Nuke Winterkill's List: Education

• There are lots of situations in life that have aspects amenable to the scientific method.  But not all do, and of those that do, those aspects may not be the most important.  Unless you suppose that the most important thing about the Moonlight Sonata is the physics of vibrating strings.  Yet, like the over-eager statistician or the determined probabilist, those enthralled by the success of Science!™ may try to use it where it fits ill.
• Natural science in the Modern Ages applies to the metrical properties of material bodies.  It can tell us about wavelengths of light, but cannot tell us about the sensation of red.
• As such, it is best suited to the domain in which it arose: the physics of local motion.
• But some parts of the Scientific Revolution dropped off.  Biology is not mathematized in the same way as physics and chemistry.  And when it came to the social "sciences" it began to lose traction.
• Basically: the methods apply most successfully when its objects are inanimate, less well when they are animate, and poorly when they have a mind of their own.  Subjects are, by their nature, subjective.
• But this means he is trying to annex Mathematics into the realm of "Science" as he (and Pinker) have just done with Engineering and Tinkering.  But Mathematics does not proceed from "observed evidence" or "empirical facts."  It proceeds from first principles.  "Science" incorporates Mathematics only if we return to the medieval way of thinking, in which scientia meant "knowledge" of proximate causes.  Given this, we can have Political Science, Military Science, etc.
• Scientism is just what Pinker and Coyne say it is not: the belief in the omnicompetence of science, that the methods of the natural science are the only way to knowledge about reality.
• A pattern of physical stuff is not itself physical stuff.
• A thing is a union of matter and form, and it is the form that gives the thing its powers.
• The fact that non-physical stuff like number, arrangement, or pattern are crucial for doing natural science does not make them physical things themselves. It's actually the form of which we have knowledge, not the matter.
• But of course if science did not really cause the bad things, then what justification is there for saying it really caused the good?  This sort of cherry-picking and confirmation bias is common (and not only to devotees of scientism).  Miracle drugs and nerve gasses, airliners and ICBMs, etc. -- Science is responsible for both or neither.
• But eugenics was not scientism because it was wicked -- oops, there's that purpose/value thingie that bpuharic says does not exist -- but because the scientists who advocated it went beyond the bounds of science.  They went from "Darwinism IS true" to "therefore, we OUGHT to breed people like horses."
• The issue of scientism is the pretense that one is doing science rather than politics or philosophy or some other field of human endeavor.
• Science can of course make contributions to those aspects of a field that are scientific.  Acoustics can help design better concert halls, even perhaps better clarinets.  But that is accidental to music.  Science does not compose the Clarinet Concerto in A.
• To which the response is: what scientist ever claimed this?  And the answer is that Science then addresses music only peripherally.  When one has understood the acoustics, the physics of vibrating reeds, the effect of lengthening and shortening the air column, one has still not understood the essentials of the concerto.
• It is possible, in fact, it is more common  than not, that the genius programmer or engineer lacks any hint of  business intelligence. But what is really frustrating for us business  types: More often than not, the techies are evidently incapable of  recognizing that they are NOT experts in business. This leads to all  sorts of amusing interactions that are very much akin to the discussions  between scientists and philosophers.

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