RichardKennaway comments on How to teach to magical thinkers? - Less Wrong

14 Post author: polymathwannabe 24 February 2014 01:43PM

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Comment author: asr 26 February 2014 03:57:51PM 1 point [-]

The awkwardness is that once you generalize enough to cover everything we normally refer to as "science", it's hard to include a very wide range of things we don't normally think of as science.

  • We don't think of legal reasoning as science, but it involves using information and experimentation (with a community of experts!) to update our model of the world.
  • The fashion industry uses experiment and empirical reasoning to figure out what people want to buy. But I don't think it's useful to talk about fashion designers as scientists.

I think the term "scientific method" as normally used in English does not pick out any actual cluster of behaviors or practices. It's a term without a coherent referent.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 26 February 2014 04:13:31PM *  -1 points [-]

I think the term "scientific method" as normally used in English does not pick out any actual cluster of behaviors or practices.

The term "scientific method" as ordinarily used is associated with the traditional rituals of "Science", which are themselves unsatisfactory, or at best an improvable-upon approximation to what really works in finding out about the world. The more useful cluster is the one hereabouts called Bayesian epistemology. It can and should be practiced everywhere, and if a fashion designer employs it, it is just as useful to call it that as when a scientist in the laboratory does.

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