The Limits of Science

W.r.t. some branches of science (medical), I'd say data isn't the biggest ingredient lacking. Most of it is correlational, which is an easy way to use data; you're just looking for correlations and that's about it. It however doesn't provide a lot of insight into fundamentals: it doesn't answer 'how?'. It's modelling that is often lacking: how does this data, this correlation support or disprove certain theories, in order to advance our understanding as a whole rather than being able to say 'medicine X provides Y% improvement in property Z.

In my view, particle physics is a branch of science doing this very well: data is never used without context, correlations never made without some sort of theoretical framework.

Which is why scientists, like everyone else, uses statistical reasoning.

> In general, if you control for everything, you can't say anything about the real world outside of those precise lab controlled conditions.

This is one of those statements which is only true if you ignore all the times it's false. It's like Zeno's Paradox: If this really troubles you, it's a sign your model's incomplete, not that there's something irreconcilably wrong with the universe. Some of what you're getting at can be fixed with better experimental design, but the rest can only be fixed by, as I said, statistical reasoning, which is universally used in practice.

It's possible to be somewhat uncertain. Some people don't get that, or refuse to acknowledge it so they can sow FUD.

Nature is the authority, and we have understanding that is incomplete.

> Scientism is the promotion of science as the best or only objective means by which society should determine normative and epistemological values. The term scientism is generally used critically, implying a cosmetic application of science in unwarranted situations considered not amenable to application of the scientific method or similar scientific standards.

The whole "true story of a middle-schooler whose mother wanted to arrange for her son to get more time to take his math tests" has a big problem in it as well. There's a real discussion to be had about disability labeling and diagnosis, but that's not how this is framed - it's framed as the mother wanting a benefit for her son that others would not have, the son not actually having a disability, and the scheme to invent one for him failing because she refused to role-play it.

A lot of people can tell the opposite story; they knew something was different about them in ways that were disadvantageous, but other people kept attributing it to a moral defect until they got a diagnosis. (This comes up a lot in conversations about ADHD and to a lesser extent autism/aspergers.)

The point is, we're not rational beings, at least not exclusively. We're emotional beings, and even if, ultimately, emotions are accounted for by physical factors, there needs to be a way to reconcile our rational side (which includes science) with our emotional one. This include realizing that unbiased, fully-rational science is just impossible. Our biases, as part of our phenotype, are there because whatever caused them to emerge either helped enough ancestors survive, or at least did not get them killed before reproducing, so they're always going to be there.

I'm sorry I'm ranting and again, I get what you're saying. I've been through enough experiences of accepting "spiritual" and other words in conversations with people I don't know well, where the other party shortly starts talking about alien abductions and astral traveling, that I know what you mean. But I've also been through enough conversations with people who think science is infallible and will eventually find a solution to everything and an answer to every question.