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RolfAndreassen comments on Rationality Quotes October 2013 - Less Wrong
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While this is true, it's often the case that you have to start by collecting the isolated facts, just as you'd start building a house by buying some number of bricks.
Arguably you'd start building a house by deciding what kind of house do you want and then making architectural plans and drawings...
Arguably, an early step in building a brick house will consist of gathering a bunch of bricks together. Arguably, that was obvious enough in the earlier comment to not benefit from correction.
The original quote was sufficiently meta that I think Lumifer's point stands.
Please name a science (not math, not philosophy) that did NOT start as a bunch of bricks.
We don't have to ignore the real world when we go meta, do we?
Science is a way, a method -- it neither started as, nor is a collection of facts.
The world is full of bricks/facts -- they are everywhere you look and the problem is not finding some, but finding the ones you need. And to figure out which ones you need you require some plans and ideas about how to go about things.
So while you are there staring at your navel, trying to come up with a plan in the complete absence of any knowledge of the world, some other guy is fascinated by a smoking stump left over from a lightning strike and screwing around with it a bit discovers fire.
Science is a human activity that arose from human activity and stayed around and was refined because it filled human needs. Scientific method did not arise from a plan it arose from contemplation of piles of facts. Chemistry and physics arose from different contemplations of different piles of facts.
You need to look at the world full of bricks and facts to have some idea how you are going to go about triage, you don't figure out how to triage facts until you know a bunch.
That's only once pre-engineering has been shown to be successful in building houses, which is a nontrivial proposition.