I think he was being sarcastic.
Mookie brought up a topic, "science should allow for dissent," then brought up scientists with a dissenting point of view. The reaction was ad hominem, along with the majority of the responses.
Nothing wrong with ad hominem, but it tends to be used to end conversations rather than spark discussion.
Think of it like a spectrum.
On the low entropy side of the spectrum you have physics and the bowling ball experiment should work the same no matter where you do it. Add some more entropy such as cellular biology and there are thousands of things happening in the cell and outside the cell at the same time so it is harder to be certain but you can demonstrate it more or less.
When dealing with economics, disease modeling, etc things with very high entropy we are in much different situation you are not proving things but instead modeling things and a few variables / assumptions off and everything you “predict” will be wrong. You can not take low entropy science cultures and transplant it to high entropy science cultures and vice versa. They are just different yet we use the word science to describe all of them, this is a fault of language where when we use a word we summon mental heuristics and shortcuts to the mind even if they do not apply.
(I did not even talk about even higher entropy things like the social sciences. Sociology is even more complex.)
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Science is always about a culture of argumentation, yet people like science more when it is not a culture but instead mere mental shortcuts, those heuristics I mentioned earlier, merely can apply and always achieve a 1 to 1 result. Sorry but the world does not work like that, it is complicated.
I like your points here, and feel that you have truly captured the essence of the dilemma of higher entropy science: that argumentation and discussion are necessary because there are too many variables to account for. In fact, you seem to advocate that discussion is needed on the high entropy sciences.
Which is why it was disappointing that your responses did not follow in that spirit.
This is actually part of my problem with government solutions in the first place. The higher the entropy of a system, the more number of models will be needed to find correct solutions. Centralizing policy will suppress this needed experimentation, and implementation on models that later turn out to be way off will have magnified effects.
It also allows for a lot of wiggle room for corrupt politics to rear it's ugly head.
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