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Scientific method is the best tool we have to achieve “pure objectivity and truth”, but it’s not perfect. The primary point of failure being application of it by extremely subjective creatures.
I know right? It baffles me how transphobes use “science” to be transphobic, like Sir/Ma’am, where in the chromosomes is it written “woman” or “man” or any of the stereotypes attached to those words. We made that shit up, we looked at what was there and then added meaning to it that wasn’t there. We interpreted the data according to our current age’s biases. Sure those wiggly things usually determine the parts you’re born with, but where in those parts is it written that women are soft and belong in the kitchen?
If you were to do some unethical science you can even add/block hormones that go into the fetus during its development for it to develop bits that it wouldn’t normally. Hell, you can do that well after birth and new features will develop because human bodies are rather “customisable”
sorry rant over, I don’t often get to talk about this from this perspective because getting into the intricacies of subjectivity of science in regards to how human beings and our languages are flawed is a bit too advanced for the average bigot
Or if you want a shorter version, “circle the part of the chromosome where it says men hold the door open for women”. There are obviously differences between what’s written in genes and the billion little social rules surrounding gender. It makes sense to have different terms to differentiate biology from social rules, and “sex” and “gender” can do that just fine.
A person’s sex is science, but their gender is a social construct. I sometimes wonder if trans people would even be a thing if there were no socially defined gender roles (or assumed gendered language) and people could just be who they are. I suspect there would not be as there wouldn’t be anything to be “trans” from.
A person’s sex is science, but their gender is a social construct.
Even sex is not the black and white dichotomy most people make it out to be. The way we define and dictate someone’s sex isn’t reproducible for everyone. The intersex population is larger than what most people assume, and can vary in ways that defy the way we normally evaluate sex. It can range from someone having different chromosomal pairings, to having a varied arrangement of secondary sexual organs.
Anyone saying that someone’s sex is scientifically dependent on “x” is either ignorant, or academically dishonest.
arguably science itself has been constructed in a social context ie a social construct
It is definitely limited by the cultural understanding of linguistical norms. Because the language we utilize in the methodology predates it, the language itself can limit most people’s conceptual understanding of whatever topic you are utilizing the methodology on.
Accurate communication is hard.
yes thank you leto ii
Trans people would still be a thing without socially defined gender roles. Even without gender, my sex was still wrong - my brain still told me, in times like trying to get comfortable to fall asleep, that my boobs weren’t supposed to be there.
Mm, that’s a good point - being uncomfortable in your own skin isn’t a problem that would go away.
Very ironic comment.
how so?
edit: if you mean the “Sir/Ma’am” bit I belive it is a valid assumption to make that a transphobe wouldn’t consider other options lmao
Ironic and presumptuous.
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Extremely subjective creatures, many of which believe they’re always right (including many “scientists”).
But yeah, you’re right, the reality is somewhere between the two extremes of the meme. Although we might also want to have a conversation about what “pure objectivity and truth” means.
We like putting things into boxes. It simplifies things. It’s easier to put things into objective boxes in math and physics, but the further from those you get, more subjective these boxes become. Biology is almost entirely subjective, we just draw a line in the sand where it suits our needs (at the time) the best.
Absolutely, and a big part of being a good scientist is acknowledging that subjectivity (and well as the degree of uncertainty in all our knowledge). In social science, subjectivity is baked in… there’s no way to avoid it, no matter how hard you try.
That’s not to say subjectivity means science can’t do anything useful in these areas. Most of the problems with subjectivity come from pretending something is objective when it’s not.
Even if we were beings of implacable logic, there would also be the issue that we aren’t omniscient. We are never going to reach the full truth of everything because we aren’t going to be able to gather all the data.
We can’t be sure of that. Maybe we will constantly be approaching the truth and never reach it. Or maybe we will just figure out every rule governing the quantum physics and extrapolate all the macro physics. Who knows.
Maybe there are meta physics responsible for creating our physics. Like, laws governing the creation of universes with different physics in each of them. Maybe it’s meta physics all the way down…The general laws of physics, sure, I have no solid reason to think they’ll be forever out of reach (only doubt), but in order to determine if there was intelligent life (even moreso civilizations) in galaxies that have already stranded away from our field of vision, we would need to have immense luck for physics to allow us to cheat the limits we know about today.
Again, we can’t even begin to speculate on what we’ll know in 1000 or 10,000 years because it’s so far beyond our current understanding. Practical time travel might be discovered. Or maybe we’ll learn how to extrapolate the path of any number of particles all the way back to the Big Bang and effectively learn all of the past.
“
scienceacademia is also an industry” FTFYIt didn’t have to be.
Yeah, but homeopathy is still bullshit.
I know that’s not necessarily the intention of this meme but it’s way too common in woo circles.
considering the political skew on lemmy i think this is more an admonition of capitalism than of science
Even so, academics is such a niche and marginal problem compared to, like, anything else capitalism fucks up.
Scientists are still doing good things all the time under capitalism. Environmental sciences criticize problems that capitalists are loath to address all the time, but also apparently capitalism funded their research for a century.
This post is just more populist tanky agitprop to make dumb people angry and distrust institutions and science whenever it tells them something they don’t like.
The founder of homeopathy did the first blinded studies, in a time where allopathy was doing bloodletting and their theories about how things presumably affect the body were, well, bullshit, quite often doing more harm than good. Humour theory and everything, even as a systemic view it’s crude AF compared to what Indians and Chinese came up with.
Now, as in currentyear, homeopathy is bullshit because we are way better at blinding and know that homeopathic drugs are no more effective than placebo.
Which just goes on to show that yes, science is a process.
It’s good to be skeptical of institutions, just don’t go dismissing or accepting science based on ideological/class association, that’s how you get shit like Lysenkoism
Both wrong.
It’s just a process. Find evidence, make theories. Find more evidence, adjust theories or replace them.
People gotta stop injecting their religious beliefs about “the truth” or “socialism” or whatever into science. These are just your personal beliefs and science don’t give a shit about any of that.
See: Lysenkoism
Though being aware of the biases involved in the literature is always important
The Big Bang Theory has that silly name because it’s what people trying to discredit it termed it.
There’s bias in everything, but empirical evidence wins out in the end.
Empirical evidence wins out in the end but… it’s not that simple. One name said a lot about this : Thomas Kuhn. Try giving The structure of scientific revolutions a read whenever you can. It’s old and there are more contemporary work, but Kuhn is still a reference in epistemology.
The second sentence of OP should have started with “Scientific research”
Man, NGT gets so much bullshit thrown his way. Sure, he’s an annoying shitposter on Twitter, but the vast majority of the time he makes a public discussion with someone he’s either one of or the voice of reason, and that sentence does definitely throw all nuance he has out of the window.
No yeah for real. I’ve never seen him doing anything I would really consider to be annoying, or at least, more annoying than any other science communicator, and he constantly gets shit on for being like, too cocky, but then when you push back I never get any examples of things he’s actually fucked up on, just that he has bad vibes.
Well, I can’t imagine why a prominent and professional black man who publicly supported the Covid precautions and vaccines would have been the target of a smear campaign.
I mean I feel like I’ve seen him get smeared since way way before covid was happening, like, since the 2010’s at least he’s been getting heat for no reason, I feel like
I don’t know, even on his own podcast I found him more willing to sound right than be right. Not that he was wrong, just dropping nuance and exceptions for the sake of sounding absolute and axiomatically correct.
His words end up being easy to poke holes in if and only if you know what he’s talking about. Thus I find it hard to accept what he says when I don’t know what he’s talking about.
Paper castles look good, but a short stone wall has a better reputation.
Sorry for my ignorance but what does axiomatically correct mean?
An axiom is a statement that is accepted to be true, usually to serve as a foundation for further arguments. I assume OP meant that NGT would often make general statements without much justification and OP perceived these statements as not nuanced / “true” enough.
… That explains so much in my life. I need to learn more about how this works. Im do this poorly
When I say axiomatically correct, I mean something self-evident or aligned with fundamental principles. An example of something that’s axiomatically correct would be: “Gravity makes things fall down” or “Lines that aren’t parallel will eventually cross”.
Something that sounds axiomatically correct, but isn’t, would be “What goes up must come down”. It sounds true, and was practically true for thousands of years, but every spacecraft relies on it being false, that things can stay up forever.
I don’t have an example from NGT off the top of my head, but this sentiment is why I’m not a fan of his, despite being very into space and astrophysics.
What does up must come down isn’t false, but it can be described differently enough to mean different things. How each word is defined would determine falsity(that seems like a real word but I’m not sure if it is btw) wouldn’t it?
So it’s not always true but it can be depending on how you interpret it?
Voyager is never coming down. Even if we wanted to bring it back, we couldn’t in this century, maybe ever.
Eventually it’s slagged remains will find a black hole to rest in, which is a different down at best, but even the black holes will evaporate, assuming the universe lasts that long. This fate is so far beyond the concept of down that there must be nuance in the claim, especially when talking about astrophysics.
Every interplanetary craft defies the phrase, and even orbit demands a deeper understanding. “What goes up must come down” sounds good and covers everyday life, but just like Newtonian physics it breaks down at large scales.
Something axiomatically correct would always be true (for the axioms we have taken). Perhaps you could take “On Earth” as an axiom here, but that’s a very restrictive axiom that you need to specify. Thus a more nuanced take: “What goes up must come down, unless it leaves the atmosphere.”
Not that I’m using axioms very rigorously. They’re usually used for math things. My informal usage was to evoke the sense of absolute truth. Of a statement so obvious that it doesn’t need proof. I find Tyson speaks in terms of “this is” rather than “this suggests” or “we have evidence for”. He speaks like an omniscient narrator speaking a story rather than a communicator of science.
Also, ‘Falsity’ is a word, and I think you’re actually using it correctly; it’s the opposite of ‘Veracity’ and also a noun for a lie or untruth. “The falsity of the statement” seems right, but it’s also old and very underused. I think a better word would be ‘Falseness’, but ‘Falsity’ in neat!
If all scientific knowledge were to suddenly disappear and we were to start from square one, it would all reappear exactly like it is. We would rediscover gravity, evolution, the expansion of the universe, etc.
Just because some scientific research is funded by entities with a bias, does not mean that the process of science is corrupted.
Often times the results of the research funded by biased corporations and institutions results in discovery that is contrary to the goal of the entity and so they just stop funding it. Sometimes they actively try to bury the discoveries, however the process of science will ensure that the truth comes to light eventually.
This meme has a poor understanding of science.
If all scientific knowledge were to suddenly disappear and we were to start from square one, it would all reappear exactly like it is.
Three competing theories of evolution arose, independently, in our world - one from British and European scientists studying the tropics, another from Russian and US scientists studying Siberia and northern North America, and a third by a Japanese scientist studying statistics and genetics. While the current consensus in evolutionary biology is that all three are true (at different timescales), the vast majority of people (and even other scientists) only know the first. This is partly because Darwin got there first, and partly because a lot of powerful people benefit from spreading social Darwinist woo.
Ironically, in a post-apocalyptic world, the powers that be would probably support the symbiotic theory, with Darwinism frowned upon as selfish individualism.
however the process of science will ensure that the truth comes to light eventually.
As Keynes said, in the long term we are all dead. Science is probably the best tool we currently have to find the truth (assuming there is a truth), but it is always important to remember that it is produced by humans, funded by interests and (mostly, though this is changing) published by for-profit journals. When reading a paper, always read the conflict of interest and funding details, and hope the authors are being honest.
Thank you, agree. But I learned from this thread that the full pic of the femboy is apparently riding a dildo which kinda fits with the masturbatory dialog, and now I’m not sure what it’s trying to say.
Regarding the masturbation and the dildo, well I suppose I have been had.
But I still disagree with that other person.
Science is better thought of as a verb, not a noun. To suggest that science is inherently corrupted by societies is to conflate science the noun with science the verb. Wank wank.
The process of science is not corrupted but deeply flawed. It is like that, because we as a species are as well. Science is the best method we have to create secured knowledge, but it is far from perfect. Things like predatory journals, lazy to non existing peer reviews in established publications, reports about scientists who are under pressure to create positive results even if their research had none of those etc. show us that .
Capitalism plays a big part in this problem. To plainly reject that is simply naive.
Science isn’t “deeply flawed”, sorry, that’s nonsense. Are there some players here and there that try and abuse the system, of course. These players are then rooted out and exposed, that’s how it works. If someone tries to hurry research, someone else will discover it.
This entire “capitalism is the root of all evil” is nonsense too. At its core, it’s the freedom to trade directly with one another and there is nothing wrong with it. Strong rules need to be in place to control that process ans the lack of that is what causes do many issues, especially in the US.
Just writing on your mobile phone, claiming science is deeply flawed, is just facepalmingly stupid.
If you really think that the core of capitalism is what you described, you have no clue what you are talking about. Funny, that you ended that by calling other peoples claims stupid.
Just out of curiosity, what do you think capitalism is?
The only thing that can correct bad science is good science.
That’s the great thing about the scientific method, as soon as someone presents a flawed hypothesis which is then subjected to scrutiny, good science has the opportunity to shine a light on the mistakes.
The process of science is not deeply flawed. Just because capitalism does indeed incentivize some to stray away from the scientific method does not then make science itself flawed.
You are throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Capitalism is a big problem, but to say that the scientific method is deeply flawed because of capitalism is not correct.
We seem to be talking about different things here: science and the scientific method. Science is a process involving many different institutions and individuals with their personal worldviews, problems and interests. The state of the scientific method is a whole other discussion, I am not able to lead.
The process of science is called the scientific method.
There certainly are people who call what they do ‘science’, but if they aren’t using the method, they are not doing science properly.
Whoever posted this meme has a poor understanding of science and isnt anything different than religious nut jobs or conspiracy types denying scientific progress
I really dislike the types, because they love using the results of science to proclaim their ignorant view points. If you really dislike science so much, for whatever reason, then reject all that comes from it. All the great food we have? Don’t eat it. Don’t wear modern clothes, go live in a cave wearing the skin of a bear or something.
Too bad you can’t test your theory either. So stop pointing fingers.
Someone is confusing true science and “Scientists says…” bullshit clickbait titles online.
OP misunderstood Kuhn maybe.
This is pretty par for the course when it comes to a lot of edgy internet leftists. They’ve read a few essays on Marxists.org and think they know philosophy.
There’s literally an entire body of philosophical work about the nature of epistemological truth, realism, naturalism, constructivism vs positivism and so on. Some subset of that surely intersects with economic philosophy, but the idea that this is a construct unique to capitalism just reeks of “I’m 14 and this is deep.”
Sorry I am likely missing context, but how is capitalism involved here?
The meme literally has 35 words
Oh, the “meme”.
Are you lost?
No, just that I think the meme is stupid. Academy can be deeply tied to capitalism, but science itself?
Science is our best attempt to understand pure, objective truth.
And more often than not, with careful reading and a little touch of skeptecism, you can pull a lot of worthwhile information out of the noise.
Is there a full version of the femboy wojack picture?
Horny 🫵
Don’t horny shame
True. Horny should overrule all. Any system, if it feels “off” then it’s non-normative. So fuck you.
Yes.
That s the real question here
Thx
Thank you !
Reminds me of how some people got a bunch of fake research papers published to prove how flawed the system is. And they would have gotten still more published but the WSJ caught on and they were exposed.
Don’t forget all the politics involved in getting funds for your research. Fun times!
Science is a method of systematically finding out the what, the how, the when and the why of the world.
Science itself has no answers, but has the questions that will lead to the answers that are the most accurate we can manage.
I mean, research funding is a huge problem, but half the problem is that journalists and reporters are largely people who went into English or Communications and stopped taking or learning any science past the high school level and thus don’t actually know how to read papers or report on them. Not to mention that critically reading a scientific paper and evaluating in the context of other research takes a significant amount of time, more time than is given to write a normal newspaper article.
And they’re reporting that science to people who on average know the same or less than them, so their mistakes and misreporting is never caught or corrected.
That’s not how I define science.
“The squirrel is an animal that can climb trees”
It’s being used to describe the word, not define it
I meant there definition in graphic from the OP.
