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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Marandahir" data-source="post: 9407649" data-attributes="member: 6803643">This. Combine that with that Science is not about one person knowing "facts" but rather the difficult and time-consuming process of peer review and debate in the search of truth, throwing out knowledge that doesn't hold up under water, and recognising false dichotomies we've set up due to our cultural preconcieved notions. And that's just the physical sciences; the social sciences are even more challenging because they're fundamentally trying to make sense of topics that are inherently subjective, and we have a long history of thinking our "scientific" perspective is instead objective without challenging our own biases and our own affect on the system. And then there's the point that to even UNDERSTAND complex scientific systems, we need to be experts in the field that have spent years of study on foundational knowledge, but people who think they understand it based on their 101 classes in college understand enough to recognise where thye're right but not enough to recognise where they're wrong. The experts often know enough to be able to say they don't know something or to recognise their mistakes, but not necessarily enough to rectify those mistakes, and the amateurs come in and think they have the answers but they don't actually because of complicated knowledge they haven't learned yet. Science is not something carried out in solitary study by a polymath but something debated in cafés between experts until a collective understanding of a system arises from that conflict. Because of all this, I would be very cautious with trying to sciencize fantasy settings, because of the nature of the fictional and fantastical. That temptation towards objectivising is the call of Asmodeus.</blockquote>

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