tdehnel

They said the science was bad, not the summary.

If you’re curious, the reason the science is bad because it’s explanationless

Utterly terrible argument. You could just as easily claim social media or touchscreens or episodes of Modern Family or literally anything else has lead to this increase.

This could be an argument for anything, so it is a bad argument.

> film was designed for optimal rendering of light skin

Utter nonsense. Shadow contrast is lower with darker skin. It’s physics, no matter how much you want to see racism.

So it could very well be more than half.

so your theory is “things have predictable patterns” or “the future will be like the past”

yes, that is one good example

i see what you mean, i suppose my concept of “explanation” could be closer to what you mean by theory

> Thinking that something will either happen or not happen if I mix those two substances is not a theory.

OK I'll bite. What is it then?

There are practically infinite combinations of things to mess around with. Which stuff do scientists choose to mess around with and why?

Why would someone do an experiment without a theory to test? How would they know that a particular result was interesting without a theory about the expected result?

You can't even observe something without theories. For example:

- I need to observe here and not anywhere else

- I can reliably interpret my senses/the instrumentation is working correctly

- Objects of this type normally behave in X way, because of Y

- etc

Think of it a different way. You can come up with a theory without any observation whatsoever. Black holes, for example, were conjectured well before they were observed.

I wouldn't disparage that method of discovery at all. But some of the theories required to do it are:

- Many brute-force combinations of these specific organic molecules will yield interesting results (this is the main hypothesis of the experiment)

- We don't need to include the molecules that we haven't included

- We have good criteria for determining what results are interesting

- Our instruments/methods of phenotype prediction are well-understood and working as expected

Once the experiment is run, the observations are meaningless unless interpreted in the context of whatever prevailing theories the scientists have in mind.

“That’s funny…” implies you had a pre existing theory about how it was supposed to work.