Fabio Manganiello on Nostr: Science (or, better, the scientific method, with its cycles of hypothesis, ...
Science (or, better, the scientific method, with its cycles of hypothesis, observation and validation) isn’t only the best way of knowing the world: it’s the only way.
There’s a deeply anti-scientific sentiment growing in the past few years, powered by enragement-fueled social media and professional disinformation campaigns, that wants you to believe that your intuition is a better way of understanding the world.
Well, intuition is just the subconscious processing of information by your brain. Sometimes it’s correct, sometimes it’s not. How do I know if it is correct? I check it. But as soon as you move from simple intuition to “What would I expect to observe if my intuition was false, and how do I validate it?”, you’re translating your intuition into a falsifiable null hypothesis and applying the scientific method.
Philosophy? Well, philosophy’s business is not of discovering things about the world; it’s in the business of understanding the big picture. It’s in the business of answering questions of meaning, but it’s not in the business of discovering new stuff about the world.
Religion? The moment a set of religious beliefs gives us a comprehensive theory of nature that is equivalent to fundamental physics or evolutionary biology, then I’ll pay attention. But they’re not even close to that. Science provided us with a solid framework that explains nearly everything around us (and we know that those theories are true because we’ve built a lot of things that would only work if electromagnetism, evolutionary biology, Einstein’s relativity or quantum mechanics were true, or at least highly plausible), while many believers in the Abrahamic religions still believe that the world is 6000 years old and was created in 7 days.
And we need to go as far as admitting that you need to understand the scientific method (which doesn’t necessarily to be a scientist) and apply it daily in your life in order to be a good person.
William K. Clifford in his paper The Ethics of Belief argued that it’s always immoral to believe something for which there is no good reason to believe it.
The reason for that is that you’re much more likely to make a mistake if your belief is not grounded in empirical evidence, and so if you knowingly do that, according to Clifford, then it’s unethical.
Cicero argued the same thing two millennia earlier, stating that you should never believe something for which you don’t have sufficient epistemic warrant.
The Stoics argued that if you want to live a good life, you need to understand the world in which you live as much as possible. Because if you don’t understand it, or if you misunderstand it, then you’re going to make bad decisions.
https://bigthink.com/thinking/why-you-must-be-logical-and-scientific-to-be-a-good-person/
There’s a deeply anti-scientific sentiment growing in the past few years, powered by enragement-fueled social media and professional disinformation campaigns, that wants you to believe that your intuition is a better way of understanding the world.
Well, intuition is just the subconscious processing of information by your brain. Sometimes it’s correct, sometimes it’s not. How do I know if it is correct? I check it. But as soon as you move from simple intuition to “What would I expect to observe if my intuition was false, and how do I validate it?”, you’re translating your intuition into a falsifiable null hypothesis and applying the scientific method.
Philosophy? Well, philosophy’s business is not of discovering things about the world; it’s in the business of understanding the big picture. It’s in the business of answering questions of meaning, but it’s not in the business of discovering new stuff about the world.
Religion? The moment a set of religious beliefs gives us a comprehensive theory of nature that is equivalent to fundamental physics or evolutionary biology, then I’ll pay attention. But they’re not even close to that. Science provided us with a solid framework that explains nearly everything around us (and we know that those theories are true because we’ve built a lot of things that would only work if electromagnetism, evolutionary biology, Einstein’s relativity or quantum mechanics were true, or at least highly plausible), while many believers in the Abrahamic religions still believe that the world is 6000 years old and was created in 7 days.
And we need to go as far as admitting that you need to understand the scientific method (which doesn’t necessarily to be a scientist) and apply it daily in your life in order to be a good person.
William K. Clifford in his paper The Ethics of Belief argued that it’s always immoral to believe something for which there is no good reason to believe it.
The reason for that is that you’re much more likely to make a mistake if your belief is not grounded in empirical evidence, and so if you knowingly do that, according to Clifford, then it’s unethical.
Cicero argued the same thing two millennia earlier, stating that you should never believe something for which you don’t have sufficient epistemic warrant.
The Stoics argued that if you want to live a good life, you need to understand the world in which you live as much as possible. Because if you don’t understand it, or if you misunderstand it, then you’re going to make bad decisions.
https://bigthink.com/thinking/why-you-must-be-logical-and-scientific-to-be-a-good-person/