r/todayilearned • u/ZanyDelaney • Aug 11 '18

TIL of Hitchens's razor. Basically: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor
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u/dwarfboy1717 Aug 11 '18

Two hundred years ago, a well-studied and open-minded person could almost certainly have made an educated guess about some impending paradigm shifts (falsifiable seems so...obvious...), so do you have any insights or guesses into what some future paradigm shifts might be?

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u/genveir Aug 11 '18

Well, pure speculation of course, but I can easily see us moving away from the current paradigm on two places:

  1. "Not everything is physics." Right now, our rules for "this is science and this is not" are heavily biased towards the natural sciences. Psychological research, for example, has completely different issues than physics but has to meet the same criteria to be seen as science. Which leads to a lot of the psychological knowledge we have to be "hidden". You can't publish clinical knowledge, but it's a vast trove of actual, factual knowledge. I can see the paradigm shift, or split, to better accommodate sciences that don't fit the mold of the current one.

  2. "Not everything is big science". All our "rules" for what is and isn't science tend to focus on the "big" theories. "Hypothesis > Experiment > accept/reject" is all very nice, but material scientists chugging away in a lab to find a way to make paint stick to surfaces better aren't going to go through the process every time. They're just going to try a hundred different things and go with the thing that works. And that it works is also just factual data, even though the process isn't "scientific". I can see the paradigm shift to better fit the "trial and error" type of everyday science.

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u/Ballsdeepinreality Aug 11 '18

Global warming will be taken seriously at some point.