A scientist doesn’t say, “Well we know the Earth is flat because that’s the way it looks, that’s what’s intuitive, and that’s what everyone agrees is true,” a scientist says, “The part of the Earth that I can see at any given time appears to be flat, which would be the case when looking at a small piece of many differently shaped objects up close, so I don’t have enough information to know what the shape of the Earth is. One reasonable hypothesis is that the Earth is flat, but until we have tools and techniques that can be used to prove or disprove that hypothesis, it is an open question.”
That seems to be a flawed conception of science that doesn't have much to do with the reality of how scientists operate.
Yeah, but if you steel-man it, I think he was trying to make something similar to a map-territory distinction. It's often useful to make a distinction between the data and our best interpretation of the data. Some conclusions don't require much extrapolation, but others require a great deal.
On LW we happily discuss with very long inferential distances, and talk about regions of hypothesis space with high densities of unknown unknowns. Most scientists, however, work over much smaller inferential distances, with the intent of meticulously build up a rock sol...
This is the fourth of Tim Urban's series on Elon Musk, and this time it's about some reasoning processes that are made explicit, which LW readers should find very familiar. It's a potentially useful explicit model of how to make decisions for yourself.
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html