The Folly of Scientism

Then I have failed to get my point across. This is nothing about discrediting science. This is everything about the difficulties of understanding what the scientific evidence means.

I was responding to a poster who asked "Name one question for which a scientific answer no matter how inadequate was once the best, but for which now a philosophical or religious one is the best one?" My first response was to show a case where there was a scientific answer based on inadequate knowledge, and where the modern ethical belief is so strongly against that there's effectively no modern scientific research on the topic.

Read Galton's 1904 paper on Eugenics (http://www.mugu.com/galton/essays/1900-1911/galton-1904-am-j... ) and especially that of the commenters. You'll see that their worldview colors their understanding of the science. G. Bernard Shaw wrote "We kill a Tibetan regardless of expense, and in defiance of our religion, to clear the way to Lhassa for the Englishman; but we take no really scientific steps to secure that the Englishman when he gets there, will be able to live up to our assumption of his superiority." Most of the others have similar views of the superiority of the white race and the upper classes.

What blinders do we ourselves have? How do we recognize the ring of truth? Those two questions express the self-doubt which is the essence of scientific investigation, and you'll see even 108 years ago that Benjamin Kidd commented "The point of Mr. Galton's paper is, I think, that, however we may differ as to other standards, we are, at all events, all agreed as to what constitutes the fittest and most perfect individual. I am not quite convinced of this."

Now going to the other topics. "Having a philosophy that says rattlesnake venom is healthy won't make it not kill you." That leads directly to the handful of Pentacostal churches where members believe that if one has faith then one can handle snakes without getting bitten. Getting bit obviously means the handler didn't have enough faith. It's a nasty self-referential and self-supporting logical loop. Restating your words, the person ignores reality, reality hurts back, that failure reinforces a false understanding of the world.

There will always be semi-stable/chaotic attractors in the phase space of human civilization. Some of the scientific observations are only true around some of those attractors. We haven't had enough time to figure out if the UDHR has the effects you've described. How does one tell how well a given country hews to the UHDR? How does one measure how well a country is doing? Can you plot those two values and see if the relationship is statistically significant? Has anyone? In the analysis, should you weight the factors according to population size? Does Belgium count as two (or three) different governments? What about the Swiss cantons?

Now suppose let's consider adding the "Right to Refuse to Kill" to the UDHR. I believe your view is that we could look a countries which already have laws like UDHR+RRK and determine if those countries are doing comparatively better or worse than those which don't, and use that to decide if the RRK should be added to the UDHR or not? Doesn't have quite the ring as "we hold these truths to be self-evident", and your error bars are likely going to overwhelm the analysis.

"Science says we don't know enough about genetics to do a very good job of it."

I'll narrow that down a bit. Is there any genetic disease where we know enough about the disease that we can do a good job of eradicating it through eugenics? If not now, do you think that we ever will? When would forced sterilization be appropriate government policy for the US?

"Cognitive biases in humans are also studied by science"

Yes, indeed. My point is that some of those "cognitive biases" go by other names, including "religion" and "ethics." Using the term 'cognitive bias' does little except recast those into science-friendly terminology.

"science is a prime way to overcome cognitive biases using a stringent methodology"

My point is that I think most people doing science aren't pessimistic enough about their own research. I am not convinced that we are doing enough work in science to overcome our biases. I point you to 'Why Most Published Research Findings Are False', by John P. A. Ioannidis , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ : "It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false."

According to an article in "The Atlantic", Ioannidis analyzed "49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years". "Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated."

Even more to the point: the impetus lies with the proponents of "love as a useful, concrete object" to defend their hypothesis from dissection by neuroscientists. Linguistic and poetic convention have no hold over hard data.

That describes the basic pattern-matching mechanism employed by the neural networks that constitute our brains. Developments like natural language processing (NLP) continue to turn that mental black box increasingly transparent.