Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises — from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics — seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence. Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will ser…
> Strong Scientism: Of all the knowledge we have, scientific knowledge is the only “real knowledge.” Stupid question. What is an example of a hypothesis that is not falsifiable by experiment but should still be considered "knowledge"?
I switched from physics to art to (ultimately) design and programming. You have no idea how much ignorance many physicists have of research that isn't easily quantifiable and turned into predictive formulas. I had to go through a period of growing more "aware" of my tunnel-vision myself. As a result, flat-out rejection of entire fields of research, claiming they do not create "real" knowledge is common.
On the flipside there's people trying to apply physics-style reductionism to problems that simply don't fit, because human societies aren't built up of spherical frictionless humans in a vacuum[1].
Example: I did my master thesis of interaction design on gesture interfaces (the waving-hands-in-the-air kind, not the touchscreen kind), a topic that has been researched over forty years but has yet to really break through. One paper I read mentioned that on average the right index finger was raised one-point-zero-something times more often than the left. Sample size twenty or so. I still don't know how that is supposed to help me design better interfaces; right-handedness being the norm is a known, and I cannot conclude anything from these numbers. But hey, it's quantified and measured, therefore "proper" knowledge!