Anti-Capitalist Sentiment (with some morality)

[wufwugy]

Anytime you're able to say "this was wrong" or "this was right", you've engaged the scientific method.

Is it fair to say the scientific method has such a narrow definition that it must be conducted stringently in a lab while science communicators like DeGrasse Tyson say things like how kids engage the scientific method all the time?

[a500lbgorilla]

Anytime you're able to say "this was wrong" or "this was right", you've engaged the scientific method.

Holy fucking no.

[wufwugy]

Holy fucking no.

I meant to say science. The method is techniques. It's all still philosophically scientific discovery. Unless you want to say that "science" is exclusively formal.

[a500lbgorilla]

I meant to say science. The method is techniques. It's all still philosophically scientific discovery. Unless you want to say that "science" is exclusively formal.

Science is exclusively the practice which allows us to turn natural reality into human understanding.

We've done this pretty successfully in biology, chemistry, physics, etc. When a physicist makes a human statement about gravity, it's pretty robust because of the methods we used to craft that statement. No statements in economics are crafted by this method.

Statements in economics are crafted through a method of rigorous argumentation and observation. But they fail to have a way to let Nature come in and have its say. There is no step that checks with Nature to make sure we're not way off base.

[MadMojoMonkey]

Anytime you're able to say "this was wrong" or "this was right", you've engaged the scientific method.

If you say, "This was right," then you are not within the realm of scientific statements.

Once again: Failure to disprove is not the same as confirmation of proof.

Take the result over the Higgs Boson. They withheld publication of failure show there was NO Higgs Boson (at a specific energy) until their statistical significance was 5 sigma. That means if the results were due to chance and the experiment was repeated 3.5 million times then it would be expected to see the strength of conclusion in the result no more than once. (In this case, the experiment includes the millions of trials they used to reach the 5-sigma significance, and not merely 3.5 million more trials.)

So the report didn't say, "We found a Higgs Boson." The report said, "We tried to show there there is no Higgs boson yet we continue to observe this anomaly in our results which is rather nicely explained by the theory of the Higgs boson. We were pretty sure that was a false reading, or a fluke or something else besides a Higgs. So we tested a million cajillion times and we simply can't shake this anomaly." We conclude that our experiment fails to disprove the existence of the Higgs boson.

This is NOT confirmation of the Higgs. (Understand that no Higgs boson has ever been directly detected. What has been observed is the decay of a high energy particle which is has an energy and lifespan predicted by Higgs and others.)

Saying there is a 0.00000001% chance that a statement is false is still infinitely more uncertain than saying that a statement is true.