14 KiB
Science
Not to be confused with soyence.
Science (from Latin scientia, knowledge or understanding) in a wide sense means systematic gathering, inference and organization of knowledge, in a more strict, "western" sense this process has to be kept "reasonably rational" by obeying some specific strict rules and adhering to whatever principles of objectivity are currently set: nowadays for example the scientific method or mathematical proof. Sciences in the strict sense include mathematics (so called formal science), physics, biology, chemistry, computer science, as well as "soft sciences" such as psychology, sociology etc. The beauty of science is you don't have to trust anyone: science is just about discovering ideas that work, ideas which anyone can verify himself at home, so there is no place for preachers, reviewers, judges of "trustworthiness" or "credibility"; people do not matter at all in science, only ideas do. For this science must not be confused not only with pseudoscience (such as numerology or astrology) but especially with soyence (political propaganda masked as "science", e.g. gender studies, sponsored "science" of big pharma etc.) -- it must be remembered that when science can no longer be questioned, it seizes to be science, as asking questions and examining EVERYTHING are the very basic premises of a true science: this means that anything prohibited to be questioned, by law or otherwise (e.g. by cancel culture), such as the Holocaust (forbidden to be denied in many countries such as Germany), COVID vaccines, racial differences (prohibited on grounds of "hate speech") and similar topics CANNOT be seen as scientifically established, but rather politically established. Any shift towards establishing principles of trust, belief and "moderation", such as nowadays standard peer censorship, turns science into religion. As with everything once science becomes politically valuable, it will be seized by politicians -- in the capitalist age the science sticker presents a brand and therefore capital; this capital if of course not just left lying around, politicians and businessmen take over it, and so the 21st century definition of science is made by politicians, not scientists.
In the wider sense science may include anything that involves systematic intellectual research, e.g. Buddhists often say their teaching is science rather than religion, that it is searching for objective truths, and it really is true -- a western fedora atheist will shit his pants in fury hearing such claim, however that's all he can really do.
TODO: some noice tree of sciences or smth
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 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 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, 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, 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.
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.
Science is not almighty as brainwashed internet euphoric kids like to think, that's a completely false idea fed to them by the overlords who abuse "science" (soyence) for control of the masses, as religion was and is still used -- soyence is the new religion nowadays. 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 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.
Science is but one of many tools, a helper, NOT a replacement for everything. Big science propaganda nowadays tries to push the idea that unless something is proven by science (or what they themselves call "science"), it is invalid; that we should not assume anything unless science proves it. That's not only very stupid but mainly dangerous, it invalidates any and all knowledge not officially approved by the big science police -- in other words it leads to establishing a totalitarian regime giving a monopoly over truth to the big science. Not even talking about corruption and potential of abuse that we WILL pay for in such case, by relying exclusively on science in everything we immensely cripple our ability to make decisions and throw away all other methods of gaining knowledge. Let us repeat again that not everything can be proven by science and not everything is easy or practically possible to be proven by it. Probably in most situations it is either much more efficient or even the only possible option to rely on knowledge gained in other ways, for example by intuition, educated guess or experience. Most decisions in life are done this way and even if we may get false knowledge this way (just like with science), we can mostly afford the risk and take its consequences, it's usually a good price to pay for being able to make decisions without having to perform rigorous research that will pass the immensely complex big science approval process. It's great if something is (legitimately) proven by science, but until that happens we may, and mostly SHOULD, rely on the next best thing, i.e. knowledge obtained by less reliable methods, e.g. observations of our ancestors regarding stereotypes, lore, advice of craftsmen and so on. If there is no scientific proof neither for nor against something, believing what's obvious is probably the best we can do. Science means questioning even common sense, but when science is powerless (or obscured, too expensive or unusable for any other reason), common sense is still superior.
What should we accept as "legit" science? We, in the context of our ideal society, argue for NOT creating a strict, black and white 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 so as to distinguish today's many times twisted and corrupted "science/soyence" from the real, good and truly useful rational conduct and way of thought. Less retarded science should follow similar principles as our technology, it should be completely free as in freedom, without any business and self interest, i.e. selfless, also suckless as much as possible, clear and unobscured etc. -- especially stressed should be the idea of many people being able to reproduce, test and verify less retarded science (see also freedom distance); 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. Similarly the line between scientists and non-scientists shouldn't be strict, common people should be able to do basic science, reasoning, experiments, calculations and research of literature, but indeed to arrive at such highly advanced stage would require a very long time, to get very close to less retarded society.
Never confuse trusting science with trusting scientists (especially in capitalism and other dystopias), the latter is literally faith (soyence), no different from blindly trusting religious preachers and political propaganda, the former means only trusting that which you yourself can test and verify at home and therefore having real confidence. We are not saying that you should never trust a scientist, only that you should know doing so is just pure relying on someone's word, which in today's society you often cannot afford to do. Also do NOT confuse or equate science with academia. As with everything, under capitalism academia has become rotten to the core, research is motivated by profit and what's produced is mostly utter bullshit shat out by wannabe PhDs who need to mass produce "something" as a part of the crazy academia publish-or-perish game. As with everything in capitalism, the closer you look, the more corruption you find. So wait, can we just trust nothing researched by someone else? It's not so simple: for starters just realize that trusting "the big science" nowadays with anything important (e.g. one's health) is just like entrusting a random stranger in the street something that's valuable to you (actually it's worse because unlike a stranger, entities such as corporations have absolutely no emotion and conscience) -- can you do that? Well, sometimes yes, mostly it's probably a great risk, and generally you want to avoid having to do it. In the past things were better, so you can generally trust "science" that was done much further in the past, i.e. facts you find in old encyclopedias are generally more trustworthy than facts you find on today's internet. LRS would like to establish society in which "big science" would be trustworthy again; until we succeed though, you have to keep distrust in soyence.