SpencerKayR
SpencerKayR t1_j6ui0h8 wrote
Reply to comment by Gripegut in How to be a sceptic | We have an ethical responsibility to adopt a sceptical attitude to everything from philosophy and science to economics and history in the pursuit of a good life for ourselves and others. by IAI_Admin
In order to agree with this, you'd have to agree with the following premises:
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90% of the body of scientific knowledge dreamed up has been proven wrong or incomplete
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The above trend is likely to apply to the scientific knowledge that is considered likely to be true today
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The types of discoveries that show science to be incomplete mean that the old theory wasn't worthwhile and has no use
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This 90% figure can be applied to all the science that laypeople encounter.
The first one is going to be a toss up, especially if you include all the theories which are disproven by testing. If this is being used to reach this figure, it doesn't do a good job of building the case for this premise because it's an example of science working properly, eliminating theories that make inaccurate predictions.
The second is uncertain. We don't know what the future holds, but we know that we're not likely to discover that quantum mechanics is pseudo science on the level of leeches to cure plague. The science that the world uses today to make medications and computers and all the material spectacles we enjoy today has been validated to the point that any new theories will likely give them greater context and not simply wipe them away, much like Einstein's theories didn't completely demolish the theories of Newton and Galileo. Which segues into:
The third premise is pretty easy to dismiss. Newtonian physics has been thoroughly demonstrated to be incomplete, yet his discoveries are still used to guide the trajectories of satellites. Some science keeps being useful even when it's no longer able to describe extremes of our perplexing universe.
The final premise is that this 90% figure, wherever it came from, will prove to be true for the science we learn in high school. This, again, is unlikely, precisely because by the time science becomes a high school topic, it has usually withstood hundreds of years of validation. The most recent science in schools is probably the standard model of the atom, which has been so impossible to disprove that they have to keep making larger and larger super colliders trying to find anything at all to threaten its validity.
So no, I don't think 90% of the scientific knowledge people are meant to have learned will be made completely useless anytime soon. But in the current climate, it's possible that a large percentage of the science people have convinced themselves is true is nonsense, only that it was already proven to be nonsense centuries ago
SpencerKayR t1_izczrqk wrote
What really freaked me out is that it can take a story you've been talking about back and forth and produce story structure breakdowns in a huge variety of formats. You can make it give you three act, five act, save the cat, it's astounding. You can make your own revisions and it will be like, "oh, I see you moved the revelation about the phone call to the midpoint of act 2, that makes sense because blah blah blah"
SpencerKayR t1_j6x76r3 wrote
Reply to comment by Gripegut in How to be a sceptic | We have an ethical responsibility to adopt a sceptical attitude to everything from philosophy and science to economics and history in the pursuit of a good life for ourselves and others. by IAI_Admin
I don't think you're really engaging with what I'm saying. I think that you're introducing a flurry of new premises (in, if I can be honest, a Gish Gallop) in the hopes of tying me up dismissing them. Who's climate predictions? Which ones specifically? Because I could just as easily retort that we've outpaced most predictions from the Inconvenient Truth era of climate understanding, but I suspect that that would have no impact on you just as your casual claims have had no impact on me, because I suspect that you occupy a specific media realm that has supplied you with these talking points. Some of this is just absurd; there's no such thing as a climate model that can predict the temperature with guaranteed accuracy the next day, let alone years in advance. But this doesn't mean that our understanding of the interactions between air masses of varying temperatures and moisture content is a pseudoscience like phrenology. You're not just moving goalposts, you have selected a goalpost on casters you can scoot around at will.