Skepticism and empiricism are robust ideas, by which I mean there’s nothing particularly similar to them. They are also very compact. You can fit them on a post-card. On the other hand, math is this enormous edifice.
The ‘getting it wrong’ that you see all over modern science is a failure, yes, but most of these scientist-failures are failing due to contingent local factors like conflicts of interest and grant proposals and muddy results and competition pressures… they’re failing to fulfill the scientific ideal for sure, but it’s not because they lack the scientific ideal. They can correctly teach science. If bad scientists were all we had, then science would have bad habits and that would be bad, but it could be solved much more easily than having to redesign the thing without knowing that it was possible, like we did the first time.
This is still the case even if all the scientists are under the thumbs of warlords who make them do stupid stuff. The idea is there, the light can spread. Not right away, likely, but we won’t need to wait thousands of years for it to re-emerge.
Skepticism and empiricism are robust ideas, by which I mean there’s nothing particularly similar to them. They are also very compact. You can fit them on a post-card. On the other hand, math is this enormous edifice.
The ‘getting it wrong’ that you see all over modern science is a failure, yes, but most of these scientist-failures are failing due to contingent local factors like conflicts of interest and grant proposals and muddy results and competition pressures… they’re failing to fulfill the scientific ideal for sure, but it’s not because they lack the scientific ideal. They can correctly teach science. If bad scientists were all we had, then science would have bad habits and that would be bad, but it could be solved much more easily than having to redesign the thing without knowing that it was possible, like we did the first time.
This is still the case even if all the scientists are under the thumbs of warlords who make them do stupid stuff. The idea is there, the light can spread. Not right away, likely, but we won’t need to wait thousands of years for it to re-emerge.