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That’s more religion than pseudoscience. Pseudoscience tries to pretend to be science and tricks a lot of people into thinking it is legitimate science, whereas religion just makes proclamations and claims it must be wrong if any evidence debunks them. Pseudoscience is a lot more sneaky, and has become more prevalent in academia itself ever since people were infected by the disease of Popperism.
Popperites believe something is “science” as long as it can in principle be falsified, so you invent a theory that could in principle be tested then you have proposed a scientific theory. So pseudoscientists come up with the most ridiculous nonsense ever based on literally nothing and then insist everyone must take it seriously because it could in theory be tested one day, but it is always just out of reach of actually being tested.
Since it is testable and the brain disease of Popperism that has permeated academia leads people to be tricked by this sophistry, sometimes these pseudoscientists can even secure funding to test it, especially if they can get a big name in physics to endorse it. If it’s being tested at some institution somewhere, if there is at least a couple papers published of someone looking into it, it must be genuine science, right?
Meanwhile, while they create this air of legitimacy, a smokescreen around their ideas, they then reach out to a laymen audience through publishing books, doing documentaries on television, or publishing videos to YouTube, talking about woo nuttery like how we’re all trapped inside a giant “cosmic consciousness” and we are all feel each other’s vibrations through quantum entanglement, and that somehow science proves the existence of gods.
As they make immense dough off of the laymen audience they grift off of, if anyone points to the fact that their claims are based on nothing, they just can deflect to the smokescreen they created through academia.
if someone cared enough about my research to even replicate it let alone disprove it I’d be losing my shit
I’ll find it and put it on your doorstep.
What’s it about?
Ideally? Yes
But a modern scientific environment puts a lot of pressure to present your results better than they really are.
It damages good science a great deal
In my opinion, the obsession with being able to measure everything with numbers is the cause. And those numbers are inevitably converting d to units of money, because capitalism.
Yup, metrics kill it all
There was a rule of sorts. All metrics become goals or something like that.
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
This is why p-hacking and searching huge databases for anything with a correlation to a desirable (or undesirable) trait are simultaneously so prevalent, and so damaging.
over fitting, but people
Have you ever seen the history of science? Left is absolutely not true to the point that we’ve had to wait for powerful scientists to die to get the progress they’ve held back entered to record.
This doesn’t disprove their meme. What it is saying is still true. Those scientist you mention held back progress and couldn’t be “real scientists”
I feel like there’s a term for that sort of thinking…
No True Scotsman? That could be true if the image is merely descriptive of our messy reality.
I see the image as including a prescriptive message that states an ethical ideal: a real scientist should welcome their findings challenged, even refuted, because the goal is truth. Science excels by dispelling falsehoods. That seems right. (It could use some alt text, though.)
in b4 “if by whiskey” 😄
Could it be the phenomenon we also see in areas such as Engineering were as people get more senior most transit into more managerial positions, where the mindset is a lot more about managing appearances and stakeholders, and saying the right things at the right time to the right people rather than the far more “it is as it is” mindset of those on the technical side?
I actually started by going into Science at Uni but ended up switching to Engineering half way on my Degree (not many jobs for Experimentalist Physicists in my homeland) so never actually saw the actual Science career track from the inside through the eyes of somebody with enough professional experience to see the more subtle things about it, so I am genuinely curious if the Science career too has the phenomenon I see in Engineering of Senior people tending to be more Administrator/Manager and less Technical hence with more tendency to manage the subjective perception of reality of others to achieve personal and career goals and less of a desire for things to be as clear and as objective as possible.
Because if it is so, it would explain how many such well established older Scientists seem to be less Scientist in the sense of this meme - because they are less Scientist and have become more Administrator, and the latter has a whole different mindset.
You got it. It has been my experience as well.
A course I took in undergrad on the history and philosophy of science really stayed with me, and is a really helpful way of understanding how science actually works.
Karl Popper wrote the revolutionary work The Logic of Scientific Discovery, which proposed that what separated science from pseudoscience as whether the discipline actually makes predictions that can be proven wrong, and whether it changes its own rules when it observes exceptions to those rules.
Well, Thomas Kuhn came along and wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argued that not all scientific theories were equally falsifiable. Kuhn argued that science actually tolerated a lot of anomalous observations without actually rejecting the discipline’s own paradigms or models. In Kuhn’s view, scientists performed “normal science” by accumulating knowledge under an established paradigm, including tolerating observed anomalies, until someone would have to come along and use the accumulated anomalies to actually propose something revolutionary that breaks a lot of previous models, and throws away a lot of the work that came before, in a scientific revolution. Under Kuhn’s description, science is quite resistant to criticism or falsifiability under the “normal science” periods, even if it accepts that revolutions are occasionally necessary.
The prominent example was that Mercury’s orbit didn’t quite fit Newton’s theory of gravity, and astronomers and physicists kept trying to rework the formula on the edges without actually challenging the core paradigm. For decades, astronomers simply shrugged their shoulders and said that they knew that the motion of Mercury tended to drift from the predictive model, but they didn’t have anything better to turn to, if they were to reject Newtonian gravity. It wasn’t until Einstein’s general relativity that scientists did have something better, and learning that Einstein’s theory works even when near a large gravity well was revolutionary.
Others include the phlogiston theory of combustion that persisted for a bit even after it was measured that combustion of metallic elements increased the mass of the resulting burned stuff, as if phlogiston had negative mass.
Imre Lakatos tried to bridge the ideas of Popper and Kuhn, by observing that each discipline had their own “Research Programs” that weren’t necessarily compatible with others in their own field. Quantum physics was aware of cosmology/relativity, and it didn’t much matter that these two sets of theories and research methods had different scopes, and contradicted each other at times. But each Research Program had its own “hard core” that was not subject to questioning or challenge, while most scientists did the work in the “protective belt” around that core. And even when a particular Research Program gets battered by a series of contradictory observations, it’s perfectly rational for scientists in that field to rally in defense of that hard core to see if it can be revived, at least for a time until that defense becomes untenable. In a sense, Lakatos described the fields where Kuhn’s “normal science” and “revolutionary science” actually happened, and how Popper’s falsifiability criterion fit into each space.
Paul Feyerabend also added a lot of color to these theories, too. He described the tenacity of ideas as being driven by more than simple falsifiability, but also of just how attractive of an idea it was. In his descriptions, ideas basically fought for popularity on many different metrics, and the sterile ideas of falsifiability didn’t actually account for how ideas compete in the marketplace, even among allegedly rational scientists.
So yeah, this comic is basically Karl Popper’s views. The world as a whole, though, has definitely moved on from that definition trying to demarcate between science and pseudoscience.
Yeah, the right is how science unfortunately works. My professor told me that science progresses one death at a time. We argued in various papers that the terminology in our field was really messy and didn’t hold up to actual findings, but the old generation of scientists didn’t want to allow any changes. In most research fields there are a few scientists that hold a position of power and that don’t like sharing that power.
Reading Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and her idea of an anarchist world caught me off guard when she starts exploring exactly this problem in science…
I’m adding that to my reading list, thanks.
The Dispossessed
You should put it near the top. lol I just told someone else to read it yesterday irl.
Would you recommend the book?
1000%!! Over the years I’ve lent it to various people and they all loved it very much. It has been the most influential book for me regarding how I view society, capitalism and anarchism.
Saved your comment, hopefully won’t take too long before i find time to read that book :)
Not to mention all the bs around science publishing, like not publishing negative results
Yeah, my first thought when I saw this was that it was definitely not made by a scientist.
I can see how this would be the case judging by the boomers around me. Do you have any examples?
deleted by creator
All my homies love meta science
“boy i wish anyone bothered to even skim my paper to make sure i didn’t make an obvious math error”
*If you challenge my
feelingsprofits, I’ll sue.Unfortunately negative results don’t get published as much as they should
Everyone in science I’ve ever met agrees there should be a Journal of Stuff That Didn’t Work
We need to push more for good science because a lot of times there is a ton of pressure to produce research and go along with the current established theories instead of being able to challenge them.
There’s really only failing, then learning, then death
My kids have me listening to way too much Disney music lately…
I really don’t like this “no true scotsman” flavored meme, the profit incentive destroys valuable research by limiting resources to replications of past experiments (as soon as something is profitable, you must not disprove it for a fear of retaliation from companies promoting said something), this is systemic, not an individual level problem, get rid of “bad scientists” and more will be propped up.
I do like the sentiment of the meme though, more more replication is needed.
To make this meme work I am assuming pseudoscience are your flat eathers, anti-vaxxers, anyone who publishes bogus papers to push an agenda. Their experiments are replicated, produce completely different results to contradict their hypothesis and these pseudoscientists simply refuse to accept the data produced after sound methods are used and verified. They end up becoming zealots about it too.A hypothesis being wrong is not bad at all but their own personalities prevent them from accepting it.
Eric Weinstein has left the chat in tears.
Very true
Mistress has failed more times than the student has had chances
