Great Mug

Reminded me of this.

Exactly. I keep trying to get people to understand that it's a process, just like running is a process.

And a method in which beliefs are important. Not the religious ones, of course, but there are other kinds of beliefs.

Believing that science yields universally true results or is the only method of finding truths, however, is an ontology and something you have to believe.

Edit: I'm not anti-science or anything, just a pedant.

Scientism is the belief that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality.

While the term was defined originally to mean "methods and attitudes typical of or attributed to natural scientists", some scholars, as well as political and religious leaders, have also adopted it as a pejorative term with the meaning "an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities)".

I saw this earlier and really wanted to pipe up, but I just couldn't bear it.

Literally I would not be caught dead drinking from that thing

problem?

seems like you're drawing on a guilt by association fallacy

Is there anyone out there who hates Ben Shapiro and the temperamental cranks who act like their subjective appeals to emotion & outrage have anywhere as much merit as valid, objective arguments that take actual effort? The latter is tiresome, and they absolutely deserve Ben's catchphrase: everyone should be appropriating it to nobler causes than Ben's to annoy him & criticize those irrational twerps.

The placebo effect works even if you know its a placebo tho.

That's medicine. Science just sees it as a problem to be sorted by good study design and statistics

You're referring to quantum effects? Don't worry about whether you're not watching, the universe is watching. If one photon is emitted from the thing in a quantum state and hits anything, that's the observation

What do you mean? Sociology I kind of get, but psychology nowadays is a purely quantitative discipline (despite its subject being squishier than other quantitative sciences).

Sent from my iPhone

I guess prayer and ritual made the device possible, eh?

LOL!

/s aside, what it takes to use science is mental discipline, not faith.

I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE

It might be printed on both sides

I'm right handed, but often find myself with the cup in my left hand, because I need my dominant hand for high dexterity tasks, like writing, operating computer mouse, etc.

Maybe it's a personal reminder to the drinker

It's referred to as "Scientism".

Science isn't a belief system. It's a way of making sense of natural phenomena.

If we look at the way the universe behaves, quantum mechanics gives us fundamental, unavoidable indeterminacy, so that alternative histories of the universe can be assigned probability.

• Murray Gell-Mann

"it posits that the universe functions according to predictable rules"

• you

Not quite. Cosmologists accept a certain distribution of predictable phenomena within known parameters while leaving the door open to chaos, outliers, the as of yet unknown and unknowable.

Complexity theory is a model that posits components interact in multiple ways and behave according to local rules. From quantum physics to cosmology and the aspirational yet elusive grand theory of everything, science is prepared for a world weirder than we understand, and possibly weirder than we can understand.

Just because empirical evidence and the development of predictable rules are a very fruitful line of inquiry doesn't mean we believe that is truth.

Philosophers of Science have rather lengthy volumes of work on the subject. I'm just a novice on the topic, but my take on the state of the subject is that we don't accept science and even it's laws as absolute truth, just a very practical, reliable, utilitarian form of inquiry and understanding which includes uncertainty (Heisenberg), probability, complexity and chaos. Scientists are prepared to abandon everything in exchange for something better.

Look at newtonian physics. No one thinks it's the truth, it's just simpler and useful for everyday engineering.

• observe
• write down observation
• try to find a discernable pattern
• test pattern

We do not believe that it functions according to predictible rules, we simply look for rules and we have infact found some. That is why we can design a scyscraper and know that it won't topple without trying it out first.

Science is knowledge discovered through the scientific process. Knowledge isn't belief.

we define "science" as the aggregate consciousness of scientific researchers

This is something I wish I could preach convincingly to everyone. The activity of scientists, a social group, are arguing and trying to convince one another that their interpretation of the data acquired by using their tools and methods is what become a scientific consensus.

Forefronting the method (often a vaguely defined one rooted in a hypo-deductive model from about 150 years ago that most people learned in grade school) removes the relationships between people and other people and people and institutions.

I wish I could find the paper but there's a wonderful enthographic study on how scientists interact with each other to transform the discourse.

Edit: Found it! Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry by Helen E. Longino

Yes!

Everything is a wave if you dig deep enough.

At least, as far as we know right now. But the standard model and quantum field theory have been really solid with really precise predictions for many decades at this point. (not any kind of expert here, just find it interesting)

I say they do in the same way that I care about the world in general, but I don't think they pay much attention to layfolks for the purposes of their work.

Plus, statistics make up the basis of pretty much all of our science. If you dig into the foundations of stats, you'll find that it's basically just formalizing our feelings. It just happens to be formalized in a way that appears to reflect reality accurately enough to be useful.

Did it work?

You don’t know what science is.