There is a saying that goes “The plural of anecdote is not data.” It’s quoted all the time around here. It sounds like you are working off that saying, but you’re getting the idea wrong. Science can start with anecdotes. The point is that incomplete stories by themselves are not enough. Say that you get sick after eating some strawberries. Did the strawberries make you sick? Maybe and maybe not. Now one of your friends gets sick from the strawberries, and so does your sister. It’s starting to look like the the strawberries might be responsible because three people around you getting sick is a bit harder to explain than one person getting sick. But can we just assume the strawberries did it? No. Maybe you work with someone who had a stomach bug and then had dinner with your sister and your friend and passed the bug to them that way.
Anecdotes can be a starting point, but when you hear a story, you often don’t know what information is missing and people can fall victim to all kinds of biases that distort the stories.
You have a lot of preconceived notions about science that don’t bear any resemblance to reality.
You’re not allowed to insult other people in this forum. Don’t do it again. And before you ask, yes, - Great Antibob is allowed to say that your post was ignorant, although in this case it’s not very constructive.
Physicists have been known to scoff at chemists, which does not mean chemistry is not a science.
Science is the search for objective knowledge. A person searching for objective knowledge related to anthropology or psychology is a scientist; some sciences are more difficult to work with than others, but they’re still science.
A bad answer is sometimes worse than none at all. If the “answer” is that tiny leprechauns create crimes by whispering suggestions in people’s ears, that is an explanation but one that is horrendously wrong.
“Yet”. It took thousands of years just to get to the point we could develop and prove atomic theory. If you lived in AD1652, you could use the same argument to rightfully claim science had yet to correctly determine the structure of an atomic nucleus. Doesn’t mean the method is bad, just that it hasn’t had enough time to produce acceptable results.
Wow. This is so backwards, it’s actually causing me physical discomfort.
Science mostly measures correlation. Causation is MUCH harder to determine.
All those medical studies?
Smoking and lung cancer? Initially just correlation until the evidence became overwhelming.
Every dead person consumed water almost every day of their lives. Correlation, not causation (drinking water doesn’t kill you).
Americans have higher BMI than 20 years ago. Correlation, not causation.
It’s much harder to prove causation.
Nice strawman you’ve built there.
We know it probably won’t find all the answers. But so far, it’s done the best job of providing any answers.
Scoffing at chemistry doesn’t make it a soft science. The search for objective knowledge is part of science. Conclusions that aren’t based on objective knowledge are not part of science. There’s no crying in science.
Notice I qualified with “without explicitly saying so”.
If you read my post again, I note that your implicit argument is that the inability to answer “‘EVERY questions’” (sic) calls into question its ability to answer ANY question. And that you attempted to bolster this argument by arguing that several results made by prominent scientists (explicitly calling out Einstein and Bohr) were mostly the result of “random guesswork”.
Yes, the “only way” to do science is to construct and test hypotheses. But there are many ways to test hypotheses; a controlled experiment is not the only way.
So? Did we pass some deadline that “science” was given to solve problems, and other methods need to take over if science hasn’t solved it by then?
Wrong. Correlation is a standard tool for testing hypotheses.
I’m surprised at how bias and stupid this thread as gotten. Apaprently no one has looked back at all the previous comments. Guess that’s why you never challenge scientists, they’re so bias that they can’t even recognize it
Well, since this was in effect a genteel pitting of someone who is now banned, and I don’t see anyone else arguing his cause, I hypothesize a short half-life for this thread.
And I’d agree any science that draws conclusions from, say, palm reading is not a science. But you’ve said nothing that would disqualify anthropology or psychology as sciences. Those disciplines (if you actually look at people who study them, not someone who calls himself a “psychologist” on Oprah) are based on the assemblage of mounds upon mounds of evidence, formed into hypotheses and tested and turned into theories and torn apart by peer review and the whole bit.
scr4 more or less nails it; there’s no deadline to come up with the final answer. In some areas we may still be very early in forming our understanding, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t science.
I wasn’t going to point at any field in particular, but psychology is full of quacks. Without understanding the underlying mechanisms, which nobody does at the moment, many conclusions are drawn based on hypotheses that can only be considered analysis of the data, not an applicable principle.
But I want to be very clear here, this is not a blanket condemnation of psychology, or any other soft science field. I am merely saying these fields tolerate these things more than the hard sciences. Diligent psychology researchers will not make the mistake of accepting hypothesis as theory. And as you point out, the problem is amplified by TV type psychologists who get lots of exposure without being identified as charlatans.
ETA: This by no means condemns all of science. Even hard science has fools. The entirety of science, and the scientific method, and the process of review, confirmation, and challenge, makes the alternatives look even worse than they sound.
