They basically stopped short of calling the scientific method a cultural construct, at which point I’m sure I would have snapped.
I can’t resist...
Did scientific method grow on a tree, or did people invent it?
Did people invent scientific method simultaneously everywhere, or was it invented and practiced at specific places?
:D
The real fallacy in my opinion is having a connotation that if something is constructed and promoted within a culture, that makes it wrong. For example, consider the Pythagorean theorem… knowing that Pythagoras was a rich white cis male, shouldn’t we remove it from the curriculum? And perhaps replace it with something more enlightened, such as: “all sides of a triangle are equal, even if their lengths may be different”.
In the same sense, science, even rationality itself, are cultural constructs. Maybe even human speech is a cultural construct, but luckily that happened sufficiently long ago so now all cultures have it. Okay, I am not sure about the last example. But I am sure that calling things “cultural constructs” is a cultural construct itself.
Are those two things really homeomorphic? A topologist’s arse has a hole running all the way through it, but a pit in the ground’s only open at one end. You might say: go far enough into a bottom and eventually you reach a hole; go far enough into a hole and eventually you reach a bottom.
The scientific method is a cultural construct, but one that yields nice things such as iPhones and reasonably accurate theories of physics. Of course, it also helps produce nasty things like atomic bombs.
I think the real fallacy is saying that the scientific method is just as good as any other method at finding truth.
I think the real fallacy is saying that the scientific method is just as good as any other method at finding truth.
Are these statements as independent as they seem? It is my impression that ”… and all cultural constructs are equally valid” is at least connotatively associated with the notion of a “cultural construct”.
It is my impression that ”… and all cultural constructs are equally valid” is at least connotatively associated with the notion of a “cultural construct”.
Can you say more about where this impression comes from?
I would agree with ”...and cultural constructs do not represent a uniquely valid objective truth,” and various things along those lines. But “all cultural constructs are equally valid” seems significantly overstating the case.
For example… I expect that most people who talk about cultural constructs at all would agree that chattel slavery and abolitionism are both cultural constructs. I doubt they would agree that they are equally valid for any understanding of “valid” that is at all relevant to this discussion.
I think that the expression “cultural construct” implies that the construct in question is a representation not of physical reality, but of something inside people’s heads.
Usually this is held to mean that cultural constructs are somewhat arbitrary, highly malleable, and do not involve laws of nature.
I think that the expression “cultural construct” implies that the construct in question is a representation not of physical reality, but of something inside people’s heads.
I think the scientific method is something that scientist do. It’s not an object in physical reality the way a chair happens to be.
Do you think that the scientific method-1800, the scientific method-1900, the scientific method-1950 and scientific method-2014 happen to be exactly the same thing?
I think the scientific method is something that scientist do. It’s not an object in physical reality the way a chair happens to be.
Yes, of course.
Do you think that the scientific method-1800, the scientific method-1900, the scientific method-1950 and scientific method-2014 happen to be exactly the same thing?
Well, I certainly agree that “cultural construct” implies (indeed, I would say it denotes) something inside people’s heads. And I agree that many people believe that, or at least are in the habit of thinking as if, the contents of people’s heads are somewhat arbitrary, highly malleable, and do not involve laws of nature.
I’m not sure how that relates to the ”… and all cultural constructs are equally valid” clause I asked about, though.
It relates through the not involving the laws of nature part. In a certain sense cultural constructs are not real. They are imaginary. And you can think of all imaginary things as about equally valid.
I am aware of holes in that argument, but getting back to the original point, when people call something a “cultural construct” there is a pretty heavy implication that whatever the replacement for it they have in mind is going to be at least as good and probably better.
It relates through the not involving the laws of nature part. In a certain sense cultural constructs are not real. They are imaginary. And you can think of all imaginary things as about equally valid.
Just because something is a cultural construct, and thus “imaginary” or pethaps even subjective to some extent, does not mean it’s not about reality. To think otherwise is simply a mind projection fallacy.
It looks like the problem might be that saying “X is a cultural construct” gets read as “X is just a cultural construct and as such has no value outside of it’s cultural boundaries”.
If your definition of “truth” is such that any method is as good as any other of finding it, then the scientific method really is no better than anything else at finding it. Of course most of the “truths” won’t bear much resemblance to what you’d get if you only used the scientific method.
Of course most of the “truths” won’t bear much resemblance to what you’d get if you only used the scientific method.
Also most of these truths will eventually wind up putting you in a position where you start experiencing pain or even dying despite your “truth” telling you that you aren’t.
If a man proves too clearly and convincingly to himself . . . that a tiger is an optical illusion—well, he will find out he is wrong. The tiger will himself intervene in the discussion, in a manner which will be in every sense conclusive.
Scientific method should not be blamed, it is the people who created them should be questioned. We all know people who have invented iPhones and bombs have followed a specific method.
The techniques of the scientific method are universally valid; they’re not contingent on a specific culture. If civilization was wiped today and we had to start from scratch, we would discover the same methods to ascertain natural laws and apply them to our purposes.
When we find an alien culture, I expect they will follow the same rules to find out what works and what is real (if they’re advanced enough to use science).
The techniques of the scientific method are universally valid; they’re not contingent on a specific culture. If civilization was wiped today and we had to start from scratch, we would discover the same methods to ascertain natural laws and apply them to our purposes.
Different scientific communities have different methods. The scientific method as practiced by physicists isn’t the same method we use in computer systems research and it isn’t the same method they use in medical research. And this isn’t because these different fields have different deviations from the One True Method—it’s because different subjects require different methods to prevent error.
In computer systems and physics, data is typically collected by machines. We therefore aren’t worried about observer bias or placebo effects, and we don’t usually worry about blinding things from experimenters.
With computer systems, everything is reasonably deterministic and so statistical error isn’t a major concern. Also, any effect that’s big enough to be interesting is likely to be far larger than statistical noise—it’s not an interesting paper unless you got a factor of two improvement or something like that.
In physics, it’s routine to circulate preprints before a peer-reviewed paper. This doesn’t happen much in computer science.
In physics and CS, a purely theoretical argument without data can be taken seriously, and often people will trust theory more than experiment. My impression is that people don’t have nearly the same sort of confidence in theory in biological or social science.
I think talking about The scientific method is mostly an oversimplification. I don’t hear professional scientists using that category when talking amongst themselves about their work. I hear much more about the particular publication and review norms of individual fields.
The awkwardness is that once you generalize enough to cover everything we normally refer to as “science”, it’s hard to include a very wide range of things we don’t normally think of as science.
We don’t think of legal reasoning as science, but it involves using information and experimentation (with a community of experts!) to update our model of the world.
The fashion industry uses experiment and empirical reasoning to figure out what people want to buy. But I don’t think it’s useful to talk about fashion designers as scientists.
I think the term “scientific method” as normally used in English does not pick out any actual cluster of behaviors or practices. It’s a term without a coherent referent.
I think the term “scientific method” as normally used in English does not pick out any actual cluster of behaviors or practices.
The term “scientific method” as ordinarily used is associated with the traditional rituals of “Science”, which are themselves unsatisfactory, or at best an improvable-upon approximation to what really works in finding out about the world. The more useful cluster is the one hereabouts called Bayesian epistemology. It can and should be practiced everywhere, and if a fashion designer employs it, it is just as useful to call it that as when a scientist in the laboratory does.
Science is tailored to counteract human cognitive biases. Aliens might or might not have the same biases. AIs wouldn’t need science.
For example, science says you make the hypothesis, then you run the test. You’re supposed to make a prediction, not explain why something happened in retrospect. This is to prevent hindsight bias and rationalization from changing what we think is a consequence of our hypotheses. But the One True Way does not throw out evidence because humans are too weak to use it.
Science is tailored to counteract human cognitive biases.
That isn’t really clear to me. Science wasn’t intelligently designed; it evolved. While it has different ideals and functions from other human institutions (such as religions and governments), it has a lot in common with them as a result of being a human institution. It has a many features that contribute to the well-being of its participants and the stability of their organizations, but that don’t necessarily contribute much to its ostensible goal of finding truth.
For instance, it has been commonly observed that wrong ideas in science only die when their adherents do. Senior scientists have influence proportional to their past success, not their current accuracy. This serves the interests of individual humans in the system very well, by providing a comfortable old age for successful scientists. But it certainly does not counteract human cognitive biases; it works with them!
Yes, science has the effect of finding quite a lot of truth. And philosophers and historians of science can point to good reasons to expect science to be much better at this than other claimed methods such as mysticism or traditionalism. But science as an institution is tailored at least as much to self-sustenance through human biases, as to counteracting them.
I think a Buddhist who seeks enlightenment might practice systematized curiosity. He doubts a lot of things that I take for granted. He only believes things that are in some sense confirmed by his perception.
I’m not familiar with that particular brand of Buddhism, but does it have concepts like karma and reincarnation? If so how do you deal with them and at the same time wanting to promote reductionism?
Theravada Buddhism is mainly practiced in Sri Lanka and Mainland Southeast Asia.
We do not consider Buddha to be a mystical superbeing come to Earth from celestial realms. We see Buddha as a regular guy who thought very hard about the problem of emotional suffering and came up with an innovative self-hack.
Karma and reincarnation are an inevitable part of Indian culture, and Buddhism was also touched by them. Karma is understood as the effect of your intentions, rippling across causal chains, and through some of those causal chains, influencing your future circumstances. It is not a cosmic system of morality, but a way of reminding you to be mindful of how what you do affects others and, potentially, your future selves.
Reincarnation is something I have more serious problems with. For one, I do not believe it. It is not a mandatory belief, though (nothing is, actually).
Karma and reincarnation are an inevitable part of Indian culture, and Buddhism was also touched by them. Karma is understood as the effect of your intentions, rippling across causal chains, and through some of those causal chains, influencing your future circumstances.
I have to preface by not saying that I’m not a Buddhist myself but that I do my meditation in a non-Buddhist framework. That means I do have my fair share of experiences but I do have to translate between frameworks.
Of course karma is all about causal changes but a lot of the causal changes that Buddhists see don’t really lend itself to materialist reductionism.
More importantly if you say karma is the effect of your intentions rippling through causal changes, that doesn’t answer the question of why the whole “goal” of Buddhism is to move beyond karma and become enlightened. It doesn’t even tell you what that “goal” is supposed to mean.
To me your answer looks like you are just reciting the teachers password. If I would go to an advanced Buddhist teacher I doubt that he would tell me that karma is about influencing your future circumstances because Buddhism is about being in the now, being in the moment.
Reincarnation is something I have more serious problems with. For one, I do not believe it. It is not a mandatory belief, though (nothing is, actually).
Of course Buddhism has no mandatory beliefs but if you drop reincarnation and keep karma you are left with asking where all that karma that determines your life comes from if not a previous life. In some sense it’s a valid Buddhist position to not seek for a source but if you a a reductionist, then part of that means actually breaking things down and not just stopping at saying that the karma comes from somewhere.
Of course Buddhism has no mandatory beliefs but if you drop reincarnation and keep karma you are left with asking where all that karma that determines your life comes from if not a previous life.
From the actions of other people? One part of Buddhism is to de-emphasize the concept of ‘self’, so the difference between “good/bad actions will cause good/bad things to happen to future reincarnations of me” and “good/bad actions will cause good/bad things to happen to other people in the future” might be smaller than it would seem at first sight.
One part of Buddhism is to de-emphasize the concept of ‘self’
Buddhism does not de-emphasize “self” to focus on other people.
Buddhism de-empahsizes “self” in the meaning of the continuity of identity—the classic Buddhist view looks at the mind/soul as beads on a string (of time) -- the beads are similar but they are not just one bead.
Yeah. It reminds me of questions like what if, 5 seconds from now, I will be Britney Spears?. I’m a little unclear on exactly what parts of “you” continue into the next incarnation (metaphors like “a lamp lighting another lamp” are not very precise)---I think you don’t get memories, but you do get mental habits and inclinations?
I could imagine a Less Wronger taking the position that “supposing for the sake of argument that everything in Buddhist metaphysics is correct, the similarities between two reincarnations are not great enough to preserve your personal identity in the philosophical/moral/my-utility-function sense. So you have no reason to care more about your future incarnation than about any other person”.
Furthermore, I could also imagine a Buddhist making that argument. Two recurring themes seem to be that it’s bad to focus on what you want, and that in fact you should abandon the idea that there is a “you” that wants things. If you follow that advice it seems you should not care about what will happen to “your” reincarnation in particular.
I can’t resist...
Did scientific method grow on a tree, or did people invent it?
Did people invent scientific method simultaneously everywhere, or was it invented and practiced at specific places?
:D
The real fallacy in my opinion is having a connotation that if something is constructed and promoted within a culture, that makes it wrong. For example, consider the Pythagorean theorem… knowing that Pythagoras was a rich white cis male, shouldn’t we remove it from the curriculum? And perhaps replace it with something more enlightened, such as: “all sides of a triangle are equal, even if their lengths may be different”.
In the same sense, science, even rationality itself, are cultural constructs. Maybe even human speech is a cultural construct, but luckily that happened sufficiently long ago so now all cultures have it. Okay, I am not sure about the last example. But I am sure that calling things “cultural constructs” is a cultural construct itself.
That’s already been done
“A topologist is someone who can’t tell the difference between his ass and a hole in the ground.”
Are those two things really homeomorphic? A topologist’s arse has a hole running all the way through it, but a pit in the ground’s only open at one end. You might say: go far enough into a bottom and eventually you reach a hole; go far enough into a hole and eventually you reach a bottom.
(Sorry. I’ll go to bed now.)
The scientific method is a cultural construct, but one that yields nice things such as iPhones and reasonably accurate theories of physics. Of course, it also helps produce nasty things like atomic bombs.
I think the real fallacy is saying that the scientific method is just as good as any other method at finding truth.
and
Are these statements as independent as they seem? It is my impression that ”… and all cultural constructs are equally valid” is at least connotatively associated with the notion of a “cultural construct”.
Good point.
Can you say more about where this impression comes from?
I would agree with ”...and cultural constructs do not represent a uniquely valid objective truth,” and various things along those lines. But “all cultural constructs are equally valid” seems significantly overstating the case.
For example… I expect that most people who talk about cultural constructs at all would agree that chattel slavery and abolitionism are both cultural constructs. I doubt they would agree that they are equally valid for any understanding of “valid” that is at all relevant to this discussion.
Do you expect something different?
I think that the expression “cultural construct” implies that the construct in question is a representation not of physical reality, but of something inside people’s heads.
Usually this is held to mean that cultural constructs are somewhat arbitrary, highly malleable, and do not involve laws of nature.
I think the scientific method is something that scientist do. It’s not an object in physical reality the way a chair happens to be.
Do you think that the scientific method-1800, the scientific method-1900, the scientific method-1950 and scientific method-2014 happen to be exactly the same thing?
Yes, of course.
I don’t understand the question.
Well, I certainly agree that “cultural construct” implies (indeed, I would say it denotes) something inside people’s heads. And I agree that many people believe that, or at least are in the habit of thinking as if, the contents of people’s heads are somewhat arbitrary, highly malleable, and do not involve laws of nature.
I’m not sure how that relates to the ”… and all cultural constructs are equally valid” clause I asked about, though.
It relates through the not involving the laws of nature part. In a certain sense cultural constructs are not real. They are imaginary. And you can think of all imaginary things as about equally valid.
I am aware of holes in that argument, but getting back to the original point, when people call something a “cultural construct” there is a pretty heavy implication that whatever the replacement for it they have in mind is going to be at least as good and probably better.
Just because something is a cultural construct, and thus “imaginary” or pethaps even subjective to some extent, does not mean it’s not about reality. To think otherwise is simply a mind projection fallacy.
True, but I’d not place much trust on a map whose creators refuse to constantly check with the territory.
Mm. Yeah, I’ll accept that.
It looks like the problem might be that saying “X is a cultural construct” gets read as “X is just a cultural construct and as such has no value outside of it’s cultural boundaries”.
There is more to a thing than how it came to be.
If your definition of “truth” is such that any method is as good as any other of finding it, then the scientific method really is no better than anything else at finding it. Of course most of the “truths” won’t bear much resemblance to what you’d get if you only used the scientific method.
Also most of these truths will eventually wind up putting you in a position where you start experiencing pain or even dying despite your “truth” telling you that you aren’t.
Or as Chesterton put it:
Or as Dick put it: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
Scientific method should not be blamed, it is the people who created them should be questioned. We all know people who have invented iPhones and bombs have followed a specific method.
It grew on a tree. Olives grow on trees too, but no-one knew you could eat them until someone discovered that soaking them in brine makes them edible.
Or less metaphorically, science was discovered, not invented. It works for reasons that have nothing to do with us.
The techniques of the scientific method are universally valid; they’re not contingent on a specific culture. If civilization was wiped today and we had to start from scratch, we would discover the same methods to ascertain natural laws and apply them to our purposes.
When we find an alien culture, I expect they will follow the same rules to find out what works and what is real (if they’re advanced enough to use science).
Different scientific communities have different methods. The scientific method as practiced by physicists isn’t the same method we use in computer systems research and it isn’t the same method they use in medical research. And this isn’t because these different fields have different deviations from the One True Method—it’s because different subjects require different methods to prevent error.
In computer systems and physics, data is typically collected by machines. We therefore aren’t worried about observer bias or placebo effects, and we don’t usually worry about blinding things from experimenters.
With computer systems, everything is reasonably deterministic and so statistical error isn’t a major concern. Also, any effect that’s big enough to be interesting is likely to be far larger than statistical noise—it’s not an interesting paper unless you got a factor of two improvement or something like that.
In physics, it’s routine to circulate preprints before a peer-reviewed paper. This doesn’t happen much in computer science.
In physics and CS, a purely theoretical argument without data can be taken seriously, and often people will trust theory more than experiment. My impression is that people don’t have nearly the same sort of confidence in theory in biological or social science.
I think talking about The scientific method is mostly an oversimplification. I don’t hear professional scientists using that category when talking amongst themselves about their work. I hear much more about the particular publication and review norms of individual fields.
By scientific method I would mean something on a far more general level than details about circulation of preprints.
Architecture varies, but the structural mechanics that describes how buildings stay up is the same always and everywhere.
The awkwardness is that once you generalize enough to cover everything we normally refer to as “science”, it’s hard to include a very wide range of things we don’t normally think of as science.
We don’t think of legal reasoning as science, but it involves using information and experimentation (with a community of experts!) to update our model of the world.
The fashion industry uses experiment and empirical reasoning to figure out what people want to buy. But I don’t think it’s useful to talk about fashion designers as scientists.
I think the term “scientific method” as normally used in English does not pick out any actual cluster of behaviors or practices. It’s a term without a coherent referent.
The term “scientific method” as ordinarily used is associated with the traditional rituals of “Science”, which are themselves unsatisfactory, or at best an improvable-upon approximation to what really works in finding out about the world. The more useful cluster is the one hereabouts called Bayesian epistemology. It can and should be practiced everywhere, and if a fashion designer employs it, it is just as useful to call it that as when a scientist in the laboratory does.
Science is tailored to counteract human cognitive biases. Aliens might or might not have the same biases. AIs wouldn’t need science.
For example, science says you make the hypothesis, then you run the test. You’re supposed to make a prediction, not explain why something happened in retrospect. This is to prevent hindsight bias and rationalization from changing what we think is a consequence of our hypotheses. But the One True Way does not throw out evidence because humans are too weak to use it.
That isn’t really clear to me. Science wasn’t intelligently designed; it evolved. While it has different ideals and functions from other human institutions (such as religions and governments), it has a lot in common with them as a result of being a human institution. It has a many features that contribute to the well-being of its participants and the stability of their organizations, but that don’t necessarily contribute much to its ostensible goal of finding truth.
For instance, it has been commonly observed that wrong ideas in science only die when their adherents do. Senior scientists have influence proportional to their past success, not their current accuracy. This serves the interests of individual humans in the system very well, by providing a comfortable old age for successful scientists. But it certainly does not counteract human cognitive biases; it works with them!
Yes, science has the effect of finding quite a lot of truth. And philosophers and historians of science can point to good reasons to expect science to be much better at this than other claimed methods such as mysticism or traditionalism. But science as an institution is tailored at least as much to self-sustenance through human biases, as to counteracting them.
What do you mean with those techniques if you would have to taboo “scientific method”?
Sistematized curiosity, carefully doubt-filtered and confirmation-dependent.
Could you explain that a bit more in detail?
I think a Buddhist who seeks enlightenment might practice systematized curiosity. He doubts a lot of things that I take for granted. He only believes things that are in some sense confirmed by his perception.
Wow. That’s an unexpected view into myself. I happen to be a Theravada Buddhist.
Of course, I wouldn’t expect Buddhist meditation techniques to be necessarily useful for alien species.
I’m not familiar with that particular brand of Buddhism, but does it have concepts like karma and reincarnation? If so how do you deal with them and at the same time wanting to promote reductionism?
Theravada Buddhism is mainly practiced in Sri Lanka and Mainland Southeast Asia.
We do not consider Buddha to be a mystical superbeing come to Earth from celestial realms. We see Buddha as a regular guy who thought very hard about the problem of emotional suffering and came up with an innovative self-hack.
Karma and reincarnation are an inevitable part of Indian culture, and Buddhism was also touched by them. Karma is understood as the effect of your intentions, rippling across causal chains, and through some of those causal chains, influencing your future circumstances. It is not a cosmic system of morality, but a way of reminding you to be mindful of how what you do affects others and, potentially, your future selves.
Reincarnation is something I have more serious problems with. For one, I do not believe it. It is not a mandatory belief, though (nothing is, actually).
I have to preface by not saying that I’m not a Buddhist myself but that I do my meditation in a non-Buddhist framework. That means I do have my fair share of experiences but I do have to translate between frameworks.
Of course karma is all about causal changes but a lot of the causal changes that Buddhists see don’t really lend itself to materialist reductionism.
More importantly if you say karma is the effect of your intentions rippling through causal changes, that doesn’t answer the question of why the whole “goal” of Buddhism is to move beyond karma and become enlightened. It doesn’t even tell you what that “goal” is supposed to mean.
To me your answer looks like you are just reciting the teachers password. If I would go to an advanced Buddhist teacher I doubt that he would tell me that karma is about influencing your future circumstances because Buddhism is about being in the now, being in the moment.
Of course Buddhism has no mandatory beliefs but if you drop reincarnation and keep karma you are left with asking where all that karma that determines your life comes from if not a previous life. In some sense it’s a valid Buddhist position to not seek for a source but if you a a reductionist, then part of that means actually breaking things down and not just stopping at saying that the karma comes from somewhere.
From the actions of other people? One part of Buddhism is to de-emphasize the concept of ‘self’, so the difference between “good/bad actions will cause good/bad things to happen to future reincarnations of me” and “good/bad actions will cause good/bad things to happen to other people in the future” might be smaller than it would seem at first sight.
Buddhism does not de-emphasize “self” to focus on other people.
Buddhism de-empahsizes “self” in the meaning of the continuity of identity—the classic Buddhist view looks at the mind/soul as beads on a string (of time) -- the beads are similar but they are not just one bead.
Yeah. It reminds me of questions like what if, 5 seconds from now, I will be Britney Spears?. I’m a little unclear on exactly what parts of “you” continue into the next incarnation (metaphors like “a lamp lighting another lamp” are not very precise)---I think you don’t get memories, but you do get mental habits and inclinations?
I could imagine a Less Wronger taking the position that “supposing for the sake of argument that everything in Buddhist metaphysics is correct, the similarities between two reincarnations are not great enough to preserve your personal identity in the philosophical/moral/my-utility-function sense. So you have no reason to care more about your future incarnation than about any other person”.
Furthermore, I could also imagine a Buddhist making that argument. Two recurring themes seem to be that it’s bad to focus on what you want, and that in fact you should abandon the idea that there is a “you” that wants things. If you follow that advice it seems you should not care about what will happen to “your” reincarnation in particular.