feotakahari

People talk about science as objective, but I actually think of science as the embrace of subjectivity. You don’t know this medicine works, but you’re 95% confident. You don’t know you’ve found every organ in mice, but you record the organs you know until you find another one. You’ve found a correlation between television and obesity, but you can’t objectively show that television makes people fat. Objectivity is a goal that can be chased but never reached as you put together subjective perspectives and find more or less evidence (not proof) for them.

I think the unifying anti-science take is “your claim to subjectivity undermines my claim to objectivity, and it’s bad for you to do that, because I’m objectively right about everything.” Like the claim that astrology is true and science is “white” for denying astrology. Science doesn’t have the power to show that astrology is false, because astrology is variable and ambiguous and you can always amend it to explain your newest observations. But science can show astrology is less likely.

Also, I think people act against the ideal of science when they claim science has “proved” black people are dumber than white people. Pull out your correlations, and I’ll pull out variables you didn’t check for.

People compare “believing in God” to “believing in science,” but ultimately, you shouldn’t believe in science. You should use a scientific model until you find something better. Is dark energy real? Is dark energy fake? Mu. Dark energy is the most plausible model we currently have of what’s real, and it may or may not stay around.