A fine choice for the House Committee for Science, Space, and Technology

[Ironside]

Science is good because it helps you filter out all the bad science? That's an argument for understanding science and statistics and how psychological studies are done, sure. But not an argument in favor of the studies themselves.

Nah, alternatives are making theories by yourself (hardwired popular, but leads often wrong), go only on your own experience (insufficient), or going by "common sense", which can be summarized as all the experience you've picked up. So it's usually the best by those options, but since you have media with its false data and insufficient data from friends and family, you'll need something more as well.

Ever done a good psychology test (there's planty of bad ones though)? It'll go something like this on the points: Lol totally wrong. Wrong, but I can see how you got there. Correctish. So true. Man, I would never have come up with it, but everyone agrees it's an excellent fit, including me in retrospect. The last part is really hard to get otherwise.

This is great for, say, chemistry. But if you are going the "big questions", it is no longer significant praise of the principles of science to say that according to them the college kid is doing it wrong if he's taking the latest study as gospel. Because in that case, according to the principles of science, we should limit our beliefs in accordance with the scientific evidence--and therefore, if we lack scientific evidence that something is good or bad we should not venture too far in saying it is. This mindset often leads straight to naturalism--"people naturally do x, so what we say about it is that it's not really bad".

In other words, the only reason the principles of science are so inherently undogmatic is because science should rightfully be limited to a small area.

Needless to say, scientists and religious people have similar attitudes towards people who accept as gospel certain moral principles that they think are true and important.

You're not familiar with advanced chemistry and biochemistry I take it? Those got areas worse than social science when it comes to vagueness. Statistics are the only thing that works, maybe.

I'm going to put it this way. Have some of the big questions changed because of science? Yes, well rather thanks of the knowledge gathered by science. If that's the case, what does rejecting science tells us?

???

I think it's really hard to summarize these things and not be goofy but can't we do better than that?

It was probably a bit missed when I went on with the goofy list, but the original point was that traditions don't really have an answer to the big questions, they rather fumbled together something and since it's traditions, that's how it works.

Religion are dealing with the big questions, but often falls back to that the gods did it. And since the gods did it according to my interpretation, I'm really right on the matter.

So no method is really equiped for it, partially because some depends on your values and people will have different values.
Will that authority searching person change with any system? No, so why bother picking him up as science is bad? He would be as bad in the other systems as well.

Sometimes in psychology the randomly select a group of people and do something experimental and analyze the results.

Other times they do case studies and just try to understand people...similar to how we do things in our regular lives. If you don't respect the first, but respect the second which you still think of as science then we don't disagree in this regard...

Both are useful. The first is good for extreme situations and to understand single or a few factors, the second one provides interactions and context. Take neurology for example, without shutting down braincenters, you'll never understand how they work and are linked together, yet on a normal person they're all (somewhat) functional. This have a massive influence in understanding human psychology.

Let's say that you were someone who believed in a fairly moderate view of abortion. First trimester, or something. And it was clear to you that there was no way that first trimester abortion was going to be made illegal in your country. But, there was a strong movement in favor of "until birth", and the arguments and mindset of the people arguing for it gave you no reason to believe that these people wouldn't extend their support to infanticide. And lets say these people often avoided making a decent and comprehensive case for their own belief and mocked the position of the "life begins at conception" religious believers instead. Wouldn't you be put off by them doing that?

In your example, you're allying yourself with the "abortion after conception is murder and deserves the death penalty"-crowd. Pick your battles.

Pape, while I agree that literacy and communication certainly have helped, it's a multitude of factors behind the lesser violence.