Is society too scientific?

Science is about observation and testing, right? That means there is an observer and an observed, a controller and a controlled(add that to the NSA and more freedom for corporations to contaminate the environment, and I doubt the Bush administration is adverse to science). When you have that dynamic, does society, on the whole, become too detatched? Is it too emotionless? Is the momentum with which society is moving too fast, because of all the scientific achievements, for actual people to be able to stop and ask what we're doing in this area and that?

Society is far too ignorant of what science is about, how to do it and why it is important. Society is far too credulous.

We live in one of the most superstitious, full-of-shit societies on earth. We can't even be BOTHERED to inconvenience ourselves with the facts about anything if it might challenge our multi-thousand-year-old fairy tales.

Too scientific? Not scientific enough. Not by a long shot.

I didn't mean individual people. I was talking more along the lines of our institutions.

I really don't think we risk falling into the category of overly rational when 90% of the country believes in a big invisible sky daddy (or some variant) and creationism seems equally as plausible as evolution.

That's my fault.

Even with 90% of the people in the country thinking that way, that hasn't stopped science.

thinking of a line from one of his sonnets: "Our meddling intellects mishape the beauteous forms of things\We murder to dissect."

Wordsworth was mounting a serious critique of analytical tendencies in modern life that strip life and nature of their organic beauty.

There are mmany people out there who think that science should be perfect when they want it to be: Meteorologists should be able to predict with 100% accuracy when a Hurricane will hit and where. If it doesn't many people whine and complain. An airplane gets hit by a windsheer, some people want to know why the windsheer wasn't observed before it hit. 'Doctors should be right all the time' in some peoples estimations or they are incompetant quacks who should lose their licenses.
But, when it doesn't suit their purpose: saving fuel, global warming, evolution, etc then science is just guessing. There are no hard facts, etc. are what these people cry.

Nor do most people appreciate that scientists really ARE emotional, and that disciplines as a whole struggle against falling in love with their own ideas.

I'm a PHD and I say this as someone who _believes_ whole-heartedly in empiricism and the methods of science.

However, we do need to be skeptical about science. As a matter of practice scientists must hold their notions of the universe as tentative and probably imperfect. That isn't easy for scientists and it's less easy for people who turn to experts as the voice of authority. Deciding not to eat butter is much more difficult than remaining open to the notion that the health risks of butter aren't really perfectly well understood. The 1990's relativist vs empiricist battles of east coast academics should have yeilded up this one insight...the relativists probably are right when they say observations and understanding are subject to personal perspective.

Remember that expert training often leads to narrow focus which is a rather nice way of saying tunnel-vision. Scientists tend not to see anything but what they are looking for.

Expert training generates special language which tends to isolate experts from one another...cross pollination remains such an effective practice for scientific progress simply because it remains so rare.

Science and the content of science education are trendy and subject to fashion. Scientists and granting agencies tend to pay attention to what's more recent than what's older. This has been institutionalized by shifting reliance to on-line searches of scientific databases that often don't reach back past the 1960's. Many universities have thrown away old paper indices of the literature because they took up valuable shelf space and "weren't much used." This has shut down some areas of study and cut-off many scientists from getting the benefit of the history of research in their fields.

As long as the lights work they could care less about science. What in the world do you think created every bit of technology that you use - including the wheel, asprin, sliced bread and computers?



This bit of mind control has some similarty to the way *'s administration uses science - to support political positions and to consilidate. And yes, as a weapon.

Science is best used to shed light and discover deeper truths. Science does not in itself control. It is a tool to help us seek to discover why the world is the way it is and what, if any, universal truths pertain to the natural world.

How did you get the idea that science controls I wonder - this is disconcerting. Are there others like you?

You may like to watch a movie called Time Bandits. It illustrates that evil lies not in science but in itself.

on edit: sp.

"Science does not in itself control. It is a tool"

Well, would science exist without human beings? I'm not talking about the natural process of life, I mean the searching for universal truths. It is a tool, created by human beings, to observe why the world is this way and that. What does a scientist do with a mouse in a maze?

"How did you get the idea that science controls I wonder - this is disconcerting."

What is the point of experiments? How does one conduct experiments? How do you get a subject for an experiment?

Civilization is based on control. Humans try and control their environments.

I think it's a fair question to ask if science is turning life into death.

Just what do you mean by that one?

The natural world would certainly exist without humans. But since the whole idea of cause and effect is an intellectual construct, a product of abstract thought it is clear that science cannot exist without a mind to conceive of it in. Whether anything besides a human mind has the capacity for abstract thought is a point of debate, but we have not observed any other organisms that I know of engaging in such activity. In a crude sense, maybe monkeys in the sense that they have been observed to make and use tools. But consider that monkey troops have been known to engage in territorial disputes where members are killed.

As for the mouse in a maze, you are of course referring the famous Skinner box. B.F. Skinner was a brilliant psychological experimentalist/behaviorist. But, most scientists would argue that psychology, even experimental psychology falls into the academic realm of humanities - not science. They do use an experimental method of sorts but to call it science is a stretch.

Civilization is based on the illusion of control. What is control? Because you kill something does not mean you control it. In fact, people often kill things that they cannot control.

What I sense you are grappling with are not issues of science but philosophy and politics and theology. The world of ideas as they relate to humanity and our perceptions. That can indeed be a troubling place since all truth is relative. Something that is a truth in one framework of thought falls down when you try to translate it into another. This is the shifting sand of truth that you search for. Truth in itself can be an illusion. Truth can be a lie - and that's the truth.

edit 4 grammar.

are object lessons that remind us that most people (even enlightened DU types) don't have a clue about what science is and what it is not. The problem in the US is that there is too little science input into public policy. The problem is not that we are "too scientific."

no mega-churches and we would be living in social-democratic heaven because the experiment has proven to be workable in other countries so we would be adopting those workable programs for our society.

Instead we are living in a society based on unworkable and flawed theories that have proven to be false. But the Republicans keep coming back and imposing the same unworkable theories on us, failing each time, and they don't learn anything from it.

of a scientific society?

Are those other societies perfect where the experiment has proven to be workable? If not, they're flawed as well.

Then it depends on what you mean by workable and unworkable. That can be vastly different for the people at the top and at the bottom.

society without some scientific principles at work. I think the search for perfection belongs in philosophy not in science. If a society is workable a top and a bottom would be a pinpoint in opposite directions with a huge swell in the middle. What we have acheived in our society is a pyramid with the underprivileged masses on the bottom supporting the smaller and smaller tiers until we reach the pinnacle of a very few who benefit from the toil and sacrifice of the many.

They've proved again and again that what they want is the quickest path to riches, not the path that scientific analysis shows is best for any project they're concerned about.

What you bring up is ethics. I wouldn't blamed the detachedness you see, or the emotionless/numb people on science, but a far more likely source is isolation/endlessTV/emotionalpain/drugs/alcoholism/otheraddictions.

serious danger of being "too scientific" any time soon.

With respect, what rock have you been under the past few years? Have you seen any of what they've done for (or, more appropriately, to) education, academia and science in general?

Society needs to be a lot more scientific, if just so people can figure out that things like What The Bleep, intelligent design, water-as-fuel automobiles and the idea that all opinions are universally true and correct are just pseudoscientific BS at best.

And people (what do you mean by "actual people," BTW? Are you excluding anyone from that set?) certainly do have the capacity to both question and understand what's going on in the worlds of science and technology. Most of them frankly don't want to.

There are so many conflicting "conclusions" arrived at through bias, it is more difficult to trust science as a whole.

Most institutions that matter utilize some sort of "science" based cost-benefit/risk-benefit analysis. Whether 95% of the population abides by it or not makes only a tendential bit of difference. "Experts rule" and the people listen. And now partisans come armed with experts to listen to.

You should read Foucault. His treatment on Panopticism. and what not. Start with "Discipline and Punish". It seems there is always a tension between surveillance and freedom, whatever the scale of life. Scientific surveillance or "research" is no different philosophically.

For similar reasons Max Weber called rationality an "iron cage".

This tension between democracy and science is 'essential' imho. It tempers the nihilist stealing cadavers in the night 'for advancement of science' with the humanity of the populace. The tension helps define the new secular morality.

The Tuskegee Syphilis study is a case in point that "knowledge/power" hybrids can be a dangerous thing for the definition of humanity. But the fact that it could never happen again and that scientists have a deep commitment to keeping it from happening again, so long as they are held in check by government regulation, is a reward of the democratic process.

I was reading down the thread and about to say what you said, thanks for saving me the trouble of bustin' out Foucault and Weber!

:hi:

ban and requiring intelligent design until it makes my teeth hurt.

And ignore your question entirely. :eyes:

par for the course I guess.

Anyway, no i do NOT think that society is to scientific. In fact I think that we and most of the world need to pay alot more attention to science.

As to the religion bashers, religion and science are hardly incompatiable. In fact the more we learn about the Universe via science, the more we realize how much we don't know. (Unless of course you are an anti-thiest and have it all figured out)