https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=8veK4Qp5tnA
Okay, so today what I’d like to do is sort of give you some sense making around what science is. So I’m going to try to give you a better definition and give you some of the implications of that definition and the focus on science over other ways of sense making in the world. And I’m going to try to justify all this. So stay tuned. All right, so what is science? How are we using this word? What is it that we’re actually talking about? We talk about science and I think that the core to understanding this, to really getting down to brass tacks, is to understand that science is intersubjective validation. So what you’re saying effectively is if I have done these things in this order, in this way, using this method, I wrote it down, I came to a bunch of conclusions, right? I justified my methodology, all that. If you do that, what I wrote down in my paper, you’ll get the same results. So that’s saying the subjective element, my element of doing this, and there’s two aspects to this, the subjective element of my doing this operation will reliably result for all other subjects, because it’s a subjective experience in your head, will reliably result in this end state. And then the rest of the subjectivity is your conclusions based on that. So I conclude this. That’s actually really important that there are these two aspects, the aspect where there’s a subjective element that you’re eliminating through the paper, but there’s still a subjective element in your conclusion within the paper. So that’s intersubjective. In other words, you have two different people, they do this operation, they can have the same result, they can come to the similar conclusion, or not, and the conclusion doesn’t matter as much as the reproducibility of the result. So the conclusion part of the paper, in a white paper, and the result parts are separate for a reason. And then that conclusion should ideally lead to more experiments to validate that conclusion. And so intersubjective just means other people can do this, and they’re going to see roughly the same thing, or usually exactly the same thing. And so science, in order to do this, reduces a bunch of variables, but allows you to have a level of certainty by providing an accurate and precise material description of what’s going on. So here’s how much of the chemical I used, here are the other chemicals I mixed it with, here’s the amounts I used to mix with, all of that is important, we’ll say, in the scientific endeavor. And that provides you with this concept of intersubjectivity. And so intersubjective validation provides you intersubjective truth, right? It’s a thing that you can experience it, I can experience that, we can agree on. Now, the problem with that is that that’s already not perfect, because if you’re insane, if you’re psychotic, or if you’re having a temporary mental breakdown, all of which are things that happen a lot, then it won’t work. And we often also confuse the intersubjective nature of the experiment itself to the intersubjective nature of the conclusion. So again, the conclusion can be wrong, even though the experiment is correct, and the results are consistent and accurate and precise across all people who do that. This happens all the time in physics, happens all the time in physics. You get an experiment, everybody validates the experiment, and they come to very different conclusions about what the experiment indicates. And they try to come up with other experiments to validate their conclusions. It’s on and on and on. Now, it’s okay, it’s on and on and on. And you can make arguments about, well, yes, but in theory, you could, yeah, in theory, maybe, but maybe in practice, you can’t, and you didn’t. So when you’re dealing with a single experiment, the conclusion of that experiment probably doesn’t have enough information contained within the experiment to prove that conclusion or deny that conclusion. And so you can argue all day long, you could do other experiments to do that, but now you’re talking about something else, right? And that’s the problem. We kind of, well, you could, maybe, maybe you could, but maybe you couldn’t ever. That’s the first problem. Maybe somebody could, but if they don’t do it, does it really matter? Pragmatism to the rescue. So this is where science goes wrong. They wrap a bunch of stuff up and compress it, reduce it into this, oh, well, this paper says this and the conclusion is this and therefore. It’s like, well, maybe the conclusion could be wrong or incomplete or poorly worded or whatever, or it could be completely correct and have no bearing on the world. That happens too. Not all facts that are true are interesting, important or useful. And so science doesn’t deal with all that. And it’s important to know the boundaries of science, the limits of science. It’s just intersubjective validation, right? It’s a way that you can do an experiment and allow other people to sanity check you in an accurate and precise way on your experiment and then alternatively deal with your conclusion and say, well, that conclusion makes sense, but have you considered this or that? That doesn’t invalidate the paper at all. What might invalidate the paper is if you do another experiment and the conclusion or part of the conclusion is invalidated as the result of that other experiment. But again, now we’re talking about something else because once you’re comparing two experiments or using two overlapping experiments to talk about a conclusion, you’re not talking about the conclusion in the paper because now you’re talking about the conclusion of the paper plus information from another paper. That’s a different thing. And again, it’s too easy to compress those things. So why is this important? Well, I think that science in its very limited way allows us to do a piece of magic, right? With some severe limitations that we’re not understanding. So one of the limitations is you need accuracy and precision, right? Can’t do science inaccurately and imprecisely. It doesn’t work because then the intersubjectivity goes away, right? Now the way you did the experiment can’t be reproduced properly. And that also goes for perhaps the time and space in which that experiment was done. So you can imagine that over time, when you do an experiment that say involve the chemical mixture, that that would work differently, we’ll say in 1800s London, as it does from we’ll say rural Kansas today, just because the air quality is different. That’s worth considering because that’s actually happened in scientific papers. It’s part of the crisis of reproducibility in scientific papers, right? So there’s a big crisis. A lot of these papers, people go back and try to reproduce the results. They can’t reproduce the results. This has been estimated to be as high as 80 or 90% of currently published scientific papers. This is a problem. This is a big problem for intersubjectivity and it might not be that high, whatever. It doesn’t matter. Last I checked, nobody had a number under 50%. If half the things that we think are science and are therefore, you know, somehow intersubjectively true aren’t even intersubjectively true, that’s a problem. So you have to be very careful, right? But the bigger problem is science is constrained, right? It’s constrained by a telos, right? By a story. It’s embedded within a goal to be achieved in accomplishing the science, right? Why are you doing this experiment? But if you look at the history of science, what you will notice is that the big sort of achievements that we ascribe to science, that we assign to science, that we say, oh, you know what, science did this, didn’t happen as the result of any scientific process at all. And so you can say, well, yes, you know, we’ll use Thomas Edison as the best known example, right? Look, I mean, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. Well, maybe. I mean, he certainly used the scientific method, but Thomas Edison didn’t make the first light bulb, not by a long shot. There were tons of people making light bulbs before him. He was the first one to figure out how to make it long lasting. But that also required assuming that it could be done. Like, I’m assuming there’s a way to do this, and therefore I’m going to throw all these resources at it until we find a way. Fair enough. That’s good science and that’s good engineering. Science is constrained. Engineering is constrained. A lot of people will tell me like, oh, you know, without science, we wouldn’t have the transistor. Wrong. It’s just a lie. It’s false. Science didn’t give us the transistor. Science comes second after invention. Invention is unconstrained, right? Invention is people trying stuff and noticing things. And you can say, well, look at Rutherford’s model of the atom. Yeah, he found that by accident. He didn’t find that as a result of looking for it. He found that because he was doing a scientific experiment to prove something else and then noticed something that he didn’t understand. And then, so it’s the noticing something if you don’t understand gets him to the science of his model of the atom, which by the way is grossly incorrect. So everybody uses that as an example. It’s not even a good example, right? It’s not a good example at all. So and then we fool ourselves because we think it is a good example, right? We think the transistor was created by science or invented by science or found by science. No, no, no, no. It was refined by engineering and engineers, not scientists, as the result of science, sure, but that process has happened throughout history long before we had science. So it can’t have been the science, right? Because technology advanced without science. We didn’t have a concept of science. Historically, that couldn’t have been the case and therefore we weren’t using it. So the idea that science and progress are somehow related, I mean, sure, it’s a useful tool, and maybe it’s increased our speed of technological development, sure, but I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Everybody’s complaining about technology nowadays and rightly so. So we have a lot of these misconceptions around science and the power of science and what science is actually doing, but it’s constrained precision and accuracy and it’s really leading us to the false belief, for example, that if somebody else can do a thing that I can do a thing. Because in science, that’s true. Like pretty much if you have the equipment that the other scientist has, you can come up with their result. It’s almost like you’re them. It’s almost like you’re equal. It’s almost as if there’s no difference in what they did and what you’re doing because you’re able to follow the same procedures, right? You’re able to follow along the same propositions and you’re able to get the same results. It’s like, wow, this is powerful. This really smart guy did this thing and I can do this thing too. Maybe I’m really smart and that’s where the whole thesis falls down. Maybe you’re not because you’re following in the footsteps of somebody else who already had the T-loss, the reason, the purpose, the goal to do the experiment and you didn’t have that. What you have is a desire to mimic. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s great. That’s how participation works, right? You can participate in science by mimicking other scientists and you should. When we don’t, science goes horribly wrong. That’s the replication crisis in science. You can’t reproduce the experiments. Uh-oh. You weren’t properly participating in science. One scientific paper done by one person is not science because it’s not intersubjective yet. Science has had some great frauds around this over the years, really impressive ones, where one person did a thing, came to a bunch of conclusions, got a bunch of money, and then they found out, wait a minute, wait a minute, you’re using the same graphs everywhere. You only did this once and you said you’ve done it 10 times. What’s going on? You’re five times or three times, whatever it is. This happened in physics. It’s happened in chemistry. It’s happened every single branch of science that I’m aware of has had a scandal like this. Science isn’t some magical thing that prevents these things from happening at all because people have been motivated to copy other people. Some scientists don’t want to copy other people because they want to be inventors. Basically, they want to discover something new. Fair enough. We all want to discover something new and do something on our own. Even if it’s only unconsciously, we realize, well, when we’re just copying other people’s work, we’re not doing stuff on our own and we’re taking up valuable time that we could use to create our own thing, if we could create our own thing, and maybe we can’t. So little humility. This is part of what contributes to the lack of humility in scientists in general is this deep confusion and this deep hubris around what science is and what it’s actually providing us. Look, I’m a big fan of science. It provides us a lot, but it has serious limitations. When it tries to play outside of that space, that’s when we run into problems. I think that explains a lot of the problems we’re running into in the world today, quite honestly. This over-focus on science, on the propositions and procedures, which are the only things you need other than the physical tools and the things, the material you’re working with, to do science. Science relies on participation, but people aren’t doing the participation, hence the replication crisis, the inability to reproduce the work. That’s a problem. And so science doesn’t buy you the participation. It doesn’t buy you the poetic understanding of how complex the world is. It doesn’t do any of that. It doesn’t invent things. It may lead inventors to do cool things, sure, but science isn’t doing that work. And I think that’s really important that we keep that in mind. So science is validation through intersubjective verification, verification by other people. It uses accuracy and precision. It is the land of logic, reason, and rationality taken to the extreme to provide a way for you to do what somebody else has done, or for you to understand what somebody else has done. It’s a very powerful tool, and it’s very useful. But science can’t explain, for example, and never will be able to explain, the mystery and the magic in something like your participation with me by giving me your time and attention.