Comment

Comment by ysapir

Even in natural sciences, there may be experiments that are not easily reproducible. Finding the Higgs can only be done in a long while (decade or more) with great financial investment.

Or take the 4th grade test about dinosaurs[1]. Objectively, we can't verify if the world if thousands or millions or billions of years old, and we can't verify if dinosaurs lived concurrent with humans or not. We weren't there. There is evidence, and how we interpret the evidence, and yet the test features a rather forced interpretation of the evidence. Now, numerically there may be a lot of people all over the world who prefer the fundamentalist interpretation, even if they are accredited scientists in universities. In a completely open environment, this opinion would get more weight than it deserves, a weight that does not represent its true standing among scientists who understand all the different implications of the evidence.

[1] http://www.snopes.com/photos/signs/sciencetest.asp

parent ysapir 13 years ago

No comments yet

Be the first to share your thoughts.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton