[FRIAM] science privilege — fork from acid epistemology

[uǝlƃ ☣]

One thing that might get in the way, here, is that *my* own concept of science values *negative results* as much or more than positive results. When someone says something like "science can't answer X", I look simply for whether interventionist experiments have been done on X. I care very little about whether the results are positive or negative, just that the experiments are being designed and executed. And if they're being done, then the statement "science can't answer X" is false, because the experiments are the science. If experiments are being designed and executed, then science is providing answers ... despite any individual's inability to understand what those answers might mean.

For example:

Politics and Personality: Most of What You Read Is Malarkey
https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/politics-and-personality-most-of-what-you-read-is-malarkey

>From the article:
> At least in the U.S., the party you believe in plays a big role in how you conceive of yourself. It feels good to think that your party is smarter, and that the smarts are what drive people to your party. It also feels good to say that the other guys are psychos. “ ‘It’s spurious, there’s no causal relationship,’ ” Verhulst says. “That could be pretty depressing for people who’ve invested a lot of time in this.” Here’s what won’t make a good headline: “Small and Spurious Correlation Shown to Have Been Backward, but It Doesn’t Matter That Much, Because the Point of the Paper Was That There Is No Underlying Causation After All.”

This does *not* imply, to me, that science can't answer questions about politics and (genetic) traits. It says to me that it *can* and will answer them. If the answer is "there is none", then that's an answer from which we can develop different experiments that help refine that answer. We learn through failure, not through success.


On 3/13/20 7:21 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> [...] And re: (3), I believe you *can* have a science of philosophy. Classifications like "the big 5" (introversion, openness to new experience, ...), correlations between politics and psychological traits, so-called political ethics, etc., however flawed, target the fuzzy boundary between these domains. [...]

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☣ uǝlƃ