Science

Science is a robust branch of metaphysics that specializes in the knowable, known, and potentially knowable. It starts with what people consider common sense, then develops as a story to clarify whether that sense is accurate.

The specific method for scientific understanding is an established procedure designed to remove individual bias:

1. Ask a question.
   • Someone must be able to test and observe that question’s answer.
   • This question comes from a desire to discover facts, but the rest of the steps are a story that concludes with communicating the findings.
2. Do background research.
   • Investigate any existing discoveries from publications, past data, wikis, anecdotes, and personal experiences.
   • Good scientists work hard to suspend all judgment as they thoroughly sift through the information, though they can never be entirely precise.
3. Build an educated guess (i.e., a “hypothesis”).
   • It doesn’t have to make sense, but must be logical.
4. Test that guess with an experiment.
   • All experiments require identifying numbers (quantitative) or qualities (qualitative).
   • Whenever possible, have a “control” and “test” group to compare differences.
   • Sometimes, the experiments are merely focused observations.
5. Analyze the data from the experiment, then conclude something.
   • Break the information into tables, charts, and graphs to find patterns, a bit like the creative process.
   • Keep many notes about how you got the data so anyone else can get the same results if they reproduce your conditions.
   • The conclusion should be so blatantly obvious that any other sane person with the same evidence will infer the same conclusion.
6. Communicate the results and get feedback.
   • The communication step is loaded with politics and bias from human nature, though many in the scientific community believe the system is self-correcting.
   • If the results diverge from convention or tradition, the feedback will likely create controversy.
   • Often, editing the presentation of the scientific paper can advance the controversial result through virtue signaling the community’s pre-existing beliefs.

Science has limits

Science is a method, so it can give answers to questions, but never provides those questions. Those come from the curiosity of people wishing to know, fear of what would happen if they don’t know, or some form of personal gain through the publishing process.

All scientific theories can only represent 2 possibilities:

1. Theories known to be wrong, since they were sufficiently tested and adequately rejected.
2. Theories that haven’t been affirmed as wrong yet, not falsified yet, but are exposed to the possibility of being wrong.

It’s impossible to use science to deductively affirm something as right or true, simply because humanity cannot perceive all reality, and therefore can only inductively deduce reality with a margin of error.

Metaphysics concerns itself with everything that exists, but scientific thinking can only localize itself strictly to provable things. Without philosophy or theology, everything beyond the provable is murky conjecture:

• Where the universe came from
• How life exists
• What happens after we die
• Most of the disciplines surrounding psychology, economics, and politics
• Whether a soul exists

Even within the realm of known things, a conversation with a small child will reveal many obvious things outside the scope of science.

Further, to answer every presently obvious question would yield many more beyond them, and the full breadth of scientific knowledge will never, ever end until either our desire to understand ceases or we’ve mastered all aspects of the universe.

Scientists fail at science

The only way a scientific mind can assert that something is, in fact, reality, is to set up all experiments while believing a high possibility of failure. A healthy philosophy of the scientific method will consider all possibilities where an experience is definitely correlation (i.e., A, then B) but may not be causation (i.e., A causes B).

Further, a scientist will disclose absolutely every reason why their experiment might be invalid. However, this type of storytelling is rigorous and requires a certain level of humility, and that degree of transparency works against how human nature is naturally influenced.

Most significant scientific studies require money, so they’re also typically performed with a secondary purpose by their financiers. A studies’ validity, therefore, can be derived from understanding why scientists performed it. The group who acquired the data determines how it could have been distorted:

1. If the study was financed by a corporation, its conclusion will invariably lean toward the corporation’s interests, and antagonistic conclusions regarding a purpose will be defunded or buried.
2. If the study was financed by a government, it runs the risk of being politically slanted, and will often be performed without enough resources for thorough results.
3. If the study was independent, it will likely be extremely underfunded or highly biased toward an agenda, depending on who funded it and why.

Further, the information isn’t always publicly available, which requires tons of rework by other scientists later, especially when studies are falsified. Every significant discovery requires 95% more work than would have been necessary in a perfect society.

The bias of scientific peer-reviewed papers shows through their selection process:

1. If the paper is controversial, but advances a political opinion that’s at least somewhat fashionable, it gets published and becomes popular.
2. If the paper legitimately reinforces the existing information, it gets published, but usually won’t be news to anyone.
3. However, if it’s random information, inconclusive, or vague, it rarely gets published or receives very little attention.

Since scientists often have a bias, the name of a scientific paper’s author has a dramatic effect on the popularity of the paper.

Scientific papers with significant findings are given a positive reputation through peer-review, but they are only reliable or valid when they’re peer-replicable. This is boring and labor-intensive, but it’s absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, replication is rarely fashionable.

In practice, the development of known scientific realities doesn’t arise from an entire community’s relentless pursuit of truth, but arises with the same trend-based power struggle and influence that arises with any other human endeavor.

Scientism

Like any other specialized group, scientific communities have outlier members who represent extreme values. One personality defect of most scientists (by virtue of their approach) is that they can’t easily live with uncertainty. A legitimate science “purist” is driven to accept complete uncertainty on many things (and likely will be a form of agnostic), while someone who abides by scientism believes in an almost religious power within the scientific method.

Unfortunately, most of the scientific community has come to trust one another beyond anything sensible for the discipline. The very essence of science-based thinking is to sow dissent by distrusting preconceived notions, with the scientific results proving empirically who is legitimately correct.

One reason for why science’s philosophy contradicts its practice is because we are constantly preoccupied with the constraints of death. That fear (and natural time constraint) drives us to hastily affirm that we’re only mostly certain, instead of investing the time to get it completely right.

Since their break from the religious community, scientism uses several philosophical values to drive their opinions:

1. Common-sense experiences have zero legitimate authority.
2. Measuring things mathematically is more important than measuring the quality of things.
3. Nature itself is mechanical, so holistic and unknowable elements have no relevance to the information.
4. We are wasting our time with “why” questions, and our best answers come from “how” questions.

The logical outcome of a few centuries of these dominating conclusions are several assertions that fundamentally can’t be proven without some degree of trust in the community’s opinions:

1. Presuming enough technology, all things can be proven directly with the scientific method.
2. The universe came spontaneously from pre-existing materials, which have always existed.
3. Archaeological and geological records indicate the world is millions of years old.
4. Humanity came into existence through millions of years of beneficial mutations, with less fit organisms dying off.
5. Social progress only comes through secular developments, typically through advancements of the State’s power.

One heavy assertion by scientism is that science’s narratives are driven purely by statistical reality. But, both purists and scientism are quick to say that enough correlation equals causation:

• The more ice cream sales there are, the higher the murder rate goes up.
• M. Night Shyamalan movie box office sales correspond to newspaper sales.
• The murder rate moves proportionally to using Internet Explorer.
• The warmer someone eats their breakfast, the higher the chance they’ll have Alzheimer’s Disease.
• Mexican lemon imports are directly tied to highway deaths.
• Internet piracy scales with global temperature.
• More Nicolas Cage movies connects to more pool drownings.

Therefore, there are other factors at work to demarcate truths that disregard statistical correlation, and statistical correlation without causation often means the two elements have another element contained within them. For example, most of the above can be simply explained by population density.

Science itself can never answer many domains, and there are valid philosophical assertions that oppose scientism:

1. Common-sense experiences prove correlation, and therefore have authority toward their results. This means causation can only serve to make the information more efficient to solve a problem.
2. Meaning is derived through our interpretation of the quality of things, so measuring things mathematically must serve that end.
3. Nature itself is holistic, so mechanical observation of nature is most effective at fixing things, but not in studying it.
4. All “how” questions are subordinate to “why” questions, meaning all science is subordinate to the philosophies that drive the purpose for science in the first place.

As a logical flow, the scientific community needs to hear alternative narratives of the same facts proven by science:

1. Not all things are necessarily provable, no matter how far humanity advances.
2. Humanity came into existence through another being’s creation, irrespective of how much time it took.
3. Archaeological, geological, and anthropological records indicate the world has only had thousands of years before it encountered a worldwide flood.
4. The universe came spontaneously from a pre-existing being, which has always existed.
5. Social progress comes through adherence to virtue, mostly through appropriately implemented religion.

The irony of what we know in context to the unknown is that we acquire so many known elements that we assume there’s no more need to accept the unknown within our body of known understanding.

Application

Great scientists are more concerned with investigating things against popular convention than disproving them. For that reason, most scientists are unfashionable nerds.

Science is great at affirming and proving the patently obvious, but the science nerds often endorse fashions that aren’t true, often believing those things to also be patently obvious.

Science can find facts, but not connections between facts. We still must consider whether we understand truths correctly, which is not a scientific endeavor.

“According to scientific studies” is the modern-day iteration of “according to the Bible” in the Middle Ages or “according to the gods” in antiquity.

While science removes individual bias, it doesn’t do anything for collective bias. If every human is the same kind of delusional, the scientific community is effectively a large group that shares similar delusions.

Scientific studies are only useful to the degree they’re boring.

The scientific community has enough hubris that they aren’t willing to accept things they can never know. For that reason, among others, most scientific papers are image distortion that sneak self-interested, bad ideas past other scientists’ common sense.

To know whether a scientific study is even trustworthy, ask who is paying for the study and that group’s bias and interests.

Scientists often preoccupy themselves with understanding “what” and frequently with “how”, but they will sometimes fall into bad cultural beliefs based on the traditions of other scientists:

1. Why do we have 2 nostrils?
   • Two nostrils give redundancy to prevent mucus from plugging up airflow.
2. Where did 2 nostrils come from?
   • Evolution, since it was the fittest solution to a survival need.
3. Why don’t we see any 1-nostril creatures?
   • They all died off.
4. Where is the fossil record for that?
   • We haven’t found it yet, but will soon, and it’s certainly not driven by an atheistic agenda.

Science is the tool, not the master. The purpose that drives science comes from other sources. When scientists don’t closely look beyond their naturally occurring prejudice, they submit to the trends of their culture and time.

Scientific institutions devolve when they don’t have a unified purpose for existing, and become the same as any other bad system.