(suggested) scientific method
(suggested) scientific method:
1. what’s that
2. how does it work
3. yeah.. why
what if.. most all our efficiencies (via scientific method et al), [ie: creation of medicines, ammunitions, tools of measurement, …], are more a necessity of a people gone blind to what matters most (by jargon/verbiage/academia-speak of authoritative in-the-know-ness), and are thus, in that blindness/numbness/deadness creating problems that wouldn’t have occurred if we were simple awake/alive.
what if.. it’s the belief in the possibility of proving of things that’s getting in the way of us being.
The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the scientific method as: “a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.”
The chief characteristic which distinguishes the scientific method from other methods of acquiring knowledge is that scientists seek to let reality speak for itself, supporting a theory when a theory’s predictions are confirmed and challenging a theory when its predictions prove false.
Scientific researchers propose hypotheses as explanations of phenomena and design experimental studies to test these hypotheses via predictions which can be derived from them. These steps must be repeatable to guard against mistake or confusion in any particular experimenter.
iterating detox ness – our need to start everyday anew.. to question everything.. to have the bravery to change our mind..
Scientific inquiry is generally intended to be as objective as possible in order to reduce biased interpretations of results. Another basic expectation is to document, archive, and share all data and methodology so they are available for careful scrutiny by other scientists, giving them the opportunity to verify the results by attempting to reproduce them. This practice, called full disclosure, also allows statistical measures of the reliability of the data to be established (when data is sampled or compared to chance).
if you think you can measure it.. perhaps that’s a sign that it’d not real .. alive.. legit.. no?
often.. once we believe we’ve proved something.. we stop listening..
and then there’s the whole realm of pay wall ness.. which is so not full disclosure. on our ongoing need to listen deeply.. to the unlikely.. rhizomatic/stigmergic expertise ness..
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arguing w/a scientist – via Seth
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/05/how-to-win-an-argument-with-a-scientist.html
The act of being a scientist is the commitment to the scientific method, a series of hypotheses, tests and re-evaluations. When you make better science, the scientist’s previous opinion doesn’t matter, not if she’s being a scientist.
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Science has started to ask questions that may not be able to be answered by the scientific method -Gerry Gilmore #100yearsfromnow
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/xiaosquared/status/673119593691529216
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scientific method (suggested) – i think the thinking on this page is what got me going long ago on sci method ness
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thoughts scribbled in the middle of the night ness…
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from Gabor Maté‘s scattered:
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the quintessential achievement of western civilization, the scientific method, has come to be interpreted so narrowly that it has been used to exclude essential knowledge human beings have worked and studied and struggle over hundreds of generations to gain: the knowledge that we are not just the molecules that accidentally have come together to form our bodies, the thoughts that temporarily engage our mind, the feelings that agitate or soothe us from one moment to the next.. so ‘scientific’ have we become, that our science has come to ignore or deny the work and experience of the greatest teachers of humankind..
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via Elon Musk
The scientific method is a phrase Musk uses often when asked how he came up with an idea, solved a problem or chose to start a business. Here’s how he defines it for his purposes, in mostly his own words:
1. Ask a question.
2. Gather as much evidence as possible about it.
3. Develop axioms based on the evidence, and try to assign a probability of truth to each one.
4. Draw a conclusion based on cogency in order to determine: Are these axioms correct, are they relevant, do they necessarily lead to this conclusion, and with what probability? 5. Attempt to disprove the conclusion. Seek refutation from others to further help break your conclusion. 6. If nobody can invalidate your conclusion, then you’re probably right, but you’re not certainly right.
“That’s the scientific method,” Musk concludes. “It’s really helpful for figuring out the tricky things.”
But most people don’t use it, he says. They engage in wishful thinking. They ignore counterarguments. They form conclusions based on what others are doing and aren’t doing. The reasoning that results is “It’s true because I said it’s true,” but not because it’s objectively true.
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from Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms new power:
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old power values.. came from a world w clear boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’.. where only the lab coated and credentialed were equipped to solve the mysteries of the cosmos.. as one leading scientist explained, the resistance to open innovation ‘is really intrinsic, the history of the scientific method goes against it.. in our training trying to solve problems in the scientific method was: i take in all this info, i synthesise it, i do analysis, and i come to some conclusion and so to reach out to other people to solve it, it’s like cheating’
scientific method and cheating
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from Charles Eisenstein‘s climate:
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if money is the keystone of the arch of modern society, the foundation is surely science. when someone demand we be realistic, often they are referring either to money or to scientifically verifiable fact.. science provides our culture’s main map of reality..
non legit.. not us
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science in our culture is more than a system of knowledge production or a method of inquiry. so deeply embedded it is in our understanding of what is real and how the world works, that we might call it the religion of our civilization. it isn’t a revolt against truth we are seeing; it is a crisis on our civilization’s primary religion..
science ness
in fact, the scientific method, like most religious formulae for the attainment of truth, rest on a priori metaphysical assumptions that we must indeed accept on faith..
huge.. scientific method et al
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starting from this implicit metaphysics, consider these other ways that science resembles religion. science has: procedure (sci method); rituals (experiments & techs); invisible universal spirits (energy.. forces); esoteric language understandable only by initiates; teachings on human nature; a creation story (big bang.. darwinian evolution); rituals for healing (meds); priesthood.. various degrees of piety; training; preachers; heroes; martyrs; mainstream sects and wacky cults; ..
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the spiritual essence of the religion of science is the opposite of its institutional arrogance: the scientific method embodies a deep and beautiful humility. it says, ‘i do not know, so i shall ask’.. the true scientist is always open to being wrong, even at the cost of funding, prestige and self image
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my call here is therefore not to discard science but to expand it, to include what it has ignored
i don’t want to be lumped in with the ignoramuses (step backward)
what?
i raise them (the questions) nonetheless, because both the metaphysical assumptions of science and its institutional expression are part and parcel of the system that has laid waste to the world. science’s reduction of reality to number mirrors the conversion of nature to money. its universalization of matter into generic particles mirrors the standardization of people and commodities in the industrial economy. and the technology that comes form science facilitates both..
though it is evolving, science as we have known it (and still to a great degree) has trained us: to see the world as a bunch of insentient things; to make decision ‘rationally’.. based on utilitarian calculations; to see the observer as independent from the observed; to see nature as an object of manipulation and control; to ignore the immeasurable/qualitative; to think mechanistic rather than organic
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when we say ‘trust the scientific consensus on climate change’ we are also implying: thrust social processes by which this consensus is formed; trust other things about which sci consensus is declared; trust the basic approach to knowledge that sci reps; .. trust assumptions that underpin sci; trust other institutions that draw their legitimacy from sci; trust power of sci techs to solve problems
in various ways, all of thee things we have trusted have contributed, and continue to contribute, to the ongoing devastation of the biosphere.. this presents the more radical environmentalist w a conundrum when invoking sci in the fight against climate change, because it requires a buy-in to the very same systems of intellectual authority that have long presided over and defended our ecocidal system
huge.. black sci of people law.. et al
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we need to reach beyond the good little schoolboys/girls who trust sci and believe what the teacher tells them is important.. and we need to cleanse ourselves of the stink of self righteousness that comes when we hold in contempt those who don’t understand sci (or patronize them as recalcitrant rubes to be ‘educated’ in a dumbed-down version of it).. ‘science says’ is not going ot reach the farmers, hunters, ranchers an other people who (in the us) typically have conservative political id’s .. voted for trump.. are polarized into climate skeptic positions.. nor will it much impress working class people who feel quite understandably, that the establishment has betrayed them
many people have direct experiences that contradict what science and authority generally tell them is real and possible. a friend’s lifelong menstrual cramps disappear for good after a few acupuncture sessions, in spite of her extreme skepticism. a woman recovers form ‘incurable’ stage four pancreatic cancer. a man experiences direct communication w his ancestors in a iboga ceremony and ends his drug addiction. rival gangs meet in a restorative circle and come to peace.. experiences like these open people to further experiences.. when the ‘impossible’ happens we begin to question the bounds of the conventionally possible..
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the astonishing results of regen agri are just a taste of what can happen when we think, ‘land, i know you want to heal/give. please tell me how to serve you.’
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when that view changes, sci will morph into something we can hardly recognize. it will share the animating force of indigenous ways of communication w nature; it will be a sto\ep toward recovering our own indigeneity. that word must mean to be truly of a place, to be intimate w a place and all its beings. in the end, it does not matter if we enact the tech rituals of sci, or some other religion. what matters is that we return to love..
if we want to enact unreasonable commitment to the healing of the earth, we need to make our relationship w it into an affair of the heart
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by documenting them (*other cultures), we incorporate them into our world, into a safe educational or entertainment or inspiration al frame, and into the debordian society of the spectacle.. fortunately, these films are not documentaries..
*could say too.. other people.. labels et al
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stephen jenkinson (on why nature is dying at human hands.. because theirs is not a power of force vs force): .. and if the wild expires at our hands in decades to come, species by species, place by place, it does so as the wild does, not in soullessness, not in punition, but in silence..
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(an indigenous elder woman on letting go of conflict) usually it’s the same story.. the police come in, all the blackfellas get arrested, lost of the whitefellas get arrested, and the project continues. but this time, because we let go of conflict and entered into art and ceremony, the ancestors of the land could come in and exercise their power..
heard a diff version from helena norberg hodge, who lived an hour from site..according to her, the victory cam e thanks to the ‘knitting ladies’ older women, white and aboriginal who as they quietly went about their knitting, kept peace in the encampments, refrained the fighting/drunkenness that broke out among the men and opened up backdoor communications channels w the police..
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in the story of force vs force, the deeper sponsoring assumption is that if anything purposeful is to happen, we have to make it happen.. it has no room for the agency for other beings to engineer synchronicity..
have you ever noticed in life that the most striking synchronicities seem to happen in times of uncertainty? when one moves to a new city w/o a plan; travels w/o an itinerary; does something out of the ordinary w no idea of what will happen… then quite often an amazing .. sometimes life changing.. meeting or stroke of luck or ‘chance’ encounters.. they rarely happen when everything is planned , predictable and controlled.
sync matters.. we have to let go of that hard won order
predict\able ness.. control.. et al
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be you. 