Science can't tell you how to structure a society because science does not assume any values beyond truth. Science can only tell you what your values will do, not what values you should have.

For instance, science can't tell you not to enslave people, it can only tell you that there are little to no factual differences between different types of people, but that would not prevent a society from allowing slavery to pay off a debt, as but one example.

Science is built on trust, no one reproduces every single finding and in the first place we measure the likelihood of some conclusion holding up in reality so we have probabilistic measures of trust in our conclusions, turns out that we can definitely build a society on this kind of trust. See my other responses to people responding to me (or datalisp.is which is a work in progress) to piece together what I am describing.

It's not based on trust, but verification by replication. The closest description is perhaps the security adage, "trust, but verify".

So you trust that a conspiracy is less likely than people just replicating and getting the same results (within tolerance).

If you are unsure you can convince yourself by replicating and then others can trust easier because you're probably not part of a conspiracy.

But it's all based on trust in the end. Again, no _one_ replicates everything.

I don't trust that a conspiracy is less likely, I infer that due to logical arguments of parsimony (see Solomonoff induction), and then I verify that such a conspiracy didn't take place to the best of my ability.

people have tried this with various ideologies (Christianity, Islam, communism, Nazism, etc).

I am not aware of a case where structuring a whole society around a single belief system or value system has worked out well.

Maybe diversity is actually a good thing.

Diversity is a wonderful thing.

Science is based on ethical persuasion, where you make it clear why you believe something. The things you listed are not of that nature, they try to persuade you by appealing to authority or employing coercion of some sort.

What would you say the ethical persuasion of science is based upon?

Reality

How does reality show us what is ethical persuasion, or that ethical persuasion is objectively the correct approach? You need to convince me this chain of questioning won't lead to either:

-Pointing to a historical line of moral tradition and figures that hold a feeling of authoritativeness to us

-"Reality is reality" and an implicit appeal to yourself and your aura of "rationalistic candor" as the authority

Either way, I predict you'll ad-hom me for daring to ask the question... Because the most thoughtful option would be conceding that there's basically not a substantive enough basis for the virtue of ethical persuasion that makes it inherently part of science. And then, science isn't especially distinct in this way from any moral tradition that values ethical persuasion, and then your tribe loses some of its unique sense of popular appeal, and then society won't be as easily coerced into the shape you want it to be. And you understandably wouldn't want that.

You said in a cousin comment:

"It [science] is no more (or less) a religion than what we have now."

And I think this applies here also and flattens out the appeal to ethical persuasion into less of a rigid, dogmatic declaration of "reality". It's rather that you want to be ethically persuasive in your reporting and discourse of what we try to agree upon as scientific evidence, which I think is good of you as a matter of faith and instinct, but I do not accept as self-evidently inherent to the epistemological basis of science itself nor necessarily to reality if we try to approach this rationalistically and divorce ourselves from appeals to authority.

The only other direction I can see for you is to try to bum-rush past the Peripatetic Axiom, and say that something about "reality" is somehow bypassing the fallibility of our sense-data and instinctual human appeals to authority - and therefore absolutely rock-solid, utterly unmistakable to anyone sincere... And that would be like what we call "Divine Revelation" in the metaphysics business. Anything like it is a strictly religious dogma - anyone who questions that epistemology as some branches of philosophy do, becomes a heretic, someone who needs to just embrace the model and "get with the program" already.

So if you take the p2p model seriously (for example) then you have no way to force a peer to accept an update, there is no coercion when it comes to beliefs.

All I can do is be patient and wait for others to reach the same conclusions I have. Also if people are interested (like you are) I can attempt to communicate my beliefs but I have no right. The communication may backfire into me accepting different beliefs.

What I am saying with my original comment is just that I don't believe in coercion as a way to coordinate society. I believe people would rather be persuaded (i.e. presented with information in as coherent a way as we know how to and then given free choice w.r.t. their behaviour) than coerced (threatened with censorship), I do acknowledge that there is a fine line between the two and I am not always sure how to draw it.

I think this makes a ton of sense and reflects a lot of how I try to live.

I think many people will never accept science as the guiding light by which they live their lives. Indeed, I don't - I think of it as a vey useful methodology for figuring out ways to reliably predict certain classes of behavior (a.k.a. "developing a consensus reality").

But, as JetAlone suggested, I see no way to scientifically conclude almost anything about correct personal values.

I may personally value truth, beauty, justice, empathy, and love, but it's clear to me that's not because they're scientifically validated as Good Things, nor because they've been scientifically shown to be pragmatically-optimal things to value.

If there's not an ironclad, undeniable path between the scientific method and optimal human values, then the only way to arrive at a culture where science is the shared value and ideology is coercion.

Hence my concerns above.

> If there's not an ironclad, undeniable path between the scientific method and optimal human values, then the only way to arrive at a culture where science is the shared value and ideology is coercion.

Let's leave the scientific method aside for now and focus on persuasive arguments as the way to change behavior (scientific method is persuasive but is not necessarily the only method to persuade someone ethically).

> I see no way to scientifically conclude almost anything about correct personal values.

Well the way I would attempt to persuade someone is by teaching them about the tragedy of the commons, i.e. when the security of the many is threatened by the incentives afforded to the individual, usually we call this pollution or corruption but I'll call it the tragedy of the commons.

Now, the persuasive argument would be that you would rather be persuaded than coerced (or that is my assumption here) but if you were to undermine the security of the whole to enrich yourself then it follows that if the whole is properly coordinated then they would balance out your gains by refusing to work with you, thereby eliminating the advantage you achieved with your actions and if you are made aware of this preemptively then your calculations change and you realize that the only way for you to gain an advantage is to contribute to the commons.

There are some assumptions in there and the argument is not completely persuasive as I delivered it here but I am trying to make a scientific experiment of sorts by building a system on these principles and seeing if the resulting economics can become more legitimate than the current system without being founded on coercion (i.e. whether people will willingly move to this new economic system because they perceive their interests better aligned with this method of assessment) ... you can check out datalisp.is, I was recently on the street and I am still flat broke (because I refuse to go against my morals - all part of the experiment ;) so this project has been crawling along, now my situation is on an upswing so I am hoping to make a lot of progress in the coming months.

I've been left out in the cold a small handful of times. Glad to hear you're off the streets now.

Terence McKenna's take on it:

https://youtu.be/Q-J09gk0mJk

Thank you for sharing this. It's an interesting thought and I found it helpful.

Science is not a belief system in the same way that religions and political ideologies are belief systems.

Science reigns supreme in epistemology.

The scientific method is a powerful tool for constructing what might be called "consensus reality".

Given its total inability to prove positive statements (no scientific "law" is ever proven correct, only "not observed to be wrong so far"), and thus its general irrelevance to mathematics, I would recommend some caution about declaring it the ultimate epistemological authority.

> Given its total inability to prove positive statements

This is recognized in the natural sciences, but not in the pure sciences. Considering the context, I thought it was clear that I was not talking about pure sciences, and that I was rather referring to the natural or social sciences.

There is no source of knowledge, method or tool that surpasses science in epistemological authority. That does not mean it gets us to a total and absolute truth, it just means it's the least-bad way possible of knowing things.

> There is no source of knowledge, method or tool that surpasses science in epistemological authority. That does not mean it gets us to a total and absolute truth, it just means it's the least-bad way possible of knowing things.

What do you base this statement on? How do you know science is the strongest possible way of knowing?

What do you mean by "science"? I may be misunderstanding you due to a divergence in our understandings of the word.

I’m not using any fancy or special definition, I use the word “science” much like it is used here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science

So science is a method of constructing falsifiable hypotheses about how to predict phenomena reliably?

Any response to my other questions?

epgui doesn't know what he's talking about. Science in it's purest form can only falsify things. Absolutely nothing can be proven correct. There is no "pure" science. That's garbage.

What's going on is epgui likely mixed up logic, math and science. In math and logic things can be proven because math and logic is a game where you make up axioms and prove theorems... but in science and reality, nothing can be proven.

Basically by posting that wikipedia article he proved you right. and demonstrated to you that he doesn't know what science truly is.

English is my second language, and I believe the correct term for what I called “pure science” is “formal science”. In French, it’s common to talk of “sciences pures” in contrast to “sciences appliquées”, so it’s possible this is where that came from. Thank you for pointing this out!

I do have 12 years of postsecondary education in the applied/natural sciences, so I think that first sentence of yours is perhaps a little exaggerated.

In English science exclusively refers to science as Wikipedia defined it.

Formal science is a rarely used term. In fact much of the (English) academic world doesn't consider logic, math, or computer science to be actual sciences. The term is basically unheard of. You may find some people who use the term but most people don't know about it.

The reason is simple, the nature of what science is, is not discussed by scientists. It is more discussed by philosophers or French people.

If you weren't suffering from a language issue, I would indeed be 100% correct that you don't know what you're talking about; but given your language impairment and your claim that French academics in common parlance demarcate a difference in sciences between formal and applied it makes sense that you can make this mistake.

I think you're quite right but I am curious, is there a reason communism is the only ideology you didn't capitalize in your list?

I'm honestly not sure why I didn't. I guess subconscious habit.

Fair enough. I know that some journalists on the left have openly made a conscious point of capitalizing the "black" in "black people" but not the "white" in "white people" because they just know that will do an amazing job at improving race relations. So I was wondering if this was something similar.

Edits: little spelling and punctuation here and there.

This sounds like religion not a tool. Science is the latter.

It is no more (or less) a religion than what we have now.

It certainly doesn't mix well with capitalism.