What is Science?

[Zosimus]

Science works a lot better at expanding our understanding of the world than that, and you should know that. You are comparing apples to oranges. Do you propose we sit around and do nothing? We want to understand the world around us, science is a means of doing that. If you find it unacceptable, then what do you do to understand the world?

So a method that its own defenders admit is wrong 80 percent of the time is "expanding our understanding of the world?" That sounds suspiciously like an article of faith rather than something that can be backed up by hard evidence.

You are like a person who is wearing a type of sneaker and proudly pointing out all the apples that you picked while wearing the sneaker. "Without it," you claim, "none of these apples would have been picked."

Well, I doubt that. However, I do notice that you have nicely gotten all the low-hanging fruit. What about the ones that are quite out of reach? What are your sneakers going to do about them?

"Sooner or later my sneakers will get them." Great. Good luck with that.

Personally, I figure that a method that is wrong 80 percent of the time is inferior to just flipping a coin. At least that is right half of the time.

 

[PsychoSarah]

So a method that its own defenders admit is wrong 80 percent of the time is "expanding our understanding of the world?" That sounds suspiciously like an article of faith rather than something that can be backed up by hard evidence.

80% of the time? Maybe if you count the entirety of human history, but the process becomes more and more accurate with new discoveries and better observational technologies. That, and count the people that use it incorrectly. Individual scientific experiments usually have an accuracy of around 90-99%, and each repeat of those experiments makes the accuracy of the results even higher. Professional scientists usually aim for no greater than a 5% margin of error.

You are like a person who is wearing a type of sneaker and proudly pointing out all the apples that you picked while wearing the sneaker. "Without it," you claim, "none of these apples would have been picked."

While that would be obvious fallacy, that would be a claim made without an experiment. Also, what if the ground was too rocky to travel without shoes? Then I could honestly say that I wouldn't have picked apples without the shoes, because I wouldn't have been able to get to them without cutting up my feet, and therefore would have not gone outside.

Well, I doubt that. However, I do notice that you have nicely gotten all the low-hanging fruit. What about the ones that are quite out of reach? What are your sneakers going to do about them?

Nothing, of course, but I fail to see how this relates to science, and not philosophy. These are philosophy designed problems, and philosophy doesn't do actual experiments.

"Sooner or later my sneakers will get them." Great. Good luck with that.

That's just playing around with semantics. I can infer tons of ways the sneakers can be necessary to pick the apples, without them literally picking the apples. Experiments account for those possibilities, when done correctly. That's what positive and negative control groups are for.

Personally, I figure that a method that is wrong 80 percent of the time is inferior to just flipping a coin. At least that is right half of the time.

I would like a citation for this 80 percent you bring up.

 

[justlookinla]

That must be why you trust science every day of your life, without science you and I would not be alive today, disease and hunger would have got us or our parents years ago, my great grand mother had 11 children (and I suspect countless miscarriages) and only 4 survived long enough to have children of their own, my grand mother had 9 and 6 of them survived, to my knowledge they were all God fearing people but a lot of good it did them, it seems Gods kill not matter what people believe.

No doubt science has provided advances in medicine which have been beneficial, generally speaking. Some of these advances have come at the expense of individuals who were treated with ineffective and/or detrimental medical treatments.

GMO foods may, or many not, offer benefits to mankind, only time will tell.

Science isn't the answer to everything, just some things.

 

[joshua 1 9]

Because god purposely doesn't let people understand by any means that is actually measurable. But anyways, we should stop derailing threads with unrelated theological discussions, it's annoying the crap out of people.

This is a paradox. Everything is measurable but you have to know what to measure.

 

[katerinah1947]

Wow. You measured something. What an impressive scientist you are.

Well, Dr. Scientist, here's a challenge for you. There is a rule that governs a set of three numbers. You do not know the rule, but you can perform experiments to determine what the rule is. You propose a set of three numbers, and I will tell you "pass" if it conforms to the rule or "fail" if it does not conform to the rule.

Previous researchers have done the following experiments. Dr. X experimented with 2, 4, 8 and was successful. Dr. Y experimented with 1, 1, 1 and was not successful because the second set of numbers does not conform to the rule.

Your goal, then, is to derive the rule using experiments. Please propose your first set of numbers, and I will tell you whether the numbers conform to the rule. By doing so, you should be able to derive the rule.

What are your first three numbers?

Hi,

Wow that's a bit insulting. "Wow I measured something. What an impressive scientist you are." you said.

After a scoff like that, you are hardly worth answering. And your test is invalid. If all it took to do research is and was to solve math problems, then everyone would be a troubleshooting researcher.

What it takes to do research, is not what you are proposing.

LOVE,

 

[katerinah1947]

Just as plenty of inventions have been made by non-scientists. Marion Donovan invented disposable diapers (nappies). She was a housewife.

People innovate all the time. Science has no monopoly on innovation.

Hi,

What does science and monopoly have in common?

I think I will post the link here for logical falllacies. In plain language that is how your thinking is illogical.

http://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/ENGL1311/fallacies.htm

I think you will find yourself somewhere in there. The relationship between inventions and scientists is hardly a good one. It is rather secondary, as most of the scientists I have worked with say that 90% of them will never have an invention.

A lot of science is support. Sometimes a person invents things. Sometimes he gives inventions away. Ron, I forget his last name, in and about 1980 way before anyone had made a RISC 32 byte word length computer, made one for an e-beam photolithography machine, as the bit map to tell the electron beam when to turn off and on, had to do that at 300MHz, in those days. Scudder. I think his last name was Scudder.
Anyway after completing the e-beam machine which took longer than exected as we are all shifting to other projects, he decided to go to the computer side of the company. He found out what they were teaching is what he had already designed and built years ago, and could have sold at a hefty price. That is typical of researchers. The vast majority of them and us, do not care about money per se. We do not.

My wish then was for them just to pay me enough money so I did not have to think about that and could spend my time kicking myself for not increasing the temperature of the Poly Silicon during laser recrystallization, as that is all that was needed to form single crystal silicon of device quality,,,,,,probably.

Innovations and science are related. Science gives people the tools to innovate, not the reverse.

LOVE,

 

[katerinah1947]

No.
Science starts from the premise that they are not right. Such as "We are going to try and show this process does not happen this way."

Hi,

And when they can't prove it wrong, that's when the fun starts.

LOVE,

 

[katerinah1947]

Why is science wrong at times? If "replicatable and testable" results yield the same conclusion each and every time, wouldn't this mean that the scientists who are interpreting the results are either untruthful or incompetent.....or both?

Hi,

What do you mean wrong?
Yes, some scientists lie.
Yes, some are incompetent.
Yes, sometimes someone sees or understands something at a higher level.

Newton is totally accurate, at low velocities.
Newton is still accurate at higher velocities once Einstiens corrections are put in for that.
Is Newton wrong at near light speed? Yes.
Is Newton wrong at much lower than light speeds? No.

All of the above are replicatable, the only error for Newton that I know of is that his work did not account for high velocities.

LOVE,

 

[katerinah1947]

But the cool thing about science is that it has mechanisms built in to get rid of these things. Scientists get others to go over their work, repeat their experiments and put their results to the test. If one scientist makes a mistake, or has the wrong equipment, or has a contaminated sample, chances are that most other scientists won't, so the error can be found.

And this is why we can never fully trust science, generally speaking.[/QUOTE]

Hi,

Be careful with that word of your fully.

LOVE,

 

[katerinah1947]

So a method that its own defenders admit is wrong 80 percent of the time is "expanding our understanding of the world?" That sounds suspiciously like an article of faith rather than something that can be backed up by hard evidence.

You are like a person who is wearing a type of sneaker and proudly pointing out all the apples that you picked while wearing the sneaker. "Without it," you claim, "none of these apples would have been picked."

Well, I doubt that. However, I do notice that you have nicely gotten all the low-hanging fruit. What about the ones that are quite out of reach? What are your sneakers going to do about them?

"Sooner or later my sneakers will get them." Great. Good luck with that.

Personally, I figure that a method that is wrong 80 percent of the time is inferior to just flipping a coin. At least that is right half of the time.

Hi,

My correlations at work were almost always 1:1. I used experiments to prove or disprove things. Where are you getting that 80 wrong idea from?

Even if I had to use statistics, simple ones, with later work I can usually refine something to a 1:1 Correlation. That is 100% right, not 80% wrong.

Maybe you have an unusual definition of right and wrong, that is not what is normally used in science.

LOVE,

 

[katerinah1947]

No doubt science has provided advances in medicine which have been beneficial, generally speaking. Some of these advances have come at the expense of individuals who were treated with ineffective and/or detrimental medical treatments.

GMO foods may, or many not, offer benefits to mankind, only time will tell.

Science isn't the answer to everything, just some things.

Hi,

Yes some of us even blew ourselves up accidentally giving the world things like transitors. Most of the scientists I know, are almost selfless. It is one of their best features.

LOVE,

 

[katerinah1947]

No doubt science has provided advances in medicine which have been beneficial, generally speaking. Some of these advances have come at the expense of individuals who were treated with ineffective and/or detrimental medical treatments.

GMO foods may, or many not, offer benefits to mankind, only time will tell.

Science isn't the answer to everything, just some things.

Hi,

And advances in just about everything else including religion. Galileo did that.

LOVE,

 

[justlookinla]

Hi,

What do you mean wrong?

I mean not right.

Yes, some scientists lie.
Yes, some are incompetent.
Yes, sometimes someone sees or understands something at a higher level.

Newton is totally accurate, at low velocities.
Newton is still accurate at higher velocities once Einstiens corrections are put in for that.
Is Newton wrong at near light speed? Yes.
Is Newton wrong at much lower than light speeds? No.

All of the above are replicatable, the only error for Newton that I know of is that his work did not account for high velocities.

LOVE,

Now, transfer that to the guesses and suppositions of evolution, the topic of the forum.

 

[justlookinla]

Hi,

And advances in just about everything else including religion. Galileo did that.

LOVE,

Would that include the 'advance' that humanity is not a creation of God?

 

[Bradly Capel]

If all we had was the sermon on the mount that would be all we need. Jesus could pretty well teach it all in one sermon.

Who wrote the sermon on the mount and when was it written?

I believe the atonement is twofold. Jesus died to reconcile us with the Father and He died to reconcile us with each other. He reduced it all down to treating others the way you what to be treated. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul & strength and love your neighbor as yourself. This is all of the law and all of the prophets and all of the commandments. All of the Bible can be summed up in one word: Love. God's love for us and His desire for us to walk in Love and to love one another. No matter how people treat us, we are to show love to them.

Is it because of Gods love millions of babies die every year before they are five? you are dreaming.

 

[Bradly Capel]

Science isn't the answer to everything, just some things.

Religions are never the answer for anything because they give no answers, people just think they do.

 

[joshua 1 9]

Who wrote the sermon on the mount and when was it written?

The sermon on the mount was written by Matthew. I do not know the exact year, you could do a google search and look it up. It would have been sometime between 40 ad and 70 ad. The last to be written was Revelation by John. He was the disciple that lived the longest. That could have been written after the temple was destroyed in 70 AD when he was exiled to the Island of Patmos. They have a software now that they can use to determine who wrote what.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/29/an-israeli-algorithm-shed_n_886996.html

Is it because of Gods love millions of babies die every year before they are five? you are dreaming.

If that is your reasoning then God must love babies because the birth rate is very very high right now. Much higher then it was before the doctors started to wash their hands. You can not blame God for the mess that man and the devil has made out of this world. His plan is redemption and restoration for who so ever is willing to be saved.

John 3:16 "For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life."

 

[Zosimus]

80% of the time? Maybe if you count the entirety of human history, but the process becomes more and more accurate with new discoveries and better observational technologies. That, and count the people that use it incorrectly. Individual scientific experiments usually have an accuracy of around 90-99%, and each repeat of those experiments makes the accuracy of the results even higher. Professional scientists usually aim for no greater than a 5% margin of error.


While that would be obvious fallacy, that would be a claim made without an experiment. Also, what if the ground was too rocky to travel without shoes? Then I could honestly say that I wouldn't have picked apples without the shoes, because I wouldn't have been able to get to them without cutting up my feet, and therefore would have not gone outside.

Nothing, of course, but I fail to see how this relates to science, and not philosophy. These are philosophy designed problems, and philosophy doesn't do actual experiments.

That's just playing around with semantics. I can infer tons of ways the sneakers can be necessary to pick the apples, without them literally picking the apples. Experiments account for those possibilities, when done correctly. That's what positive and negative control groups are for.

I would like a citation for this 80 percent you bring up.

Eighty percent of non-randomized studies are later convincingly refuted.

You will find 13,700 hits for that at https://www.google.com.pe/webhp?sou...randomized studies later convincingly refuted

The original source was an article on the Atlantic entitled "Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science." This article is no longer available on its original website, but a Google search pulls up multiple PDF files, which may or may not contain the original article.

Now, I am well aware that scientists claim that science is accurate because the p-value of 0.05 prevents 95 percent of false findings. This is completely false. To take a simple example, if we imagine that 20 teams are independently studying whether reading the Bible causes an increase in cancer risk, what is the likelihood that a positive correlation will be found?

35.8 percent all teams find no correlation.
37.7 percent chance one team finds a positive correlation.
18.9 percent chance two teams find a positive correlation.
6.0 percent chance three teams find a positive correlation.
1.3 percent chance four teams find a positive correlation.
and most of the remaining 0.3 percent chance will be consumed by five teams finding a positive correlation.

These numbers don't even include p-hacking.

You see, the basic problem is that you don't understand math. You think that if a specific study has a 95 percent confidence interval that there's only a 5 percent chance that the conclusion is wrong. In reality, that p-value tells you absolutely nothing. P-values are not as reliable as many people assume.

To determine whether you understand p-values, please answer the following questions true or false:

1. If p=0.05 then the null hypothesis has only a 5 percent chance of being true.
2. A non-significant difference (p>0.05) means that there is no difference between the groups.
3. A statistically significant finding is clinically important.
4. Studies with p-values on opposite sides of 0.05 are conflicting.
5. Studies with the same p-value provide the same evidence against the null hypothesis.
6. P=0.05 means that we have discovered evidence that would occur only 5 percent of the time under the null hypothesis.
7. P=0.05 and p less than or equal to 0.05 mean the same thing.
8. P-values are best written as inequalities (i.e., p<0.02 when p=0.015).
9. P=0.05 means that if you reject the null hypothesis, your probability of a type I error is only 5 percent.
10. With a p=0.05 threshold for significance, the chance of a type I error will be 5%
11. You should use a one-sided p-value when you don't care about a result in one direction or a difference in that direction is impossible.
12. A scientific conclusion or treatment policy should be based on whether the p-value is significant.

Check your answers by clicking here.

 

[Zosimus]

Hi,

What does science and monopoly have in common?

I think I will post the link here for logical falllacies. In plain language that is how your thinking is illogical.

http://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/ENGL1311/fallacies.htm

I think you will find yourself somewhere in there. The relationship between inventions and scientists is hardly a good one. It is rather secondary, as most of the scientists I have worked with say that 90% of them will never have an invention.

A lot of science is support. Sometimes a person invents things. Sometimes he gives inventions away. Ron, I forget his last name, in and about 1980 way before anyone had made a RISC 32 byte word length computer, made one for an e-beam photolithography machine, as the bit map to tell the electron beam when to turn off and on, had to do that at 300MHz, in those days. Scudder. I think his last name was Scudder.
Anyway after completing the e-beam machine which took longer than exected as we are all shifting to other projects, he decided to go to the computer side of the company. He found out what they were teaching is what he had already designed and built years ago, and could have sold at a hefty price. That is typical of researchers. The vast majority of them and us, do not care about money per se. We do not.

My wish then was for them just to pay me enough money so I did not have to think about that and could spend my time kicking myself for not increasing the temperature of the Poly Silicon during laser recrystallization, as that is all that was needed to form single crystal silicon of device quality,,,,,,probably.

Innovations and science are related. Science gives people the tools to innovate, not the reverse.

LOVE,

Proof by anecdote. I stand corrected.

 

[Zosimus]

Hi,

Wow that's a bit insulting. "Wow I measured something. What an impressive scientist you are." you said.

After a scoff like that, you are hardly worth answering. And your test is invalid. If all it took to do research is and was to solve math problems, then everyone would be a troubleshooting researcher.

What it takes to do research, is not what you are proposing.

LOVE,

The test is not invalid. It's a test of confirmation bias. I simply wanted to see how you would go about doing things, but you have refused to take the test. Perhaps you know that you will fail.