Quoted in whole just for a cogent reflection of my understanding, don't take it personally. It's a response to someone about a specific question.
Steven Novella wrote:
What do you think science is? There's nothing magical about science. It is simply a systematic way for carefully and thoroughly observing nature and using consistent logic to evaluate results. Which part of that exactly do you disagree with? Do you disagree with being thorough? Using careful observation? Being systematic? Or using consistent logic?
I like this topic best. I was taught to be superstitious and I was taught what to think of. I was taught how to think of it. The people who taught me these things didn't do it to harm me, they were taught to think that too.
Wrong science gets overturned by a better explaination. Superstition breeds itself.
Easy to misunderstand in all the complexity. When Erwin Schrodinger described a cat in a box with radioactive decay as the trigger to kill the cat he simply meant that a radioactive isotope has a statistical probablity in a given duration to decay but you can't predict exactly when, not that a cat is concurently dead and alive. That would be crazy.
Bigfoot. Crop circles. Psychics.
Prove it.
That is a trick challenge. It's impossible for a reason.
Heisenberg realized that the more positive you are of a position, the less you can be sure of the momentum and vise versa. This is about particles, not baseballs, so you can't see any evidence with your eyes in most cases.
Faith healing. Spirit mediums. Ghosts.
Poorly, misreported, and flatly made up whole-cloth bullshit is stuck out there as reality (and misrepresented AS science) because people either lie, or perception meets a lacking enlightenment and the shadow was a monster. The monster story is interesting to most people. Not me. I'd rather them fess up that they shit their pants when they saw their own shadow. That is funny.
People ask what harm it is to let people believe what they want to. It is outright deadly in the case of faith healing or homeopathy for a medically treatable disease.
I came to these conclusions; I didn't jump to them.
It's not my boat. Hop in. Lots of room and arguments about most everything too. It is more comforting to know what we know and how we know it than it is to hold onto a superstition born before history.
Signatures have a 255 character limit that I could abuse, but I am not Cecil B. DeMille.
