Science is powerful tool, but today it appears to be threatening to certain segment of society. If you have a poor narrative that you live by, and the data doesn't speak for it, then the data gets tossed out. Now for that matter, the baby gets tossed out too. After all, science was created by some privileged European dudes. So what do they know? They never suffered victimhood or belonged to disenfranchised tribe.
So retro-elitists like Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton should have known better what wokeness would have come to light in 2020. But instead they focused on concepts like observation, skepticism, making hypotheses, and testing & experimentation. So much for these twits.
But without error correction to our ideas, we are doomed to failure. Error correction is the basis for science, as well as everything we do. We all have biases and misinformation, so being vigilant through scientific tools is necessary to break away from what we believe to be true to knowing what we don't know.
But there is one area where the postmodernists may have a point on the shortcomings of science: once we leave the harder sciences (STEM) and move to the softer sciences (social sciences), it is harder to determine causation. We have now entered the territory of studying the human being in all his or her magnificent glory interacting within society, and when it's all said and done, it can be a cluster f--- to figure us out.
Here we find the power of science is in isolating variables and finding one key relevant factor that changes the game. We now know that the more Trump speaks, the more people get infected with Covid. Or maybe that is just a correlative. But never mind, facts fit narrative so it must be true!
The reality is the challenges we face in society involve massive multi-variable systems. Not to mention, science has little to say of the moral, ethical or spiritual sense of what guides our inner selves. So if free will can't be isolated to a variable, then what good is it to the scientist.
“The problem with science is that without rules that generalize from experience, we have nothing more than a catalog of data, but inductive evidence can never tell us with certainty that our generalizations are correct” (Manzi). So we gotta start with some ideas—which means you can never remove the scientist from the science. This was Polanyi's big point: all knowing is personal.
And as we move from physics, to biology, to human behavior, causal density increases significantly to the point where we land on a mass of (almost) free willing persons within multi-complex systems. And at that's when the scientist is going to have to make a stand somewhere—and where some reliable tacit knowledge (through tradition and experience) is going to have to be invoked where trail and error has no place.
That's also why error correction can't stop with the science, but must be part of the process of the scientist themselves. We must always be aware of the intelligibility and coherence of the converging principles he or she is working from. Otherwise, we can be left with skewed data (flawed by omission more than commission) shoehorned into a correlated narrative that may be counter to reality.
Still, where the postmodern woke go wrong is we will always need to trust the tools and the tooler, as long as we verify too. We need to make sure the thesis/conclusion is cohesive and non-contradictory while the person proposing it is worthy of belief in their proposal. And while science is never the end of the story, it can scaffold us closer to a higher truth. But without the tools of science all together, we can easily regress to impulsive idiots.
“When we do science, we reject the Aristotelian idea of “essence,” but when we think about what we love, essence is everything. So, we need to think strategically while remaining aware of our ignorance, and we need to exploit the power of trial and error while remaining aware of the essence of what we are trying to protect.” — Jim Manzi