Today I am going to ramble about "science" versus business books, pop psychology, etc.

Many people treat "science" as a collection of facts. The next level is to consider "science" as a collection of facts derived through a particular methodology. ¹ Both of these levels of "scientific" understanding presume a process/establishment that is good enough at filtering good from no-good to consider humans collectively to be "moving forward".

The next level of thinking about "science" is to consider how authorities canonize what is(n't) "science" and how knowledge accumulation is more about finding useful models for different things and trying to fit them to phenomena. "Science" is a far less unified thing than people make it out to be. Reporting "facts" is a very difficult thing to do because "scientific facts" are always with respect to a model.

Two places to learn more about these things:

• For an introduction, see Luke's Smith Against Method and For 'Pseudoscience'
• For a more long-form thing, see the works of Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Case Study

Some neckbeard might say something like "Qi energy is not real". What do they mean by this? That some traditional Chinese school of thought is completely incoherent?

This neckbeard might reply that Qi cannot be measured with any instrument we have. We can't observe Qi like we measure the temperature with a thermometer.

To be a difficult person, you create a dataset rating video clips on the amounts of Qi energy being displayed. Professional fighters display lots of Qi concentration; you mark some high number. Someone just sitting and not doing much has resting Qi not doing much. You tag a few thousand video clips and then run your classification algorithm on some new data.

Wow! Machine learning shows Qi exists?!??!??!?!?

Implications

There's lots of useful information all over. Oftentimes, to understand some isolated "fact" however, you need to understand some more comprehensive system. Someone who is not trained in biology, chemistry, and other things is probably just driveling nonsense if they are talking about how sodium is good/bad for the body. "Sodium" is just a magic word to this person.

On the other hand, some people talking in terms of martial arts, traditional medicine, etc. may be onto something. Do they have a model of the world that helps them do whatever activities they are trying to do?

A programer may be annoyed by many aspects of music notation. Why does such-and-such have to be so confusing? We must respect the fact that Western music notation works, as do programing languages. Both have lots of room for improvement but they succeed at least somewhat in some particular domain and we can state "facts" in terms of them.

Likewise, as with the machine learning example above, we can talk about the models of psychology/business/etc. as put forth in popular/contemporary readings. Insofar as these books are able to help people do a better job communicating with others, getting organized, etc., these works shouldn't just be considered as "pseudoscience".

"Fact Checking"

"Facts" only make sense with respect to some model of the world. Can you say that XYZ discovered the atom? The notion of "atom" as discussed in physics and stuff today is a very specific thing that only exists with respect to a particular model of the world. Likewise, when religious people speak of "the soul", a Christian might mean a very different thing from a Buddhist or some kind of Pagan. Each describes this term with respect to some model of the universe.

"Fact checking" is prone to be super annoying and misleading because it presumes one (establishment-approved) view of the world and calls things factual or not relative to that.