Re:Stop Equating “Science” with Truth (2017)
by dangle1 on Monday October 18, 2021 @03:54PM
(#28910730)
Science is an amazing but frustrating tool. Amazing in the sense that it is the only way to reliably learn more about what is happening around us. Frustrating because it is much slower than we'd like in providing reliable answers in many situations (pandemics, perhaps even climate change). And the gap between gathering observations and reaching agreed upon conclusions gets filled with normal but unhelpful human behaviors.
It's especially frustrating in medicine, perhaps most in behavioral medicine, because there are so many degrees of freedom in human behavior and value judgments assigned to behaviors.
Re:Stop Equating “Science” with Truth (2017)
by clairity on Monday October 18, 2021 @03:57PM
(#28910772)
despite the sophisticated math required, physics is also orders of magnitude simpler than biology, chemistry, or the social sciences, which is why physics models can reach that level of certainty and other sciences haven’t yet.
Having a p-value of 0.05 is incredibly weak, even if nobody is cheating. It's just a garbage process that's guaranteed to produce high % of falsehoods, where the exact % depends on the prior probability of starting with true hypotheses.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/
I mean think about the Newtonian mechanics, there really isn't almost any room for error. And once the model was pushed into more and more extreme applications and errors were eventually spotted the theory was refined into new mechanics.