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Desrtopa comments on Confusion about science and technology - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: NancyLebovitz 23 October 2013 12:27PM

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Comment author: Desrtopa 23 October 2013 03:35:11PM 2 points [-]

In the short term, science may not be all that reliable, but keep in mind that we know that this particular data is unreliable because replication attempts have rendered it highly suspect.

In some areas, science is self correcting over a much longer time horizon than others. For fundamental physics, a comparably easy to correct misapprehension would be unlikely to persist for so long (in a modern day context.) In medicine, it might last much longer (because there are so many hypotheses to evaluate relative to the available research funds and manpower, and there's often inadequate communication between scientists who research stuff and doctors who implement it.) Psychology isn't the absolute bottom of the heap in terms of speed of correction, but it's well down there.