Science from the 30s through the 50s should be tossed... ... were they just making stuff up?
I've come to realize that science is always wrong, when viewed with a long enough lens. It does the best it can at the time - i.e. let's spray everyone with DDT, or let's put lead into paint and gasoline, or let's introduce species x to control species y then x becomes a problem, etc.
Then years later science figures out those were terrible ideas, but shockingly everyone just says "NOW we know better, forget about before, trust us THIS time".
Does anyone else not realize it's exactly the same thing, and ~50 years from now science will know that lots of what we're doing today is a really bad thing to be doing? In 2050 someone will say "Science from the 1990's - 2020s should be tossed, they were just making stuff up"
You're focused on science learning what science previously got wrong, but I think there is a deeper conflict at work when it comes to animal capabilities.
Before science started correcting itself, it was correcting perceptions based on religion and culture. For example, the germ theory of disease ran headlong into the older idea (not based on science) that doctors couldn't have dirty hands because they were gentlemen.
The belief that animals do not share capabilities with man arises from culture, specifically Western Christian culture. God made man in his own image and gave man dominion over the dumb beasts of the world. Man ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which set him apart from animals.
This still dominates theoretical thinking of animal behavior. If scientists went purely off of observations, most questions would have this answer: we don't know yet. Instead observations are climbing uphill against preconceived notions.
Studies of consciousness run into the same thing. The distinction between brain and mind goes back to the body/soul distinction from thousands of years of religion and culture. There is no evidence at all to suggest that minds exist apart from brains. Yet the question of "where consciousness comes from" is still asked seriously by people who think of themselves as serious scientists.
Religion also affects the study of climate change. There are many evangelical Protestants who believe that is blasphemous to imply that anything that humans could do could change the weather in any way, because God created the weather and runs it as He sees fit.
>evangelical Protestants who believe that is blasphemous to imply that anything that humans could do could change the weather in any way //
As someone who you might fit in to the category "evangelical Protestant" I find it hard to believe there are "many" relative to the whole set. Any sources?
Cloud seeding is pretty widely known; most people seem to be convinced that there is a human element to current climate change.
The concept of "stewardship of creation" is pretty widespread amongst evangelical Christians, that God handed over the world in to our care and that we've largely screwed it up. One of the largest Protestant communities, the Church of England, for example have altered their investment policy to avoid companies who are involved in activities that they see as contributing to unwanted climate change. (eg https://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2015/07/ur...)
Often I hear that it's "loony USA evangelicals" but at least the USA National Association of Evangelicals [which seems to be a large and influential body] accepts some climate change has human origins and that we should act to reduce our negative impact whilst simultaneously acting to aid the poor who are disproportionally affected by current changes in climate (eg http://nae.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Loving-the-Least-o...).
One of the fundamental tenants of science is to strive to constantly prove itself wrong. It's fundamental.
Of course we'll make mistakes along the way. That's how you learn. Some will in fact be disastrous. Such is the cost of scientific progression. Best we can do is hope to mitigate the negative affects as much as possible.
As a counter example, despite all the negative things we read about, life expectancy and quality of life continues to go up. The system appears to be working.
> I've come to realize that science is always wrong, when viewed with a long enough lens.
I fundamentally disagree. An enormous amount of science has been right, and has lasted essentially unchanged since the time of discovery. No one is refuting the germ theory of infection, information theory, or classical mechanics any time soon.
A lot of belief has been asserted and sustained by people who stand to gain from that belief being widely held. This is always happening, whether it is the Pope or Dow Chemical, and this is most of the science that gets discovered wrong after the fact. Most of it would have been proved wrong immediately if results hadn't been faked or attempted verifications hadn't been prevented or suppressed.
I'm excluding theories that are first approximations that are further refined later from 'made up' science, of course.
I agree 100%. I think lots of people realize it, but what can you do? Like you said, it's the best we can do now. In 50 years they'll probably think we were complete barbarians for how we medicate psychological disorders but right now the patients need to live the best lives they can live and brute force is all that we have to work with.
I think we should start making decisions based around the understanding that we probably don't understand the full implications of what we're doing.
i.e. We don't really know for certain what will happen if we seed clouds with nitrogen to alter the weather - so let's not (in reality we are doing this)
and
We don't know for sure if these hormones we're injecting into livestock have down-the-line health consequences for the people eating them, so we shouldn't do that.
We should stop messing with stuff we really don't understand, and actually don't even need to be messing with - leave well enough alone.
We absolutely should use the best theories we have to try to predict outcomes of our actions, and apply them incrementally instead of globally where possible. But sometimes more damage is caused by avoiding risk (time wasted planning, lives lost that could have been saved, etc.) than would be lost if the experiment in question goes wrong.
Often the only way to "know for sure" is to do something and see what happens.
Well, the EU has institutionalized that approach to regulatory decision-making under the rubric of the precautionary principle. Likewise, environmental review is increasingly common in planning/permitting contexts. But we have to have some sort of medium - an overabundance of caution ends with paralysis as we might avoid doing anything new due to the difficulty of adequately predicting the outcome.
If we did that, we'd still be riding horses. Mistakes are inherent to progress; we aren't going to ban progress because we don't know, you acquire knowledge by doing and making mistakes.
I agree with you, and I want to see us continue to make progress, though I don't think we need to be injecting nitrogen into clouds so people can have better skiing.
Says you, those wanting to ski have a different opinion, who are you to prevent other people from deciding what they consider progress? You sound like a Luddite from old England railing against technology.
> That's an interesting thing to say, as I'm a Software Engineer, and one of the most "techie" people I know.
And yet your default opinion is don't touch things we don't understand, which prevents us from ever understanding them; you must see how illogical that is.
I've come to realize that science is always wrong, when viewed with a long enough lens. It does the best it can at the time - i.e. let's spray everyone with DDT, or let's put lead into paint and gasoline, or let's introduce species x to control species y then x becomes a problem, etc.
Then years later science figures out those were terrible ideas, but shockingly everyone just says "NOW we know better, forget about before, trust us THIS time".
Does anyone else not realize it's exactly the same thing, and ~50 years from now science will know that lots of what we're doing today is a really bad thing to be doing? In 2050 someone will say "Science from the 1990's - 2020s should be tossed, they were just making stuff up"