who are you to try and talk down to science. you are some bullshit teenager spitting in the face of what pretty much affords you 99% of your lifestyle.

yeah so uh

I acknowledge that the scientific method has been a pretty great rule of thumb. The fact that I can take the medicine I do is great. Computers! Satellites! I’m not saying that “science” is an icky word or anything (although I also won’t instantly fall at the feet of anything that describes itself as “scientific”. Isn’t that the whole point of skepticism?).

Science also includes attempts to “cure” queerness, to “prove” that women are inferior, dehumanizing accounts of all sorts of varieties of people, and a long history of being used to legitimize only certain identities.

Is it really so radical to acknowledge that??

Slightly more philosophically, what gets counted as “evidence” changes based on discipline and what tools are available: There are pretty of important studies in linguistics, for example, where the main source of evidence was basically, “In my experience it’s like this.” That isn’t convincing enough for everyone, though. What people will end up agreeing with and what they won’t is, guess what, kinda subjective.

Those are the kinds of discussions we’re meant to be having in that class, but instead it’s the same old indignant outrage at anyone who says “Science isn’t perfect.”

- Thomas