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**There is no simple objective definition of a strict science** -- the definition of science is hugely arbitrary, political and changes with development of society, technology, culture, changes in government and so on. Science should basically stand for the most rational and objective knowledge we're able to practically obtain about something, however the specific criteria for this are unclear and have to be agreed on -- even if we leave out malicious intents at shaping the definition of science and only consider a completely honest definition of "rational effort", what's "rational" is highly subjective -- What level of confidence is high enough to us? Which axioms to accept? Which methods do we believe to be reliable enough? To believe a mathematical proof is correct, is it enough if 5 experts check there is no mistake? Or does it have to be 20 experts? Even among top scientists there are always subjective opinions. The [scientific method](scientific_method.md) is evolving and there are many debates over it, with some even stating that there can be no universal method of science. The [p-value](p_value.md) used to determine whether measurements are statistically significant has basically just an arbitrarily set value for what's considered a "safe enough" result. Some say that if a research is to be trusted, it has to be [peer reviewed](peer_review.md), i.e. that what's scientific has to be approved by chosen experts -- this may be not just because people can make mistakes but also because in current highly competitive society there appears science [bloat](bloat.md), obscurity and tendencies to push fake research and purposeful deception, i.e. our politics and culture are already defining what science is. However the stricter the criteria for science, the more monopolized, centralized, controlled and censored it becomes.
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**Summary of the western-style science**, for those who never attended elementary school or got amnesia or something, is basically this: science uses so called *scientific method* to acquire knowledge. Scientific method works more or less like this: first we formulate a hypothesis, i.e. something we think might be true and which we want to test (for example: "men are on average smarter than women"). Then we perform experiments and observations, i.e. collect data (for example we make men and women take IQ tests). Then we evaluate the data and basically compute how likely it is, according to the data, that our hypothesis holds. More precisely we compute so called *p-value* which is basically a probability of obtaining the data we got provided that our hypothesis is NOT true (we call this a *null hypothesis*), i.e. we say "the data look like this either because our hypothesis is true or by pure chance, while the probability of the latter is X (given by p-value)". If the probability *X* is very very low, we are basically saying that either our hypothesis is correct, or we witnessed a miracle (e.g. men scored 10 points higher average on IQ tests than women either because they're really smarter or by all of them being extremely lucky that day, probability of which is extremely low). This is how things are "proven" in western science. However notice that the possibility of a statistical miracle is always there and so **with scientific method we can never prove a hypothesis true with absolute certainty**, we can only approach high level of confidence.
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**Science is not almighty** as brainwashed internet [euphoric](atheism.md) kids like to think, that's a completely false idea fed to them by the overlords who abuse "science" ([soyence](soyence.md)) for control of the masses, as religion was and is still used -- soyence is the new religion [nowadays](21st_century.md). Yes, (true) science is great, it is an awesome tool, but it is just that -- a tool, usable for SOME tasks, not a [silver bullet](silver_bullet.md) that could be used for everything. What can be discovered by science is in fact quite limited, exactly because it purposefully LIMITS itself only to accept what CAN be proven and so remains silent about everything else (which however doesn't mean there lies no knowledge or value in the everything else or in other approaches to learning) -- see e.g. Godel's incompleteness theorems that state it is mathematically impossible to really prove validity of mathematics, or the nice compendium of all knowability limitations at http://humanknowledge.net/Thoughts.html. For many (if not most) things we deal in life science is either highly impractical (do you need to fund a peer reviewed research to decide what movie you'll watch today?) or absolutely useless (setting one's meaning of life, establishing one's basic moral values, placing completely random bets, deciding to trust or distrust someone while lacking scientifically relevant indicators for either, answering metaphysical questions such as "Why is there ultimately something rather than nothing?", anything that cannot be falsified, if only for practical reasons etc.). So don't be Neil de Grass puppet and stop treating science as your omnipotent pimplord, it's just a hammer useful for bashing some specific nails.
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**What should we accept as "legit" science?** [We](lrs.md), in the context of our [ideal society](less_retarded_society.md), argue for NOT creating a strict definition of science, just as we are for example against "formalizing morality" with laws etc. There are no hard lines between good and evil, fun and boring, useful and useless, bloated and minimal, and so also there is no strict line between science and non-science. What is and is not science is to be judged on a case-by-case basis and can be disagreed on without any issue, science cannot be a mass produced stream of papers that can automatically be marked OK or NOT OK. We might define the term **[less retarded science](less_retarded_science.md)** so as to distinguish today's many times twisted and corrupted "science/[soyence](soyence.md)" from the real, good and truly useful science. Less retarded science should follow similar principles as [our technology](lrs.md), it should be completely free as in freedom, [selfless](selflessness.md), [suckless](suckless.md) as much as possible, unobscured etc. -- especially stressed should be the idea of many people being able to reproduce less retarded science; e.g. Newton's law of gravitation is less retarded because it can easily be verified by anyone, while the existence of Higgs boson is not -- this freedom of science can be measured with [freedom distance](freedom_distance.md).
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