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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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I hesitate to say people have rejected science, as I said above, to the vast majority of people who don’t work in the sciences, or know people who do (and to be honest the same could be said of most academic subjects) they don’t understand it at all. They’re not rejecting a subject they don’t understand, they’re rejecting narratives and a “priesthood” of The Science. They don’t know the work of science, they don’t understand the process, they don’t understand the arguments.the reason for anti-realism and anti-science is that once you lose your trust in the basal religion of you society and suspect that those you trusted to explain the universe are either ignorant or untrustworthy.

I think some disciplines tend to over-theorize, especially astrophysics and the like. Most of the stuff about the ultimate structure of the universe are basically no more empirical than any cosmology invented by any ancient religion. There’s no direct experiment or observation that could conceivably show air castles like String Theory or Multiverses to be reality. There have been no observations of dark matter or dark energy. All of these things might be true, but we have no data, and no empirical evidence of any of it. It’s mostly based in mathematics. Mathematics that was based on other observations, but mathematics. And I think the honest answer to these sorts of ideas is “we don’t know”.