EDIT: Let’s cool it with the downvotes, dudes. We’re not out to cut funding to your black hole detection chamber or revoke the degrees of chiropractors just because a couple of us don’t believe in it, okay? Chill out, participate with the prompt and continue with having a nice day. I’m sure almost everybody has something to add.
You decide what’s fact. Everything you ever thought you knew is stuff someone told you and you believed it based on their presentation. You’ve never seen evidence. You’ve seen them telling you there’s evidence.
What if you’re doing the research real-time? What if you, yourself, have done the experiments which logically are evidence? There are a lot of things you can scientifically prove yourself. And there are a lot of phenomena you can mathematically prove without even doing the experiments, although you have to try to mitigate or account for chaos / the specific environment you’re working with.
Conspiracy bullshit like “you haven’t seen the scientific evidence so it might just all be made up by so-called scientists” is garbage. You are a nut if you think that. It is on the same level as flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers.
Oh yeah, I’m not against the idea of science. Doing it yourself from the ground up is pretty solid. All of your own experiences are at the very least valid as you experienced them.
If you can believe the scale of vote fraud Trump pulled off, you can believe that textbooks are often written with an interest in influencing our young. I’m mostly against history as it’s taught. It’s written by the victors and so much of it comes off as fables and allegories to keep people in line.
Scientific rigor states otherwise. You must be able to prove or repeat your experiences for them to be accounted as valid within the context of experimentation.
‘Doing your own research’ isn’t the silver bullet you may think that it is. Most laypeople don’t know what effective research actually looks like; let alone understand how to actually do it or the covariates that may truly be impacting their observations or research. Further still, some may not even care to know as they may already have established biases. More often than not, it simply leads to further conspiratorial thinking.
Try doing some simple physics experiments with pendulum and stuff. It is quite simple to set up and will make you use many different physics concepts.
For quantum mechanics, I suggest diffraction and the double slit experiment that are quite easy to do with a cheap laser pointer.
That way you can rediscover scientific models yourself!
If you are not willing to try it, then you don’t really have legitimacy criticizing thé work of scientists.
I’m not criticizing work so much as all the things where the claim work is done but wasn’t.
As a flow artist, I understand pendulums more than most. I heckin live pendulums! I play with them every day!
Science is good. Science publishing is out of hand.
I agree with you that science publishing can be of variable quality. One solution for the reader IS to never trust one paper alone, scientific knowledge is established when many papers are published about the same topic and give the same conclusions.
So bigger number = more true?
Actually, yes.
Journal Impact Factor (JIF), is a very important part of establishing credibility.
Reputable journals are very selective about what they publish. They’re worried about their JIF.
If you get published in a journal with a high JIF, you can be as close to possible as establishing a foundation of fact, as their articles have a high chance of being both reproducible and accurate.
If there was a casino that took bets for which scientific discoveries would be true ten years from now, I would make money all decade long by betting on high ranking JIF articles.
I wish you could hear yourself.
Don’t worry, I do. The problem here is that there are two different definitions of truth. Scientific Truth/Fact is what we are left with after we rule out what is not true.
Science doesn’t make declarative statements about what is true in any ultimate sense. But when we talk about truth in science, we’re referring to the scientific consensus.
When we use the scientific method, we deduce facts about reality, then use those facts to infer “truth”. Of course, science is often wrong, and we discover when truth is wrong in the second half of the process.