Do you believe the scientific community in 2020?

I build databases. Worked with a Dr. who developed an excellent NICU application. Turns out in the real world, if you are caring for babies, you can not depend on a straight Male / Female binary choice to accurately describe a baby. I know that social values are changing radically but the truth is that the actual nature of human beings is not nearly as clear cut as we may want to believe.

Heard this on a drive a while back and it kind of blew my mind. Can’t believe how much we have learned since I left college in the early 80s. We certainly understand more now than we did then. FWIW, I think this is worth a listen.

When I was in the 6th grade our science book told us that the Earth constantly went through cyclical changes and we were headed for an ice age in some many thousands of years. I was somewhat skeptical but knew I would not live long enough to know if they were right or not. The science teacher allowed a couple of students to hold Mercury in their bare hands and also demonstrated on a desktop how it behaved and rolled around in little balls. Science has evolved since then. When scientists are looking back in time or trying to predict the future there are always some variables that they don’t fully account for.
I’m pro science but always trying to think about the variables that they may be missing. No pointy hats.

Yet anthropologist can look to the bone fragments/skeletons fossils throughout ancient history and scientifically determine whether animals were male or female but according to this view they shouldn’t be able to?

So throughout history, we could determine male or female but now all the sudden recent studies say there’s a continuum?

How convenient.

Yep. One of my science teachers told me that in 30 years, everything I’d learned in college would be dated or wrong.
And that all that I’d have left to rely on was the habit of looking for answers.
True that.

I don’t know about ancient history but I do know that now babies are born and their sex is not possible to define as male or female. Perhaps their fossils could provide that evidence but their living beings do not. Of course there is also the point of time reference. How would the anthropologists address the fossilized remains of clownfish, wrasses, moray eels, etc.

With rare exceptions I think science is evolving and providing a clearer view of reality. I know that during the time I have been on this board flashlights have gotten better. It is easy to mis represent science. However, what is a Lumen other than an expression of a scientific principle? What is a driver other than an application of those principles? You can go into a field and claim that a 1,000 Lumen headlamp is not as bright as a 900 lumen C8 and a whole bunch of people would believe you. Does not meant that the science somehow got “convenient”.

Yes, we can determine a person's sex at birth, unless you are part of the 1% who have a genetic issue like hermaphrodite. Gender may be a social construct, but sex is not.

I guess my question is where does real science stop and philosophy start? I don’t trust the peer review process.

Example: Why should we expect the future to be like the past?

Your view is based on indoctrination. Deception.

Peer previewed is often deception too.
Lots of corruption, lots of bought/controlled reviews. Stepping outside the controlled boundaries gets a scientist marginalized.
No, I’m talking about ‘facebook scientists’.

Some might remember a few years ago, a congressional hearing with high level NOAA officials testifying that the official books were cooked on a regular basis…

So, with buoy temps changed/cooked in the NOAA charts/studies, the same studies/charts that scientist use all over the world to form their theories, are these theories and studies that used the cooked books valid…?

Or are scientific studies only as accurate as the ‘facts’ they use…?

Does money corrupt science or further it….

Conspiracy-thinking is something that happens in your own mind, unlike science it does not tell much about reality, instead it is in the way of reality.

What’s frustrating to me is: why is this even a question?

Many of the things I learned in college date back hundreds of years. They are still accurate enough to keep you alive while hurtling through the air at 500+ mph.

It’s the times we live in. Distort and confuse. Sadly it works. Oh yeah, lie also.

I initially had the same thought and asked myself “what’s the alternative”. And then I realized that many people have alternatives. Add to that the fact that science is constantly evolving. People seek answers to questions. Science is hard. Understanding science is hard. Then you have the pointy hats. I may have said too much.

Look at some of the replies in this thread, sadly your answer can be found there.

All I know is that many different weather sources/models can’t accurately predict the weather even 2-3 days out, so how in Hell can they accurately predict what’ll happen 10/50/100/1000 years out?

The smallest little tweak to even a single parameter has a huge butterfly effect the farther out you let it play out. So of course you can shop around to pick the model whose prediction fits what you want to predict. Yet “scientific models predict…” blah blah blah, the end of life as we know it. :confounded:

As of Monday, today was supposed to be rainy, but the sun’s shining quite brightly.

There are countless examples of why we should expect the future to be like the past. That does not mean that the future will always be like the past. However, the last time I clicked the button switch on my flashlight it turned off. I expect it will come on when I click it again. The science behind that is solid. I expect that it will get dark later tonight like it did last night. Again solid science behind why we should expect the future to be like the past.

From the point of view of database design the 1% are actual people. A simple binary choice does not cover that actual reality of a baby’s sex. Gender is something different.

As a philosophy it made sense of geology. But you need a long observational baseline to get it right, as there are occasional dramatic events like asteroid/comet strikes, or Mt. Saint Helens type eruptions, or the several recent undersea earthquakes followed by tsunamis. Taking those into account as part of the long slow pattern of changes over time, it works to expect the future to be like the past. If your window on the past is the last week or two, then maybe not.

See also punk eek.

Agreed wholeheartedly.

Only the un-manipulated ones.