The Process of Science

This page is incomplete. It displays memoes and/or notes.

Title Memo

Science is a process, and can be done well or poorly. Things aren't "scientific" or "un-scientific" so much as the science is good or poor science. It's a matter of degree and quality. The importance of operational definitions and measurement. Other important features of real science. Black boxes, atomism, reductionisn, wholism, system effects, i.e., various levels of analysis.

Note Text: 1562 Science has protection against self-deception

The success of science appears in great part to be due to a series of built in devices that guard against deceit and self-deception at every turn. First, everything is supposed to be explicit. Famous mathematical proofs (Godel's theorem) begin with a set of all the symbols used and what they mean. By contrast, in the so....

Trivers, Robert, "The Folly of Fools", Basic Books, 2011, 305

Note Text: 1563 Deception protection in scientific methods

[Other deception-guarding devices in science: controlled conditions; meta-analyses; requirement for high p’s (.95 or .99); statistical methods allow both reliability (statistical significance) and effect size to be estimated.]

Trivers, Robert, "The Folly of Fools", Basic Books, 2011, 306

End of included memoes/notes

If science is an institution, the scientific method is its central process. Science isn't truth, but it is about truth. It is a process that like all other processes can be done well or poorly.

I've been fascinated with science since a boy, and I've studied it a lot, read it a lot, and done it a bit. I don't know whether most people are taught about scientific method in school. I imagine that if they are, perhaps they're taught about the progressive accumulation and winnowing of knowledge. Perhaps they're told about hypotheses and experiments to test them. It can be much too dry for many peoples' tastes. I don't want to do a comprehensive run-through, but there are some features of science that are important to the points I want to make in this book. I try to present them accurately but non-technically.