Why is science better than the alternative? (And what is that alternative, exactly?)

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• Izzy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The question doesn’t make any sense. There is no alternative to science.

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  • Mugmoor@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Right? There’s no alternative to math, numbers are numbers.

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    • Izzy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Unless we are talking about simply not doing math and instead doing cocaine. I’d say cocaine is a bad alternative to science.

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  • froghorse@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Ok, I’ll put it another way.

    What does science do?

    What is another way to do that?

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    • Mugmoor@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Stop being obtuse.

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    • Izzy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Imagine it is a lot time ago and you observe that things fall when you drop them in the air. You want to figure out how fast they are falling. You can either apply some kind of scientific method to do an experiment, record the results and get an answer or you can not do that. Which I wouldn’t count as an alternative to science. It is just the absence of science.

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    • marcos@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Science was born from the pragmatism ideology, so it’s defined by its goal, and all the features you hear around are just implementation details.

      If you get something else that does the same thing, it will be called “science”.

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• TheOneCurly@lemmy.theonecurly.page ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The Scientific Method is currently the best way humans have for taking observations about the world and deriving meaning from them. There have been other methods before and it’s entirely probably that there will be another one in the future.

  Scientific methodologies provide a framework to develop and analyze experiments. Without one you may end up doing a test and coming out the other side not really knowing what you were testing in the first place. You may also take experimental data and start analyzing it for things that the experiment couldn’t properly capture. This can lead to meaningless or misleading results.

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  • froghorse@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Or, to put it plainly.

    Science is a method for getting knowledge. Knowledge of remarkable quality.

    It’s key component is a strong reference to observation. IE What you saw, how you saw it, and what your friends saw when they did it too.

    So what are other ways of getting knowledge?

    What are their pros and cons?

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    • TheOneCurly@lemmy.theonecurly.page ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      To get knowledge from scratch there really is only observation. We are pretty limited as human beings, we can only take in information about things we can directly sense, we can sense through indirect observation, or that we can build instruments to sense for us. After that its the same thing I mentioned above, use some method to refine that observation into a repeatable, testable theory.

      The bad science that many people try to do is to start with a theory, usually with some social or political agenda attached, and work backward collecting evidence that “supports” it. That’s not a way of gaining knowledge though, it’s just a way of emulating the look and feel of science.

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• slazer2au@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Why is science better? Repeatability. You take the same objects arrange them in the same order and get the same outcome. If it doesn’t work then you question the original hypothesis.

  If you lie, you will be discovered when others repeat your work.

  you will need to define what you mean by alternative. Do you mean homeothermy in place of medicine, or do you mean religious faith in place of scientific testing.

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  • froghorse@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Better for what, exactly?

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• snailwizard@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  “Science” isn’t a monolithic entity like a deity is. It’s simply a belief in the natural cause and effect of the universe we live in. In other words, science is merely a way to describe and explain our world, derived from repeated observations. When people say they “believe in science”, it’s not blind worship- the idea is to present findings and observations in such a way that anyone could theoretically replicate the experiment, given the proper equipment.

  On the other hand, faith is the opposite- “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (“Religion” is a system of hierarchical institution based on spiritual faith or beliefs, btw.) Scientists ask questions about the world, and strive to find the answers, but religious folks are content to let those answers simply be “because God”.

  So, to disbelieve in science- rather, the scientific method- is purely a rejection of reality. You can, in fact, reconcile spiritual beliefs with scientific truths to an extent but ultimately, learning more about science leads to its own kind of spiritual understanding and beliefs that tend to reject religion. This is upsetting to diehard religious folks because hierarchies demand constant subjugation of inferiors, and to reject that “place” in the hierarchy is an act of major rebellion in and of itself.

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• Nemo@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It’s better because it’s self-consistent and yields better results.

  The alternative is observation followed by inference. But inference can be wrong, no matter how good the observations it’s based on.

  Repeatable tests, published results, and consistent methodology are what separates the scientific method from the observe-infer-pronounce method that dominated natural philosophy beforehand.

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  • froghorse@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Better for what, exactly?

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• CorrodedCranium@leminal.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Religion? I feel like that’s the usual go-to for the evolution versus creation debate.

  I’d argue science is better in general because it involves deepening are understanding of the world which can be a building block for the future.

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  • froghorse@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You could call science a method for crafting knowledge.

    A method that insists upon a strong reference to observation.

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    • NOSin@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      What do downvotes do, exactly ?

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• goddard_guryon@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’m not sure what exactly you’re looking for as an answer here. I’ll say that instead of looking for alternatives of science itself, we can list through the central tenets of science and then explore perspectives that counter one or more of those tenets. I’m not sure of the generally accepted list of tenets, so I’ll try coming up with what I think those are:

  • observation: to understand the world around you, you need to be able to see/hear/feel it. Without this, you’re basically making up whatever you feel like (one could argue that the scientific method begins with a hypothesis followed by observations to test it, but the hypothesis itself has to be based in reality, which again requires prior observation of reality)
  • logical reasoning: one you make observations, you try to make sense of them. You do this by applying logic on your observations. Alternative worldviews would say that this logical reasoning has no inherent advantage over, say, not having it, but those worldviews would be useless themselves because a) as far as we can tell, the world does follow logic; “the world around us doesn’t have to make sense, yet it does”, and b) if we were to still accept alternative worldviews that throw away logic, it would get us nowhere. Theories that disregard logic have no consistency and thus no utility whatsoever. You can say this about most (if not all) religions: one of the arguments I’ve heard a lot against atheism is that science is useless because it’s ‘incomplete’, hence God. But that essentially stops science in its tracks: saying we should throw away science and blindly accept any faith solely because science hasn’t solved everything already actively harms science from making progress, and the religions being presented as the alternatives don’t answer the same questions satisfactorily (or consistently) either.
  • skepticism: this may partially overlap with the previous one. A huge part of the scientific method is to not blindly accept whatever is presented as model, or even observation, of the world around us. If an observation is objectively good, it should be possible to make basically the same observation by different people. If a model of reality is objectively good, it should match with the reality regardless of who tries to apply it. An alternative of this, like before, would be blind faithband superstition. Things like ‘miracles’ are not scientific because they cannot be (or at least have not been) repeatedly observed under controlled conditions. God as a model of reality is not scientific because it does not have much predictive power (as far as we can tell based on ‘prophecies’).

  There may be more ways an alternative theory could try to counter science, but I think these points should give you an idea.

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  • froghorse@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If we go with “science is a method for getting knowledge” then

    Authority, consensus, tradition, personal experience. Those are some alternatives to science.

    Can you add to that list?

    Be succinct.

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• backgroundcow@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  While a broad concept, in the context of your question, science is a metod to derive knowledge from observations.

  Alternatives to the scientific method is to guess or obtain knowledge from others. (Most other ways I can come up with, e.g. “religion” can still be sorted under these two.)

  Obtaining knowledge from others is great, but may not always be available, and the quality of the knowledge derived this way depends on the reliability of the source.

  For the other alternative, every sensible metric shows how science is a better method than guessing to derive knowledge.

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