gentleman-mummy asked: In a nutshell: I don't see how being negative about other people's practices helps to win people to your cause. Disagree all you want, but why not promote science purely on its own merits, rather than on the perceived demerits of the alternatives? It's no better than religious people saying that science is the work of the devil. Both systems are equally beneficial and equally vulnerable to error.

Tarot. Is. Not. Science. They are roughly equivalent in that they are both concepts, yes. That two things are both concepts does not make them equally valid for any given purpose. “Justice” and “genocide” are also both concepts! Hell, they’re both nouns! How dare you consider one less valid than the other, amirite?

Find your meaning wherever you want, but if you try to present it as interchangeable with and equivalent to fact-based investigation, you are just straight-up wrong.

Science doesn’t go away or cease to be relevant if I stop believing in it. It’s not a subjective system. It’s not subject to faith or personal belief. It’s not a system for subjectively interpreting reality. It’s reality. And if you don’t see the difference, that is terrifying.

I’d normally have stopped responding about four posts ago, but this is really important, and it’s buying into a fucked-up and common fallacy: that because two things are both things people believe in, they’re equally valid bases for behavior and policy.

Here’s the thing: There’s belief based on evidence. That’s called *knowledge*, and, yeah, it’s a sound basis for things like criminal investigation. Sometimes it involves prediction based on observed patterns, usually with the qualifier that it’s an inexact process.

Then there’s the kind of belief that involves god, or crystal balls, or, yeah, tarot decks, or the i ching, or whatever. It’s not based on reality. It’s not useful for interacting with reality. Whatever it does in your head, great, but when you start to treat it as equivalent to science, let alone to demand that others do the same, it becomes actively harmful.

Not all belief is created equal. Insisting that the subjective is objective does not, in fact, make it so.

End of conversation.

Notes

  1. postcardsfromspace posted this