> _“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”_
(living thread)
**_Everything_ is quantifiable, and should be quantified.**
Everything is a #measure or can be measured.
#Science can study anything, and #mathematics is the language of science.
The fact that some aspects of life seem hard to estimate doesn't mean we are better off not even trying and coming up with our best approximation.
More #information rarely hurts, and even rough approximations (accompanied by their respective confidence intervals) are useful information.
One can measure, weigh and analyse… and still be sensitive, funny, romantic, impressionable, intuitive, creative — if one so chooses after all the (numeric) information is available.
@tripu
Go tell this to anti realists.
Surely measuring things often improves information and knowledge, but that doesn't mean everything is quantifiable.
@rastinza What isn't?
@tripu
Whose life is better, what is the meaning of life, position and momentum of an electron
Science can study some things, to some others it can offer no response; for example it cannot answer the question "is science a good way to explain the world?"
> Position and momentum of an electron
Yes, I think you hit on a valid edge case: singularities (in the physics sense). At quantum level and black hole level my claim might well fail 😅
> [Science] cannot answer the question "is science a good way to explain the world?"
Yes, it can. Put science to compete against alternatives (intuition, religion, tradition, randomness, etc) to make predictions about a specific phenomenon. See which does better. Rinse and repeat. Science comes ahead in the aggregate.
@tripu
One edge case is enough to falsify a whole theory.
Making predictions does not equate to explaining something: neural networks for example make very good predictions about stuff, however provide no explanation.
Moreover, you cannot consider religion and tradition as alternatives to science since these do not work in the same field.
How can you evaluate which works better if they provide answers to different questions?
The scientific method is based on several axioms, thus one might simply disregard it completely if he disagrees with one of those.
> _“One edge case is enough to falsify a whole theory.”_
I'm happy for my claim that “math is everywhere and numbers are useful to us humans in all domains of life” to be limited by the Uncertainty Principle. There's still an awful lot of useful applications outside of that. After all, when was the last time you felt the UP was constraining your options in life?
> _“Making predictions does not equate to explaining something: neural networks for example make very good predictions about stuff, however provide no explanation.”_
Agreed. Still, science and math do tend to make predictions _and_ explain far more than anything else we know. Even when science or engineering can't “explain” but just “predict accurately”, they're terribly useful, and better than anything else. Don't you agree?
> _“You cannot consider religion and tradition as alternatives to science since these do not work in the same field.
How can you evaluate which works better if they provide answers to different questions?”_
What questions do religion or tradition answer better than science?
> _“The scientific method is based on several axioms, thus one might simply disregard it completely if he disagrees with one of those.”_
Agreed. But that's true of _any_ epistemic system. That's not a weakness of science. (And I would claim that science needs fewer and simpler axioms than, say, Christianity.)
@tripu
I do agree with you in almost everything, but even though you believe that everything is quantifiable, you have no way to prove it is, while I did provide valid examples of things which are not quantifiable.
Thus, according to the scientific method, not everything is quantifiable.
Religion provides clear answers to the questions "why are we here" "what is the purpose of life" and so on
Tradition provides guidance on how to behave in certain situations, something that science cannot do: science can help you understand the outcomes of certain actions but it doesn't tell you which one to perform, while instead tradition does guide you in your decision making.
Science and technology are useful, I never said otherwise.
The fact that religion is also based on axioms doesn't change anything. One could consider the axioms on which religion is based as correct and the ones on which science is based as incorrect and still use science because it works.
Just like when you use classical mechanics, you know that the theory is wrong but it does work well enough to do what you need to do.
Keep in mind, I'm not religious at all.
If you believe that science provides real knowledge, that is fine; but it's just your belief and you have no way to prove it to be true.
> _“Religion provides clear answers to the questions ‘why are we here’, ‘what is the purpose of life’ and so on”_
Sure. But it's not about providing answers; it's about providing _good_ answers. My 2-year-old can provide a clear answer to the thorniest of questions, too.
I sense you're stuck in binary thinking: either a theory is absolutely comprehensive, or it fails; either an epistemic system can answer any conceivable question, or it doesn't work as stated. I'm more interested in what works best.
Yes, you can reject any axiom, define “works best” to mean anything, and even deny that there could be a way to know what “works best”. But then you're trapped in an epistemic void of nihilism.
Almost everything we use for decision-making would fail at the quantum level, near a black hole, or when the Big Crunch is nigh. Again, I'm happy to rephrase my claim to restrict it to a human-scale scope. As I said, that's still an awful lot of areas that are commonly assigned to the realm of intuition, opinion, the ineffable, or the subjective — and I maintain they're not.
@tripu
Science provides a comprehensive explanation of the world only as long as you have a materialistic view of the world.
Religion provides answers if you don't believe in materialism.
Now, wether those answers are correct or not it doesn't really matter; science does not provide those answers at all if you are not a materialist.
A Christian will tell you that while science is really useful, it doesn't allow you to discover God, which is in their view the real objective of life; thus while science is useful in conducting life on earth it's not useful to conducting a proper life.
@rastinza @tripu yes, some people can believe extremely improbable things and still lead a happy life. There isn't a single answer for the best way to live. I don't think science will ever say "no one should believe in God to be happy", since that's clearly (and measurably) not true. There's no contradiction here.