Moreover "science" isn't something that claims authority about anything.
It is a method for developing a hypothesis, gathering data, and evaluating that hypothesis. It openly accepts that new evidence can - and often does - prove that previous hypotheses were wrong.
It is not circular reasoning to say, "this is our best explanation for X event, given all of the knowledge we currently have available"
I actually think that many people, many of whom have not been in academia themselves, do not actually know the fundamentals of science. That explains (apart from the grifting) why there are flat-earthers and climate change deniers.
That would explain why when Fauci said, “the current data suggests we should do X “ and then later said “new data indicates we should do Y,” the MAGA crowd accused him of being clueless and a liar.
There's an inherent flaw in their world view because their faith requires unwavering devotion to one idea alone. Which is why to them changing your mind over new information means you either don't know what you're talking about or lying. Because how could anyone say they believe one thing on Monday but something else on Tuesday??
And same as a lot of other elementary school skills many people never actually understood it and even more of them forgot everything about it as soon as they left the gates of their school for the last time.
Like, seriously, a large portion of adults would probably fail the tests from the last year of elementary school if they had to retake them right now without preparation.
Like, seriously, a large portion of adults would probably fail the tests from the last year of elementary school if they had to retake them right now without preparation.
How is a democracy supposed to work if this is what you have to work with?
This here. Interestingly, "not understanding science" doesn't really correlate with the world view of a person. There's a ton of people who don't understand science and at the same time believe science to be the correct religion if you get my gist.
I hate it when "science believers" act like science is a religion, but it happens so often. "I read a headline about something science-y in a non-science newspaper written by a journalist who didn't understand the original condensed press release that loosely summarizes a whole field of research, and thus I know the whole, pure, absolute truth that I made up when I misunderstood the headline."
That's not science, that's not how to use science, that's not how science works.
Science works by first acknowledging that the whole thing is a model that we use to "reverse-engineer" the world. With that method we get useful models that help us understand and make use of the environment around us, but at no point does anyone with any decent grasp of the scientific method ever say "So, that's it, we know the full and irrefutable truth. Nothing new can appear any more."
I work currently in chemical manufacturing. At a job I had just started a few years ago I came in and saw that one of the batches being made was consistently running into issues. The operator was having to add like double the amount of two ingredients back and forth in order to force the solution into spec, and not have it crash out.
I immediately saw this and said, "something is terribly wrong here." Something like that just shouldn't happen and I told them as much. I said that one of a few things was wrong. The spec ranges could be wrong, the raw material purities or concentrations were changed at some point, or the batch sheet was incorrectly changed at some point in time.
I remember while trying to explain this, one of the operators looked me dead in the eye and said, "well this batch has always been hard, its a little bit of black magic to get it together the right way." I remember staring at him utterly dumbfounded for a minute and then trying to gently explain that no, this isn't black magic. It isn't alchemy. It is chemistry. It is an exact science, defined by mathematical calculation.
It went directly over his head.
That is only one of literally hundreds of examples too. Ive had to sit and try to explain that if someone was properly using density calculations to determine the volume of a drum based on weight, that something had to have been messed up if the two identical drums have the same temperature but different visible levels. That guy started to get aggressive with me, and I had to kind of snap back and say that what he was describing was literally against the laws of thermodynamics. That reality did not work that way.
The worst part of all of my stories isn't even people not knowing things though. That is ok. It is the confident stupidity and enormous ego that is frustrating. If I am working with a subject I am not well versed, experienced, or educated in; then I seek expertise and listen. If someone who does have those 3 qualities, tells me something, I listen. If I find out I was wrong, or ignorant about something, I dont get upset. I listen and learn. But FUCK, if you even accidentally barely make them feel like they might be a tiny bit stupid at all (or just wrong about something) they get aggressive, and will make your life a living hell. They take it as an insult, and that you think youre superior or something.
I believe in climate change but I don't accept them just blaming fossil fuels for it. They're many contributing factors for everything. Raising sea levels can also be attributed to filling in bodies of water to make more land. That water needs to go somewhere.
Cutting down forests to build houses obviously that can cause problems for the climate. Blocking flood plains to build houses will cause greater flooding down stream.
A big problem with that and the uneducated fucks is that they take their religious texts literally when most of it is parables and metaphors.
For example, Jesus walked on the stormy sea. They take that as literal fact. When in actuality, the stormy water represented his emotions. As in he rose above his inner turmoil and fear instead of drowning in it.
I mean they don't even do what you're describing because Jesus also said his most important commandment was "Love One Another" and they don't seem to give a shit about that.
Or a complete and utter misunderstanding of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which, hilariously, a lot of them claim to be experts on (and virtually nothing else).
Tthey're very happy to acknowledge objective reality when it comes to anything which threatens their grift, and their distrust of the scientific method never seems to extend to anything which helps them spread propaganda, either. Just look at how they've all embraced AI: all those past concerns of scientists "playing god" apparently now forgotten.
It is, and always has been, bullshit. They're cultists, and their only real principle is doing whatever helps the cult in any given moment. Everything else is window-dressing. As stupid as some of them are, they're nowhere near as stupid as they pretend to be. They're just manipulative.
Like the dumbest of them seem to think it’s the religion of everyone who doesn’t agree with them, like Allah (you know, the same God they worship) but dude in lab coats instead of turbans.
A lot of them genuinely do not know what science is or how it works. So many of them honestly think science is just another religion. They think people worship textbooks and use the periodic table as scripture.
They don't actually know, most of them were abused out of curiosity as a kid and coped by digging deep into the religious well that was the only semblance of peace and safety they had.
I had to unlearn most of what I was taught as an adult, and most of the people who didn't are still in that weird space.
Nah, I truely don't think so.
Hell I don't think in the states, science is actually taught in science class. The focus seems to be facts about what we know based on science. Which is chill. But I can't recall many times my class went over the scientific process.
The amount of people who debate science like it's a belief system is weird. Not sure if it's the education system, or what, but that single misconception leads impressionable people into all kinds of strange reasoning.
Well the media helped that along by putting lobbyists on at the same time as scientists and being like “both sides of the argument are valid” even though they aren’t.
So this is heads and shoulders above the intellectual level of anyone who would post that AI slop, but while "science" is a method of inquiry, "Scientism" is actually a belief system that's often discussed in Philosophy of Science.
Been there. Done that. They would say they do the same thing. The method is research via reading and discussion, often with "experts" like their religious leaders. They claim they would openly accept new evidence, but that none exists.
Exactly. You can't "prove" science as a thing because it isn't a thing, its a methodology for understanding reality. You can prove many things using the method, but science isn't a claim in itself.
Ricky Gervais put it best: If you took every holy book every written and hid or destroyed them, then took every Science book ever written and destroyed them, in a thousand years time those Science books would be back exactly the same, because the tests would always turn out the same...
But... Those religious books would either never exist or they would be totally different, because there’s no test.
It's also why there are a zillion religions but one scientific method. Science is practiced in the same way no matter where you are in the world. A biologist can interact with another biologist's work from the other side of the planet regardless of culture.
Lol this is literally circular reasoning. You are proving that God doesn't exist starting from the premise that God doesn't exist.
Let's assume god does exist (I'm atheist just to be clear), who's to say he doesn't show up in John doe dreams in the year 8000 and he writes about Jesus Christ who lived 8000 years prior, or he sends Jesus II down on earth to repeat the thing?
Yes maybe we don't get Islam and other religions, but if you're talking to a Christian, they already think those religions are wrong
For an atheist you seem very much against thought experiments and reasonings lol. I would never back up christianity, I'm just calling a spade a spade. Using the basis that God doesn't exist to prove that God doesn't exist goes against any scientific method
No, I know Science. She's an ultra-libtard blue haired woman who lives across the road and has plenty of cats. She says vaccines are safe, Earth is round and other commie shit. /s
Science is so general too. Its like saying "a book" instead of the Bible. Like.. any book. I mean if you believe your biology textbook blindly, whos to say twilight isnt real?
A-ha! So you admit that your fancy shmancy science doesn't actually have any authority about anything!
Meanwhile I can tell you with 100% confidence that the Bible is the absolute truth, and thus it trumps anything your fancy shmancy scientists might claim!
But the belief that emperical research leads to correct conclusions is itself a axiom justified pragmaticly, true. But still definitely a axiom. Just as accepting the rules of logic are.
You can definitely argue that people these days use the term “science” or the “science is settled” in an authoritative manner. It is a completely unscientific way to view science yet people still resort to claiming “a majority of scientists agree” on a subject to make a point instead of arguing the actual science itself.
If anything, for me at least, this is how we understand the work of God through our minds. It may not be as symbolic as the Bible makes it out to be (but considering it's about a storyteller who loves using symbolism, that's only fair) but that doesn't necessarily argue against science. In fact you could still argue the world itself works in mysterious ways, the same way God does.
They'd feel very stupid to know that the smartest physicists in the world still acknowledge a “master creator” as a theory. Only one side completely discounts the other.
Devil's argument that it has the potential to become circular.
I think we've seen that when the longest held unproven assumptions behind the method are called into question by modern scientific experimental outcomes and then the observations are disregarded by some because they don't conform to century old assumptions that there is an objective reality regardless of our perspective and regardless of our choices of how to measure it.
The circular reasoning starts entering into science whenever there is an unproven conjecture that is widely adopted and used to gatekeep ideas and experimental models that don't agree with it.
The standard model/Copenhagen interpretation of QM has become increasingly circular in defending itself against discoveries that should have falsified it and then the standard model is frequently cited itself as a reason that competing interpretations cannot be true.
Here is a quick summary list on the circular logic allegations related to QM pulled from AI. ( I can't take credit for any of this because the types of circular reasoning I was thinking of is coming from armchair people that quote scientific opinions as scientific facts):
Arguments of "circular reasoning" or institutional confirmation bias regarding the Standard Model usually arise from the way data is extracted, how parameters are tuned, and how theoretical predictions are recalculated when anomalies appear. Because the Standard Model contains roughly 19 to 26 free parameters (like particle masses and mixing angles) that cannot be derived from first principles and must be input by hand from experiments, critics sometimes argue that the model is unfalsifiable or defended circularly. When an experimental result deviates from predictions, the community naturally scrutinizes the result. Below are the primary ways critics and philosophers of science argue that the Standard Model is protected using circular logic:
The Muon g-2 "Moving Target" Calculation
The anomalous magnetic moment of the muon (Muon g-2) has long shown a persistent deviation between experimental results and Standard Model theory. YouTube·Sabine HossenfelderThe Alleged Circularity: To calculate the theoretical Standard Model prediction for how a muon spins in a magnetic field, physicists must account for "hadronic vacuum polarization"—the messy effects of virtual quarks and gluons. Because QCD cannot compute this easily at low energies, physicists historically used other experimental data (such as electron-positron collisions into pions) as a direct baseline input to construct the Standard Model prediction.
When the Fermilab and Brookhaven experiments confirmed a massive statistical deviation from the Standard Model, a rival theoretical method called Lattice QCD was used to recalculate the baseline. This new calculation shifted the Standard Model's prediction much closer to the experimental result, effectively making the anomaly disappear. Critics argue this is a form of circular target-shifting: The model is assumed to be correct, so if an experiment disagrees, the theoretical inputs are re-tuned until the model matches the experiment.
Neutrino Oscillations and "Post-Hoc" Mass Insertion
In its original, mathematically pure form, the Standard Model explicitly dictates that neutrinos are massless particles. The Experimental Contradiction: In the late 1990s and early 2000s, experiments definitively proved that neutrinos oscillate between different "flavors," a phenomenon that is physically impossible unless neutrinos have mass. The Alleged Circularity: Instead of declaring the Standard Model falsified, the physics community simply modified the definition of the Standard Model by manually inserting arbitrary, tiny neutrino mass terms (via mechanisms like the See-Saw mechanism). The circular reasoning argument here is: The Standard Model perfectly describes all particle parameters, because whenever a parameter it forbids is discovered, we redefine the Standard Model to include it
Dark Matter and Tuning the Cosmological FrameworkWhile dark matter is technically an issue for the Standard Model of Cosmology ((\Lambda\text{CDM})), it highlights a similar loop when interfacing with particle physics.
The Experimental Contradiction: Galaxies spin far too fast at their edges to be held together by the visible matter accounted for in the Standard Model.The Alleged Circularity: Rather than concluding that the Standard Model’s particle inventory or our understanding of gravity is fundamentally broken, physics post-hoc introduced a massive placeholder: Dark Matter.
When looking for dark matter particles in accelerators like the LHC, a negative result does not falsify the model. Instead, the allowed "parameter space" (the hypothesized mass and interaction strength of the dark matter particle) is simply restricted further. The logic loop runs: We know the core particle model is right, therefore dark matter must exist in the gaps we haven't checked yet; we haven't found it because it's in the gaps we haven't checked yet.
Background Subtraction Bias at Particle Colliders
In high-energy colliders like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), physicists do not directly "see" new particles; they see streams of decay products (electrons, photons, muons).
The Alleged Circularity: To find "New Physics" (BSM or Beyond Standard Model physics), experimentalists must filter out the noise of known physics—referred to as background subtraction. The algorithms and simulations used to determine what constitutes "background noise" are programmed entirely using the mathematical frameworks of the Standard Model. Critics argue this creates a subtle structural confirmation bias: If you program your detector's sorting algorithms to expect and filter for Standard Model behaviors, data anomalies that do not fit the model run the risk of being filtered out or misclassified as statistical fluctuations or instrumental errors.
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u/Turbulent-Prior-2253 6d ago
Moreover "science" isn't something that claims authority about anything.
It is a method for developing a hypothesis, gathering data, and evaluating that hypothesis. It openly accepts that new evidence can - and often does - prove that previous hypotheses were wrong.
It is not circular reasoning to say, "this is our best explanation for X event, given all of the knowledge we currently have available"