You probably aren't telling this to 1 person 100x, but rather 100 persons just once.
Do you think I may have overreacted?
Not really, but the length might be a problem.
I've had to really shorten my HN comments. Otherwise people generally ignore or misunderstand what I'm trying to say.
Regarding your comment I have the same issue with how badly engineers simplifies science, but they usually have a to noble view of themselves being ignorant of what they ignore. Having discussions which offends people needs to be done in a trustfull way even then it is hard, I usually sound like a dimwit or a twat.
Belief in science as an all-encompassing ideology is a minority view among scientists. Scientists are usually careful to stipulate that it's not. My parents were both scientists. They're the ones who took my brothers and me to art museums and concerts, exposed us to religions, literature, the love of the outdoors, and so forth.
Maybe 90% of the public have never met a scientist, making it easy to turn us into the bogeyman.
I believe that if this was studied carefully (with temporal detail), the reality of the situation would be revealed to be much more interesting than your intuition indicates.
Even the best scientists still have heuristics based consciousness, layers of culture, etc. Consciousness is way more complicated than it reveals to itself (which is what people here are describing, technically / architecturally).
It's a great meme, but all capabilities in existence have not been brought to bear, not even close.
> We all wrestle with the limitations of our mental apparatus.
Agreed, but to very different degrees, and in very different ways (as in positive wrestling vs negative).
> Also, reality is always more complicated than any concise description of it. No experienced scientist would claim otherwise.
a) You 2nd sentence is subject to your first.
b) You have no way to know this. I on the other hand do: I talk to scientists on the regular who make unsound claims. There is nothing about science that renders its practitioners immune to culture, propaganda, ideological blindness, heuristics, etc (despite it being an extremely popular, faith based belief).
I'm going to go waaaaay out on a limb here and make a guess: you have no proof for this claim of fact?
I am endlessly fascinated how science is held up by its fan base as superior because it is evidenced based, yet when defending challenges to it, any "fact" can be deployed effortlessly, with no evidence required.
> It's not about culture
I strongly believe that thinking is downstream from culture.
> science makes everything its domain
It certainly rhetorically extends ownership to all of "reality" (identical to The Universe, dontcha know), but they certainly do not investigate all that can be.
Here's a nice discussion:
The Nature of Reality: A Dialogue Between a Buddhist Scholar and a Theoretical Physicist
https://youtu.be/pLbSlC0Pucw?si=hFdhJ1U5pbFP6BEf
Note that the gloves remain on, as always. (Gee, I wonder if that has anything to do with why humans are perpetually wandering around confused, without knowing it.)
It's a slick technique, especially if it is done intuitively:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey
Furthermore: do you consider scientists to be a part of science?
If so: how do you know if everything important is actively being worked on by at least one scientist (never mind a near optimal number)? (See also: [1])
If not: how does science accomplish anything? How can only ideas interact with the physical realm, if not through human bodies engaging in work?
> Scientific method is generally applicable
"generally", "applicable"
I am also fascinated at the loose language science fans use when describing their ideology, that is so great because it deals in precision.
> it's a universal tool for identifying any kind of pattern that we can possibly identify.
"identifying"
Here is a pattern, Humans.
Well done, Scientists!
Can you point me to science's study of war, and their strategies for ending it in the near future? It's a pretty important topic, they surely have thousands of the very best minds on it I would think, since it is their domain (in that it is a part of everything).
> Everything else is, in practice if not theory, completely random...
Present a proof.
Just because your ideology is sitting in the throne right now doesn't mean you get beliefs = facts freebies like this, especially when shit talking competing ideologies for that very same behavior is a core component of your marketing/indoctrination strategy.
These conversations remind me of one of my favorite sayings:
"People don't have ideas. Ideas have people."
- Carl Jung
I'd recommend him, but he is a peddler of "woo woo".
[1] From foolswison's link:
"Plenty of scientists are theists. But the ones that do good science leave their theism at the door and try to explain things in naturalistic terms (even if theism is the reason they entered that door in the first place)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic)
I don't keep detailed records, but I have had easily hundreds of science fans tell me with absolute sincerity and good faith that any scientists that don't behave the way they describe (say, if I was to link them to articles) don't count, because they aren't scientists. (Actual scientists only behave perfectly, of course.) I wonder if science not studying such things (ontology, etc) and thus not constantly tooting their horn about it in the media [2] might have something to do with why their fans have utterly no knowledge of it, and thus believe that it doesn't exist[3].
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+train+a+neural+networ...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_Silver_Blaze
Apologies for any negative vibes, I just think it's a fascinating phenomenon, and fun to discuss. Curiosity used to be so popular!