Comment on Well whenever you notice something like *that*, a wizard did it
banana_lama@lemm.ee 2 days agoI assume he meant that just because someone believes in something separate from their scientific work doesn’t affect their credibility.
An easy thought experiment is if an astronomer believes that when an ostrich is scared it buries its head in the ground. Does this affect their work?
If a surgeon believes in destiny doesn’t mean that their work is subpar or that they sabotage their work because it might be someone’s destiny to die.
Squorlple@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I agree with that much. A person can be smart in one field and ignorant in another field. My concern is with the contamination of one’s own supernatural thinking (either individual notions or the approach itself) into their scientific work and publications. That’s why I said “they may have applied similar illogic and pretenses”, not that they certainly did. That’s the importance of having methodology being scrutinized by unbiased peer review to produce replicable results.
Lumisal@lemmy.world 2 days ago
If you have experienced something that can’t be currently explained by science, it doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t believe there isn’t a scientific explanation for it we just haven’t found yet.
For example, if in an imaginary scenario you and 5 other credible people you trust and know experience, idk, an apparition that looked human appearing in full detail appear out of nowhere, say “I am real”, and then vanish, would you suddenly lose all your reason and no longer trust any science at all? If so, you are not scientifically minded at all, and would contribute no significant progress to science with such rigidity.
Someone who practices science, and seeks to advance our knowledge into that which is unknown, would instead first try to rule out possible known causes, such as by confirming with others if they saw that too and to immediately make sure no one says anything, then instruct them to all write down what they experienced. After confirming indeed that everyone had the same experience (and this ruling out multiple known causes), you’d probably inspect the environment for any possible other explanation.
Finding none, would that mean your work and understandings of science would no longer be credible? If so, then you never understood the point of science and research. Your work would be tainted not by having experienced something many consider paranormal/supernatural, but by your inability to understand that it’s simply yet another unknown phenomenon that perhaps can be explained in the future with further research and advancements in technology (after all, we already struggle figuring out testing intelligence in things that are known such as animals - in something we can’t even easily observe, it’s currently not possible). Unwillingness to entertain a widely reported phenomenon makes you no different than early scientists who refused to consider that reports of what we now know are pandas and gorillas to perhaps be something. It is actually that thinking which holds back humanity, rather than advances it.