Science, Art, Litt, Science based Art & Science Communication
Science has its own corrective mechanisms
A science writer: L asked if I have faith in science. I do not. Science is a mode of thinking and investigation, not a faith.
I view science with skepticism because I am aware that it is done by human beings, and that it is subject to political pressures at every level from supervisor through section to institution to funding bodies and governments at all levels.
We strive to be objective but it is not within human capacity to be totally objective. We do the best we can and we hope other scientists do that too. However we need to b aware that it does not always happen that way, and it helps to understand some of the reasons why not.
It is a bit of a stretch to class politics as science. It is raw intuitive human interaction, not science although it can be studied scientifically from a distance.
My reply:
You won't be able to get past peer review and the tough analysis of your colleagues if your work is done under the influence of politics or other pressures. That way science is very open to criticism - so wide open that people are dumping even rubbish in it. But rubbish doesn't stand a chance in the long run. And such influences are miniscule and correctable. Science has its own corrective mechanisms. Science is built on the strong foundation of self-correction. Scientific community sees to it that studies are sound and can be reproduced by other scientists in separate labs. An erratum is issued when errors are relatively minor, and do not invalidate the basic assumptions and conclusions of the study as a whole. A retraction is issued when the study is no longer valid. A retraction withdraws, refutes or reverses the entire scientific finding. Paper retraction is a near-perfect guillotine, heartless perhaps, but an alarmingly potent tool for self-correction in science.
A relentless storm is reshaping the way science is conveyed and received today. Fraud and error are harder to hide, because of the democratising influence of technology and the world wide web. Plagiarism-detecting software, which can scan a paper and give a report within minutes, is widely available. Replication or manipulation of images is easier to sleuth out, because most papers are now widely available in digital versions viewable from any computer. The rise of online post-publication peer review (2) is also reshaping the scientific endeavour before our very eyes (1). It was found that papers which received public discussion had a sevenfold greater correction or retraction rate. To make the whole process more transparent there is a service called CrossMark. For journals that subscribe to CrossMark, every paper is stamped with a digital logo, and any researcher can, at any time, even years hence, click on the logo to see if a paper has been cited, corrected, updated or retracted (1).
Asking for access to raw scientific data of scientists' work before publishing their papers is another way of stopping frauds.
Objectivity or subjectivity must bend its head and submit itself to rigorous testing and correction. Otherwise it is not science.
That is the difference between science and other subjects, Mr. H
Scientists do very hard work, trying to control their emotions, fighting several pressures from both inside and outside of their field and try to give the world their best. All that just to dismiss with a wave of your hand and say ''Science is no big deal and is like any other subject"? This is very unfair.
Whether you trust science or not is in your right to do so, but one should not give unreasonable reasons for it and subject science to humiliation and misunderstanding.
Doesn't matter, fortunately people like you are less and more and more people trust and respect science more than any thing in this world now. This is a fact!
References:
1. http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/are-retraction-wars-a-sign-that-...
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on
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227
The scientific method is random guessing, or rather, it starts with random guessing. Scientists are not prophets; they're not special individuals inspired to speak only truth.
(Of course, I'm exaggerating a bit when I say this guessing is random. It isn't. It's guided by theory, mathematical modeling, and a certain amount of intuition, so the guesses of scientists are very much educated guesses. But what is an educated guess? We have a tendency to denigrate certain guesses by calling them "random," and praise others by calling them "educated," but at the end of the day, a guess is a guess. Every guess is unique and arbitrary; it's not obliged to be true.)
The trick is all in how we test these things—and the fact that we test these things at all. It's not that scientists aren't wrong; they just clean up after themselves. We throw away the guesses that just don't work. The history of science may seem smooth and inevitable, but it's littered with dead ends, red herrings, and lives wasted trying to vindicate cherished hypotheses—guesses, in other words, that turned out not to be correct.
You can think of the scientific method as a sort of genetic algorithm. Even if its hypotheses were originally randomly distributed, every generation of ideas is subjected to testing against reality, and only relatively accurate theories survive this testing to seed the next generation of ideas. All of this results in a surprisingly rapid convergence towards a reasonable accurate view of reality.
(I've seen genetic algorithms churning away on my computer, and it never fails to delight and entertain me how uncannily they converge on a solution!)--
How do we know that the scientific method returns more accurate results than random guessing?
Easy. By measurement ! Random guessing means you use a coin flip to make your decision. So part of the scientific method is measuring the results obtained to see if they are better than random guessing. Then again, if ordinary humans are doing the measuring, they might make mistakes. So how do we know ?
Easy. The scientific method recognizes this problem and takes steps to reduce mistakes. That is to say, controls are added to the experimental procedures to detect these errors. In many cases double blind experiments are implemented to insure that the measurements are accurate.
But your questions asks how do we know. I'm glad you didn't limit the question to your own knowledge. So I assume by "we" you are saying "okay, we know science is accurate, but how do we know this". Indeed, in this modern technological era, its obvious that science works. Moreover, as time goes on, science improves in reliability because it tends to strip away methods that don't seem to be working.
Conclusion :
We don't know anything with absolutely certainty. Science is no exception, but its rather obvious to most of "us" that the scientific method has a good track record. But the pronoun "us" is meant to exclude people that put their trust in astrology or other pseudo sciences. In other words, those of "us" that are wary of wishful thinking, are reassured that the scientific method includes the directive of taking whatever steps can be taken to avoid fooling yourself.
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Random guessing ends at the guess. The scientific method observes a phenomenon, and proposes a hypothesis that could explain the phenomenon (you could call this a guess), but then there is another step: conducting experiments to see if the hypothesis is true. This is done by testing to see if the hypothesis can make successful predictions about future phenomena.
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The plausible reasons for achieving accurate results by a scientific method is only because we eliminate the probable mistakes or reduce them to a large extent.
I'm assuming that by a scientific method you mean a science experiment.
Before desigining an experiment we scale it from the start to the end calculating all the risks involved, methods applied, improving the way of conducting the experiment and so on. In an indirect way we are calculating the best possible answer that can prove to be pragmatic and at the same time applicable in a real time situation.
Example:
In a bag we have 2 red and 2 blue colour balls by guessing we can say that the first ball we pick would be a red/ yellow but not sure
Desing an experiment do the math and you would come up with a better result not just for the first time you pick, but even after a couple of times you can be able to justify what kind of colour ball you will pick up.Because scientific method works!
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