Tom Sawyer

Substantiating his assertions would mean giving evidentiary support that would enable people to accept or reject the hypotheses that his assertions are based on. This would destroy the world.

Keith&Co.

Yes, what IS it with the 'pearls before swine' syndrome? People post, their posts are not hailed as the millennial advancement of the philosophy of _______, they decide that everyone here is biased against them personally or the philosophical advancement of the millennium.

badger3k

But there are other animals that use tools, and therefore tool use is natural. All the scientific method does is make the process that we use everyday into formalized steps. People were making axes and hammers out of rocks long before "science" (why do I get the feeling that this should be capitalized like it is some concrete thing?) came around.

Referring to the OPs seeming nihilism, extinctions themselves occur all the time with or without technology. Humans have made it easier, but we also have the ability to learn from mistakes (something that is also part of scientific inquiry, which is definitely a strength and not a weakness). I have to admit that much of what The Dollar is saying makes absolutely no sense to me. It seems to boil down to "Science Bad!".

If I remember correctly, the average lifespan of a species is something like a million years or so (from a Point of Inquiry podcast, I think), and so it is natural that eventually everything that lives goes extinct. Why is that a big deal? :huh:

Sorry, I just don't understand the point of this discussion.

badger3k

Well, if they are growing a limited type of crop, then that would indeed lower the biodiversity of that area, at least as far as plants are concerned (and also factoring in the typical diversity of plants in that location). You also have to consider the animals and other organisms that may be killed/displaced, and balance that with the animals and organisms that will move into the area, which is a long way of saying that you could be correct but IIRC farmed areas do indeed have less biodiversity (so probably not) - but I could be wrong.

I think the OP has a problem with human desires (such as greed) and lack of self-control (short-term as opposed to long-term thinking and goal setting, for example). How this is "Science"s fault, or how "mathematics and chance" could correct this I am not sure, unless we become cybermen. But that would take technology, so that isn't it.

Maybe we can figure out the math behind the universe and use the formula to transform ourselves (much like "Gypsy" from the Well of Souls series, or Johnny Quick from the old All-Star Squadron (and more)).

Keith&Co.

Well, any amount of land dedicated to farming a crop would reduce the biodiversity in that land, sure. But the claim was that agricultural technology was reducing biodiversity. AT would be likeliest to increase the amount of food produced by a given acre. So for each acre already given over to crop production, better farming techniques, better farming or harvesting machinery or better irrigation would reduce the requirement to increase the area dedicated to the crop.

badger3k

That is true. I was also looking at the picture that land that does not go to farming could also be used to house the growing population, thereby reducing biodiversity further, but that depends on the area. If the expanding population of Brazil, for example, used the more technologically sophisticated farming, the land that might be burned and cleared for agriculture would be reduced. Of course, the land could go for lumber, or grazing land, or for the newest Disneyland, or whatever the people want.

Now, that greatly expands the original line of thought, but I just wanted to add that for the peanut gallery. There are always many factors that can affect a situation, and technology is just one. It is a method, a tool, and a means, but the end is decided by people and the countless interactions between them (and within them, as in thoughts, ideology, etc).

For the OP, given the dislike of science in general, do you feel that we should get rid of evidence-based medicine, vaccines, modern delivery rooms, and the like? Should more women die in childbirth, and more children die of diseases, or is science good in that regard? I really am curious to see what you opinion is.

edit - I'm looking at this from a biological/ecological angle, so my apologies for getting a bit detailed.

Keith&Co.

Which is, still, not 'agricultural science destroying biodiversity.' It may contribute towards, but it is not the cause.


more to the point, does $-san really expect everyone to stop using vaccines, medicines and basic hygiene, because it's from tainted science, and just stand by to watch the surplus population die off?

badger3k

Agree 100% with both of these points. No answer so far.

Bueller. Bueller. ...

lazcatluc

There are many potentially fundamental flaws in the scientific method. Most of them have been discussed at length by various philosophers of science. From the top of my head:



1. The problem of induction.

The Sun shines every morning. You wake up every morning and you observe this. You make up a theory that explains why the Sun shines every morning. You test that theory over and over again. It becomes science. You believe (in) it.

Of course, that's a simplistic way of thinking about science but the point that Bertrand Russell in "On Induction" makes is that our confidence in science is a potentially incorrect (and certainly something we take for granted) inductive belief that we are entitled to believe that whatever has happened in the past in a certain way will happen in the future in much the same way. Read the text if you haven't already, it's worth your time.



2. The "realism versus instrumentalism" philosophical debate.

What is the ontological status of scientific objects? How do we know which of our concepts are just useful mental patterns that help our theory's credibility and which of them really exist? Ether was used for many years as a very useful mental pattern that helped us understand the world in a certain (fundamentally flawed) way. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a scientific perspective. It certainly was because it was a falsifiable perspective (which, incidentally, became falsified with the Michelson-Morley experiment). Someone was asking "are you saying that it's possible that we deny that water is H2O in the future?". I say that not only it's possible but it's possible that, should a well thought future experiment be performed, we might "understand" that the concept of hydrogen is fundamentally flawed, much like the concept of phlogiston is today.

So where does this leave us? Well, a little frustrated, of course. Instrumentalism is the view that we don't care about the reality of our scientific concepts. What we care about is getting the job done (the "shut up and calculate" interpretation of quantum mechanics is the best example of instrumentalism in scientific thought). Many scientist try to resolve their own cognitive dissonances by adopting this view, though I see that here on this thread most of the people are hard-core realists.



3. The social aspect of science.

How does a scientific community function? what are its manifest functions and purposes? does it have any latent functions? what is the distribution of power behind the peer-review process? how does funding of scientific research affect the discoveries of science? who does science really serve in the end, the general public or some elite? is scientific progress absolute or is it similar to darwinian adaptation of ideas in an everchanging world?

These are important questions asked recently by sociologists of science like Robert K. Merton and Michel Foucault and by philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend (and many others; this is one of the hottest area of philosophical and sociological research at the moment). I won't get into any of them because they are huge topic themselves but I think it's clear how some fundamental problems arise here.

Athrond

How about using the scientific method to actually put up some evidence of all you are saying?