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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7472711" data-attributes="member: 16814">Yes, ergo the better method for defining moral good is social, not scientific.  What you're doing here is reification -- the swapping of one thing for the other and then pretending their the same.  Science done on social definitions of moral good aren't actually addressing objective moral good -- you've swapped in a subjective understanding and then pretended that since you've invoked Science! that it's actually science.  You've forgotten that the basis of your effort isn't observation of reality, is subjective definition of it. Yes.No.  Science is the method.  Period.  Reasoning + evidence (I'll assume you mean observations) isn't the method, ergo not science.  This kind of thing is exactly what I'm talking about -- so long as the title Science! is applied, the actual means and subjective bases are ignored.  You do yourself a disservice as you're allowing yourself to believe that the outcome is much more certain than it should be.This is claiming there's a problem on my side without actually stating the problem.  You're dismissing, not discussing.  If you're confused as to what I meant, point out where and I can elucidate.  Claiming I've made an error without stating the error, though, is handwaving.What is it you're observing, then, if not an experiment?Question -- are all ants red?Research -- I've seen ants in my backyard and they appear redHypothesis -- all ants are readExperiment Design -- collect many ants and observe their colorConduct Experiment -- I collect 100 ants from my backyard and observe themAnalysis -- all the ants I observe are red.Conclusion -- hypothesis not disprovenRefine -- collect ants form more locationsObservation is part of experimentation -- so long as design is done prior to observation.  You can't observe a bunch of things and go back to see what fits -- you cannot be sure you collected the necessary data or noticed possible confounders.I do not agree.  I don't agree that science converges on objective truth -- that's a belief of yours and absent proof.  There's some good evidence that science self-corrects error given enough time, but it's equally possible that some objective truths are unknowable to us.  The result of moral good, for instance.And, on the topic of other means of inquiry converging, they most certainly can.  The golden rule, for instance, seems a strong point of convergence for many areas of study: religion, politics, philosophy.  Most of the world seems to have converged on the idea that slavery is evil.  There's convergence in other means of inquiry as well -- this is not a unique feature to science, if science even has such a feature.  Are you presenting that some things, like morality, do not actually exist because you can't science them?  There's some nice philosophy on that, you may enjoy it.That if you claim that a thing can be done, it is your burden to show it can be done, not mine to show it can't.  Similarly, if I claim a thing cannot be done, the burden is on others to do it and prove me wrong.  This is entirely because it's impossible to prove a negative.No, you making a reification mistake.  Spending on science isn't a science issue, it's a political one.  Science cannot speak to which questions should be addressed, as that's a policy issue, not a scientific one.  Choices of where money is spent to achieve policy goals has absolutely nothing to do with science as a tool or means of inquiry.  It does, however, affect people that employ science as a means of inquiry.Given that science cannot speak to proper policy, as that's a political question, I disagree.  Some social research may provide inputs, but, really, most of it should be strongly distrusted as it isn't science.  Issues of bias, improper collection, and p-hacking have resulted in less than 1/4 of all social science experiments being able to be repeated successfully.  And the ones that are usually successfully repeated are the ones that mostly confirm well known phenomenon.  The vast majority of the new stuff just fails in replication.Largely, I think this is because social scientists are taught cookbook stats and think that all statistical methods are valid regardless of data input and don't understand the fundamental errors they're causes.  Most statistics are only valid in very narrow conditions, and, even then, the dangers of reification and overconfidence abound.You're confusing cause and effect, here.  Brute force methods are not new or dependent on science.  Computers, a product of science experiment and hard-working, heroic engineers making science actually useful, just allowed faster use of existing brute force methods.  Science (mostly engineers) provided a new means of doing an old problem.I'm already disagreeing with him in other posts.Of course the golden rule is subjective.  How I want to be treated is solely my subjective belief.*Those are just questions.  That science can answer them is your belief, not fact.  You've decided to believe Science! is the tool to answer all questions, and so look at any question like a nail to be hit by Science!  I'm saying you shouldn't do that, you're limiting yourself to a narrow belief structure unsupported by reality and forming dogma around it.Sigh.  Scientists are people, not science.  When a scientist is writing philosophy books, he's not doing science, he's done philosophy.  People are complex and capable organism -- they're not restricted to only one role or passion in society. *Interestingly, I can use the scientific method to refine my subjective preferences.  I can ask if I like kicking puppies, for instance, design and run a puppy-kicking experiment, observe that I actually don't like it and that I also don't like the social fallout for doing it, falsify my hypothesis that I like kicking puppies, and then move on to refine my question to finding out if I like cuddling with puppies.  Spoiler alert -- I love it.The point here, though, is that science cannot tell me what I like.  It can be a tool to discover what I like, but at all times that discovery is limited to only me.  And, really, this experiment is very limited to falsifying the specific claim.  If I ran another experiment on whether I like drinking sweet tea (yes) I couldn't compare these results at all.  Even if I added a scale of 1 to 10 on each separately and rated cuddling puppies at a 8 and drinking sweet tea at a 6 (respectively), I can't say I'd rather cuddle a puppy than drink sweet tea or that I'd enjoy doing both at the same time even more (nope, messy).  It's very important that you don't extrapolate results past the experiment and the specific question asked.  This is, however, done all the time and the recent trend of science by press release is very disheartening.</blockquote>

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