ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ส.ค. 2024
- Visit my new website: wescecil.com This lecture, presented by Wesley Cecil PhD. at Peninsula College, explores the way science has shaped our thinking and led to the peculiar and peculiarly misleading take on the world called "scientism".
Download the lecture handout at www.wescecil.co...
For more information visit www.wescecil.com
I believe this will become more and more relevant into the 21st century.
Wes Cecil, I randomly found your TH-cam channel and I wish I had found it three years ago! I'm sorry I didn't run into you when I lived in Port Angeles! I volunteered at Peninsula College for a couple of projects. Awesome lectures. Awesome stuff!!
I’ve been trying to come up with a simple way of conveying this concept and this lecture nailed it. Thank you!
Dr. Cecil, you ROCK!! I really enjoy learning and your lectures are mind expanding.
Bad news. The telephone was not only not progress. It was regression. Before the telephone, the telegraph already had developed into a sort of primitive internet. The telephone re-privatized communication and kept it there for more than a century.
This man needs to be teaching at Yale for Christ’s sake. As an English major, it’s always been my dream to combine multiple subjects (philosophy, science, and mathematics) and teach them as an English course, that is, with lots of context and evidence pulled from primary texts. Seeing Dr. Cecil make that dream a reality is beyond inspirational. Dr. Cecil demonstrates the true capabilities of an English major. Most English majors I know are interested in multiple subjects outside of literature. The whole point of the English degree is to learn how to research, argue, and communicate ideas in a clear and concise manner. It’s also about open-mindedness, communication, and learning to cope with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, but more than anything, the English degree is about humanity.
Thank you Dr. Cecil.
scienctism is really just positivism
I love your lectures Wes. Such profound insight, the way you combine various world views and schools of thought and make it so human and accessible, it's delightful to listen to.
I also read Dostoevsky and your description of him being riddled with flaws is truly brilliant to me.
I wanted to ask your opinion on something, recently I stumbled across some talks from scientists questioning what they called the paradigm of materialism, i guess their Aristotelian worship of matter and reduction of everything else to illusion. They poised kind of spiritualist, pseudo scientific ideas, but the main thing was one of them found flaws in the way meteorologists measure universal constants, and made a gesture that maybe these 'constants' change and evolve with the universe. A perfectly good, scientific assumption! But he was met with so much resistance that the site, TED, had to take it down due to being 'scientifically incorrect'. Do you think in our lifetime we might see a move away from materialism and capitalism? And from your experience, do these things tend to meet a lot of resistance before a change of direction takes place?
This lecture was amazing
It is important to make a distinction between natural science and social science. In the bridge example we use natural science for the construction of the bridge. When it comes to its location we look to social sciences like sociology or political science. Thus we use the knowledge of science just another kind of science. The ambiguity problem with many social sciences, the many differing view on for example where to build the bridge stem from a methodological issue, because the social sciences are often not, as fierce in applying the scientific method as the natural ones and the results frequently lack replicability.
Another problem I have with Wes' view is the notion that science strives to find the right way. This is not what science is about. It can't say if something is right. it can only say, within a reasonable frame, whether something is wrong and specific theories only offer our temporarily best explanation for a given topic. So science can make good recommendations for the best way to do something with regard to a certain aspect, but it does not give or even claims to give the right way.
Scientism means “check your guesses.” That’s all it means.
Science says, eat less and exercise more. I say, I want another slice of pecan pie.
Started losing me when it became evident you were obviously downplaying what air-conditioning did for humanity (the elderly, hospitals, electronics, etc.) but totally lost me when you dismissed the Higgs as largely irrelevant. You then sealed the deal with claiming "science says"-no Sir, science doesn't "say" anything. Going at length claiming humanity didn't place numbers on things before the scientific revolution but failed to mention currency that's been around far longer, I could go on and on.
This whole talk seemed more agenda filled than rational.
@ is this not why we must define terms, ideas and generally "what we mean" as to limit errors of opinion? For example, if someone says "blue is the best color" I might further explore what they mean by asking, best for what? Is it the best for painting the bottom of helicopters for to hide them in the sky? Well we can test that.
Defining blue isn't all that hard either as at a minimum we can discern between say, some objects in a table that are identical except some are blue and some are red. Even if we can't define precisely what blue is, there is something there that's measurable as all things being equal, the "blue-ness" is something we're identifying to tell them a part from the red objects. If we define our terms in some way, we can discuss rationally competing ideas on most if not all topics that can have a measured, repeatable and dare I say, scientific approach.
I think the only way someone can claim "scientism" is a thing is by suspending reality as a whole no different than someone arguing we "could" all be in the matrix.
Dr. Cecil is great. Why is he teaching at a College I've never heard of??
40:00 Well, we are listening to you here today, so I'd say so
Ender's Game is a 4.30
However there are 1.2 million ratings which is a lot more than The Brothers Karamazov. LOL
These numbers indicate the PROBABILITY of liking the book within that genre. I would not think about reading TBK.
Check out C. P. Snow. The Literary and Sci-tech people think kind of different but the Sci-tech people don't talk about planned obsolescence enough.
Wealth & Cash Flow are not the same thing.
The steam engine is a combustion engine.
It is an external combustion engine versus the internal combustion engine.
Would mandatory accounting in the schools make people more rational about money? This could have been done since Sputnik. When do economists suggest it?
Apply science to the Twin Towers and ask about the distribution of steel down the structures and other skyscrapers.
First rate, thank you
I agree that scientific thinking or rational thinking is not generally applied in politics. At least not in a democracy, especially a democracy that is allowed to print and or "borrow" enormous sums of money. Rational thinking applied to sociological issues would obviously lead us down a eugenic path. Most, if not all, ancient societies followed such a path. As they were not so far removed from the law of tooth and claw, as we are. Is evolution itself not eugenic? It may be uncomfortable to look at the plain and simple truth. However, just as the yeast culture grows, uses up it's resources and drowns in it's own waste (giving us our booze) so our species is devouring everything and drowning in its own poison. Basically, democratic compassion is killing everything. As a species we must accept nature for what it is or perish. It is what it is.
interesting to note that Newton was a mathematical physics philosopher. Galileo didn´t cross Aristotle, that happened in 1277. He crossed a papal admin clinging to Ptolemy.
😂
The world was created 6000 years ago by a deity. But not just any deity. A deity who looked like Mike Ditka.
Why didn't you mention Jabir ibn Hayyan (815 AD). He wrote about using a clear scientific method in doing a proper research.
Another amazing lecture and very much in keeping with observations from cognitive science that show how human irrationality is never actually supplanted by rationality. Human cognition and behavior is paradoxical by nature.
A 4.4 vs a 4.0 out of 5 is not a 10% difference, it is much greater. It is almost twice as close to a perfect score of 5, and much rarer with regards to books of such readership to attain such high marks.
Much of this is not true, not factual.
The Error part of Trial and Error is interesting when it comes to Steam Engines.💥☠️
jumbo jets fly 600+ mph, just in case anyone was wondering.
Is that ground speed or air speed? :)
@@a.randomjack6661 Warp speed.
Lets want to build the Dragon Bridge, perhaps with stone/metal.
You da man Wes. However I must submit a correction. Peter Thiel didn't found PayPal, that would be Elon Musk.
and I would also add that while air conditioning as such might not seem like a major innovation, refrigeration (a related technology) is most certainly a significant historical innovation.
Elon Musk, didn´t found PayPal. He was with it when it got big. Musk co-founded X.com, which merged with Cofinity that had X.com. Two years later, Ebay bought PayPal and Musk´s 11% holding paid off big for him.
I can think of many myths of the American mind, but honestly, I never thought of 'scientism' as one, but I guess when it comes to things like ghost hunting it could be salient. The most pervasive myths of the American mind, at least as far as what is glaringly obvious, would have to be liberal progressivism and egalitarianism, or universalism. I wonder if you plan to deconstruct those myths?
This is very excessively hyperbolic.
I agree people can over use and abuse science, but the key issue, is that over emphasizing science, doesn't really hurt anyone that I can tell, and the counter position, of misusing science, or pseudoscience, or outright anti-science is far more of a societal threat then "scientism".
You spend like 20 minutes complaining about rating systems of all things. Subjective rating systems are very useful for subjective issues... Which is why medical science uses a subjective 1-10 scale to measure pain for instance.
Can we call it entirely scientific? Debatable. But it is useful, and I don't see the point of mocking it. Knowing what the average subjective rating of other people, can be somewhat predictive of your personal experience with the product. Humans are, after all, more similar then dissimilar.
Science doesn't belong in a box. Every time somebody says "science has no application in this field" some creative soul finds a great way to use scientific methodology to advance understanding in that field.
Obviously not all knowledge needs to come from science, but you also can't say it doesn't have relevance to most of life.
You said yourself, there are a jillion sub branches of science. Why is that? Because science has FAR too much understanding for one person to grasp. And yet you seem to think you understand it all well enough to say where it doesn't apply? And to mock things like Dark matter/energy, when you don't understand the math that leads to the predictions?
By all means, we should question everything, especially things touted as "science". We should check sources on any issue of importance. But science has application to all kinds of things. The scientific fields of psychology and neuroscience have made vast import into personal self improvement as well as societal improvement, for instance.
Understanding biological and memetic evolution has given me great insight into all kinds of things.
You speak of how science can't help us with diabetes, because while we can understand it medically, we can't solve what people want. Again, under rating the application of psychology/neuroscience, which has made fantastic strides. It hasn't gotten into mass use yet, but we are understanding the self, and how to improve it as we wish, far more then ever before, through science.
And yes, we can study economics scientifically, without individual people spending rationally, that is an ignorant thing to say... Through analysis of statistical trends etc... Individuals may behave irrationally, but it is still predictable... not truly random behavior. There is a difference between "irrational" and "random" and you don't seem to understand that.
In a nutshell, mocking science and areas you don't understand as "scientism" for over an hour, is not a useful lecture, in my considered opinion.
Too much of any good thing is a bad thing. Just because it isn't as much of a bad thing as an excess in another thing doesn't make it any less of a bad thing. Just because a society that is anti-science is worse than one that is obsessed with it, doesn't mean it still isn't a problem. Also, I listened to the whole thing and in no where was he mocking science. I believe he said repeatedly that this isn't an indictment of science but the misapplication of science. The interesting thing is that from my experience scientism isn't really that much of a problem in the scientific community. In fact, most scientists I know and, being in the academic world right now I know a few, are very concerned with the limitations of science and by extension its misapplication. This is what science can do, this is what science cannot do. You find that on the beginning of almost every textbook across all sciences. In fact, I remember my very first two science classes, bio and environmental science, these questions were on the very first test. It's very important for the scientific community to communicate what it is, and also, what it is not. There were questions concerning whether science can prove a theory (it can't, it can only prove things to be false, that's why evolution is still a theory even though everyone agrees it's a thing).
But the larger, less scientifically literate population, doesn't really understand this. And this is where scientism is. It's not a problem with science (most of the time) but what everyone else. The scientific community is very concerned with debunking a lot of the scientific myths you have floating around, such as the meaning of the word theory for example, which many people believe to be just conjecture. I read two articles this week debunking scientific myths. Guess what, scientism is a scientific myth. We should be concerned with educating the public about what science is I don't see how this could be a bad thing. And in order to educate people on what science is, we have to tell them what it is not.
The interesting thing is that your comment is itself an outgrowth of scientism. If you even look like you are critical in any way of science or something like scientism that has science in its name (even if part of what makes it scientism is that it is *not* science) is kind of like critiquing the church was in the middle ages.
We should be concerned with the misapplication of science. We should be *very* concerned. Sure, the example of reviews might be trivial to you, but very important if you are concerned with wine or literature and want to understand the value of a score on a review. And the other example he gave, of creationism, I assume was not so trivial. Are you aware that teaching creationism in high schools is an outgrowth of scientism? Religion has no business in a science class and similarly, science shouldn't be applied to proving (or disproving) the existence of a god. Science has nothing to say about that. It, by definition, only deals with what it can empirically quantify. You can't quantify god. It might have things to say about certain religious beliefs, but not about the existence of god itself. Until we can experiment and test spiritual concepts we can't have a scientific discourse for god. But we continue to pretended that we can. So any application of science to try to sell you on religion, or anything, be it a product or a service or a political or economic philosophy, where it does not apply, can potentially be harmful.
Let's be glad, as Wes said, we don't live in an age of anti-science like the middle ages. That would be much worse. But that doesn't mean we can't talk about this. I mean, I like to complain about the public transportation in my area. Sure, I should be grateful that I even have public transportation and I am. Sure, there are much bigger problems than my lack of better public transportation, even in my city. We could have no public transportation at all! That would be much worse. Does that mean I shouldn't talk about it? Of course not.
Mishima You seem to have misunderstood my comment.
You say it is important to know the limitations of science. My point, is there are many areas where NO ONE KNOWS the limitations of science, or if they exist. Science doesn't belong in a box. You are right of course that it can't prove a theory, only falsify it, so I'll certainly give you that.
But that's a point of known scientific methodology.
This lecture is about SCIENTISM. Which is overly revering science. You are talking about people who don't understand science (aka lack of good science education) and pseudoscience (practices that sound like science, but don't use scientific methodology). These are distinct and real problems, but separate from scientism. Speaking of "scientism" in a derogatory way, only encourages the "growing endarkenment", the willful ignorance and anti-science movement.
The problem isn't with revering science too much. It is misunderstanding it, misusing it, and abusing scientific lingo for political, religious, or marketing purposes. If we respected science MORE, we would teach what it actually is and how to spot pseudoscience, and that would be a good thing.
"Religion has no business in a science class and similarly, science shouldn't be applied to proving (or disproving) the existence of a god. Science has nothing to say about that. It, by definition, only deals with what it can empirically quantify. You can't quantify god. It might have things to say about certain religious beliefs, but not about the existence of god itself. Until we can experiment and test spiritual concepts we can't have a scientific discourse for god. But we continue to pretended that we can."
Many religious claims infringe directly upon scientific fields, and have been studied using strict scientific methodology. And they have ALWAYS been debunked. Look at prayer studies for instance. All instances of assumed supernatural interference in our world have been debunked. We know intercessory prayer to be perfectly useless. Its just talking to yourself. Creationism, a young earth, and Noah's flood are debunked through science. The idea of a "soul" has been very strongly challenged, if not destroyed via science. And if there is no credible reason or evidence to believe God exists, that is ample reason to not believe in the concept.
Stephen McKerracher No I think what’s happening is you’re not understanding what he means by scientism. It does not mean an over revering of science. Sure, it is that component that might fuel it in many instances, but ultimately if it were just that people loved science too much I don't think that would be a problem for anyone.
But If you listen to the lecture, he very clearly defines scientism as, the misunderstanding of and misapplication of science in places where it simply doesn't make sense to apply it. And yes, science does have limitations, we all know what they are. If it didn't have the limitations it has, it would be magic, not science. Science is a method, a very strict method of understanding the physical world. By nature, any strict method must have limitations, otherwise it would not be rigorous. *The limitations make science rigorous* and serve to allow us to have confidence it its conclusions. If science is the bullet, the limitations are the barrel of the gun. They serve to help us understand where to aim it and assure us it will hit its target. If it didn’t have them, it would be all over the place, applied everywhere and effective nowhere. Coincidentally, that is what is happening with scientism.
But what are the limitations? Science can only deal with, and only wants to deal with, things that it can empirically quantify in some way. If it cannot go through all the steps of the scientific method, the ones you learned about in any intro course on just about any science class, observation, inductive reasoning, experimentation, deductive reasoning, and so on, If it hasn't gone through this very rigid process of analysis, nobody will call it science. Well, people will call it a science (political science, economics, the social sciences) but that won't make it a science, and any scientist will tell you that.
This is why scientism is such a problem for academics. It has created huge problems for all sorts of fields which have adopted the limitations of science arbitrarily in an effort to look more rigorous. In these cases, the limitations of science work to hinder, not help, the ability of that discipline to produce worthwhile answers. This is because though the strict methodology is necessary, it is misapplied. Sure strict methodologies and the limitations that necessarily come with them should be employed and/or developed. But there are other methodologies besides science that would be more appropriate in these areas.
So yes, we do want to put science in a box. *That is exactly what science is.* It's a method that says here, let's put this idea derived through observation in a box, test it under very rigid conditions using experiments that can be reproduced, so that we can be sure our conclusions are accurate. You see all of these limitations? Needs to be observable, needs to be testable, needs to be reproducible, needs to be quantifiable. These are at the core what science is, you could even argue science is defined by its limitations.
Stephen McKerracher As regards to science and religion. Science can talk about certain claims made by religious organizations. But these are just the claims that can be empirically tested. The efficacy of prayer groups can be empirically tested. Science has not disproved the existence of the soul. It simply showed us that we don't need to invoke the soul to account for organic life. These are two different things, the difference of which people have trouble understanding, probably because of scientism.
***** LOL and this is all that is wrong with the world.
This is also why I warned about the effects of this talk, because the Anti-science movement will quote mine it and think it supports them...
Talking of "scientism" feeds the growing endarkenment.
Nameless, Name a single credible reason to believe any of that garbage. All the arguments claiming the moon landings were faked have been definitively destroyed thousands of times.
Mythbusters even did it.
You can't just listen to the crazy wacko conspiracy theorists dude... that way goes insanity.
You have to also look at the counter arguments, and then you'll see it go up in smoke.
Quora has like a dozen questions on the topic, with hundreds of great answers, do some browsing and challenge your embarrassing ignorance.
www.quora.com/Have-humans-actually-landed-on-the-Moon
Keynes has been proven to be a terrible economist. Great lecture
Keynes died in 1946. What did he say about Planned Obsolescence? About as much as economists still say about it.
What has the annual depreciation of automobiles been since 1946?
Interesting but many of the questions raised here are answered by Dr. Sam Harris in the Moral landscape... its a lecture that he has published into a book... very good I would suggest it.