Neil DeGrasse Tyson Tells Bill Maher That Anti-Science Liberals Are Full of Shit Too

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211. Yes, but it does make the theory a belief.

A well supported one to be sure, accurate to as accurate as we can see or as accurate as we can infer in some cases, but never the real substance of reality. That we experience directly, and we wander around in the images we create of it, hopefully gracefully.

Any good mathematical theory will have many equivalent forms, isomorphisms, homomorphism, models, or whatever mathematical term is used in the context. And nature is full of ad hoc arrangements, arbitrary numbers, etc. that we don't understand, some very precise.

The point of empirical methods, that they work better, is that they avoid getting wrapped up in the bullshit in your head, it keeps experience first.

And all the interesting stuff is out there in the "we don't know yet" areas, so you want to be looking in that direction, not grazing on established theory all the time.

So what I oppose is this dogmatic theory-first approach. Guys like Maxwell don't get enough credit, guys like Einstein get too much. We love our theories too much.

And that is without even getting into how statistical methods are used.