Weird Science
I read the whole thing and although there was a lot of interesting information there, I don&#x27;t get what the author was trying to say (other than, &quot;Hey look at all this information.&quot;)<p>To me it seems clear that the word &quot;science&quot; and the outer trappings and forms of using the Scientific Method have become co-opted, largely in the last century or so, to cover a lot of things that just can&#x27;t be considered &quot;true science&quot;.  This is not a &quot;No True Scotsman&quot; instance, because there is a clear and incontrovertible guideline for what (I think) counts as &quot;true&quot; science: the ability to make accurate predictions.  That, and that alone, is what truly distinguishes <i>science</i> (as I am using the term here, in a restricted sense) from all the other what-could-be-called &quot;predictive arts&quot;: e.g. astrology, tarot &amp; divination, numerology, etc.<p>Obviously, <i>physics</i> counts as &quot;true&quot; science.  The standard model makes predictions accurate to within a mind-bending tolerance, the width of a human hair over the distance from New York to Los Angeles.  Chemistry is science, biochemistry and molecular biology are still science.  Biology and ecology are pretty scientific.  From there, things get much worse pretty quickly.<p>By the standard of &quot;ability to make accurate predictions&quot; there are a lot of things we call &quot;science&quot; today that I just don&#x27;t think deserve the title, most importantly: economics, sociology, and psychology.  They can&#x27;t make predictions, and in many cases they can&#x27;t even replicate their &quot;findings&quot; from previous &quot;research&quot;!<p>I think those &quot;sciences&quot; serve a social function, the same one that the court astrologers et. al. used to serve, they give a glamour of legitimacy to the king and a way to deflect responsibility onto councilors of the imaginary, who supply ready-made scapegoats.<p>I&#x27;m not saying &quot;the humanities are not useful&quot; or anything like that, what I&#x27;m saying is that people mix up the orders of knowledge (deliberately or otherwise) as part of politics, and that some things that we call &quot;science&quot; today, aren&#x27;t.  I mean, E=mc2 doesn&#x27;t have to &quot;defend itself&quot; politically.  Anyone anywhere can test it for themselves (that&#x27;s the whole point, innit!?)