I don't think I've ever, out of all my physics classes up to grad seminars, been given the impression we have everything figured out. In fact, it was hammered into us that all we have are "effective" theories, at least when it comes to high energy physics, and that's not even talking about grand unification (electroweak + strong force unification), let alone Theory of Everything (electroweak + strong + gravity).
Maybe not where you studied, or at the level you studied, but in upper division undergrad physics at a top tier California school I definitely was given the impression that I should just crunch the numbers and not think too much about how it might be working.
Was this a quantum mechanics class? Thinking about how it might be working leads to strange things like the Many-Worlds Theory[1] and other very weird ideas. "Shut up and calculate" is the usual method of dealing with these deeper questions.
So much this! There’s surely a huge argument that all of scientific education is a massive disservice.
The point should be to learn and appreciate the method or process of scientific investigation of uncertain and mysterious or hard to understand phenomena.
Instead we get dogma as a proxy of measuring intelligence with little regard for what the fundamental tools are of being a scientist.
I’ve gone all the way through to Grad School and came out astounded at just how little commitment to or a sense of the essence of scientific investigation and what’s expected of the investigator there is in the system. They don’t prepare you for it because they themselves weren’t prepared. You can try to leverage some meta understanding of the “process” in conversation or debate, but so often the conversation falls flat because few are prepared or accustomed to it. Research is often done, IMO, in philosophical poverty by people eking out a living in the gutters of novelty and paradigmatic safety, averting their gazes from the sky (flourishes aside, you get my point).
Putting aside the health of actual research. If the general public is to benefit from education and pass that benefit into their society (that’s the point right), it needs to be more than soon to be forgotten and often useless fallacies.
> There’s surely a huge argument that all of scientific education is a massive disservice.
> If the general public is to benefit from education and pass that benefit into their society (that’s the point right), it needs to be more than soon to be forgotten and often useless fallacies.
I realize this is hyperbole, but still I think it's obvious that there is more than soon to be
forgotten and often useless fallacies.
I do generally agree though that current models/paradigms are usually presented more as "the final word" vs "a useful mental model".
Esp. when paradigms are challenged by, or conflict with untestable traditional explanations, ppl tend to get irritated and overstate the confidence of their own understanding
Agree. I’m guilty of descending to hyperbole at times!
Nonetheless, while I agree with your pushback, I do wonder how much utility there is in the “dogma” approach. There’s a lot of “facts” being thrown around in education, from what I’ve seen, that are often forgotten or become vague memories. How much better would it be to focus on skills and practice and concepts? Especially in the digital age where a fact is easily discoverable, provided one has the appropriate research skills.
Who do you think makes it appear we have it all figured out? That is not my impression at all. All the scientists I know are extremely aware of the limitations of their field.
It is easy for children to come up with questions for biologists that none can answer, and that none has even tried to answer.
Biologists are almost unique among scientists in being happy to say how little they still know about their subject. Up until last year nobody had thought to see whether anything eats viruses! Turns out some do.
To be more precise, viruses are just made up of proteins and DNA / RNA. Your normal digestion that can handle proteins and DNA/RNA from animals, plants etc doesn't have any more problem breaking down virus proteins into amino acids and absorbing them.
I think the OP was talking about the bacteria that derive non-negligible sustenance from viruses.
>Moreover, our foraging trials demonstrated robust growth in the Halteria population with only chloroviruses as food (rint = 0.66 ± 0.26 [SD], black lines, Fig. 1A), with minimal to no growth in the controls (with chloroviruses filtered out; rint = 0.22 ± 0.12 [SD], blue lines, Fig. 1C). The abundance of the larger Paramecium did not increase in treatment or control trials (Fig. 1D), indicating that not all ciliates can grow on chloroviruses in these conditions, even when they consume them.
How could you possible find a citation for that? It’s not even pretending to be a scientific or totally objective claim. Asking for a citation for this type of statement is no way to have a discussion. Do you not see why?
Eh, 'Citation needed.' was my admittedly somewhat snarky way of calling bullshit.
Most any scientist will happily babble all about the stuff they don't know yet in their discipline, because that's exactly where the excitement lies for them.
> Much of Wikipedia is "curated" by retired professors carefully scrubbing mention of anything new that makes their graduate thesis look ill-conceived.
What makes you think so? What evidence do you have?
