being pedantic about idealistic principles when he doesn't even know his audience (a grad student who obviously already knows that).

naw, he knows his audience

his gimmick is pretending to be interested in genuine exchange of ideas, getting people knowledgable about a subject to open up, luring them into explaining a complex idea, then responding with an oversimplified version of it and shitting on them; suggesting they have no actual knowledge of the subject matter

it's pretty funny when you don't actually engage with him and just watch him do it to others

P4wn4g3 posted...

Well the point I'm speaking to and I don't think came across very well is where there are too many opinions, not enough people accepting facts.

you are part of the problem

one of the facts is that 'humans are fallible' and 'science is done by humans and is therefore fallible'

that is the point people in this thread who do science are making
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Darkman124 posted...

naw, he knows his audience

his gimmick is pretending to be interested in genuine exchange of ideas, getting people knowledgable about a subject to open up, luring them into explaining a complex idea, then responding with an oversimplified version of it and shitting on them; suggesting they have no actual knowledge of the subject matter

Yeah, it's pretty clear that he is simply trolling. But the issue is that there are many who are not trolling both lurking and posting, nodding their heads in agreement.
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let me try something

gravity is a scientific fact

although if we were on another planet it would work differently with a difference amount of force

near a black hole it is quite different

there may even be a place in the universe where gravity is somehow unable to work or doesn't work (we don't know of such a place though unless you consider underwater)

yea, what if Isaac Newton was a Mermaid and lived in the ocean? He dropped an apple and it just floated

as you can see gravity is a social construct of a society that lives above the earth's crust and is quite effected by this force

FrozenXylophone posted...

there may even be a place in the universe where gravity is somehow unable to work or doesn't work (we don't know of such a place though unless you consider underwater)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point

I lose brain cells anytime I read one of Fluffys posts.

Great topic though guys, nothing to add but wanted to say I've enjoyed it.
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Darkman124 posted...

one of the facts is that 'humans are fallible' and 'science is done by humans and is therefore fallible'

I feel like this is part of what I was addressing. It just so happens to be one of the most accurate ways of doing things.
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Questionmarktarius posted...

FrozenXylophone posted...

there may even be a place in the universe where gravity is somehow unable to work or doesn't work (we don't know of such a place though unless you consider underwater)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point

noice

fluffy and pwnage are doing really good idiot impersonations at best

covxy, glass phantom and soviet poland know what they're talking about

didn't read the whole topic but that's what I got out of it. I graduated with a degree in physics as well
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About time the world caught up to the truth
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ThyCorndog posted...

fluffy and pwnage are doing really good idiot impersonations at best

Yeah well to be fair I flew in here with a few too many assumptions about the discussion at hand, and it didn't help that I started in on covxy which I may have confused with some other poster. So I'm kind of feeling a bit stupid in that regard.

Either way I feel like there is a pure form of science than one that has ulterior motives. I.e. performing an experiment in a vacuum and collecting results, versus performing an experiment and directed to find certain results.
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Well my mathematician friend is recommending I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair. He basically said the point of all science and math is to introduce our bias into facts of the universe and assign some human value. I'll have to check it out.
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