Adventures in Thought Space

    What does it mean to believe in science? Why do I believe in science?   Many promulgate science’s virtues, but such questions too often go unasked. Many conflate believing in science with believing what it says—or claiming to. Some confuse it with the joy of learning science. Others mistake it for the study of the physical World. To a Complex systems theorist, video games are no less part of Nature than the rainforest. Even most genuine believers have yet to solidify their adherence by answering these questions.   This post is the author’s solidification as well as an attempt to dispel common misconceptions about the nature of science.   Another misimpression is that belief in science is opposition to baseless opinions. You can’t truly say you believe in something if you don’t appreciate it, and you can’t truly appreciate it if you don’t at least on some level understand it, including its flaws. Belief in science manifests when one acquires UNI...

    Bishko once said that “It’s often hard to show someone they’re wrong about one thing when they’re wrong about almost everything else.”   What’s wrong with common learning, thinking, and wisdom isn’t so much incorrectness--but their nonexistence. Whatever tangibility they possess amounts to little more than questionably consistent, questionably correct beliefs people are told to have. Perhaps worse, the absence of an established epistemology implicitly discourages it. If its advocates weren’t offended by the following, it would be evidence against extralogical reasoning’s correctness.   Common life-related learning doesn’t teach thinking, decision-making, and mental health managerial methods (a philosophy of judgment); it doesn’t teach what knowledge, understanding, proficiency, and wisdom are and how they fit together (a philosophy of learning); it doesn’t define what a psychology is in any meaningful and unambiguous way and how it fits in with your i...