Which Sciences are Real and which are Quackery?

[97 toyota corolla]

I think it's obvious that after COVID, appeals by authority figures and their meek followers to "Trust the Science" hold a lot less sway than they used to. We're in the post-information age, where anyone can believe anything and have their beliefs instantly affirmed and entrenched through echo chambers. Not only that, our institutions are idealogically captured by people who reject reality in favor of pushing thier agenda. This was also obvious with COVID. So if there's a flood of information that can theoretically lead you to any conclusion, and the authority figures who we were told were Experts are actually fucking retarted, how does one figure out the truth?

For me personally, it means throwing away the part of my brain that wants to preserve intellectual status quo comfort over potentially being an idiot that has to change what they think, and going whereever the actual evidence lies. Easier said than done of course.

Whatever you feel like is BS when it comes to certain science theories, feel free to discuss below. And if possible, feel free to share interesting books recommendations on these topics if you can.

I'll start: Modern Physics and Cosmology is filled to the brim with mental goyslop, having to convince yourself that a retarted theory is real because you did some magic with numbers is the height of self-deception. This applies especially to whatever horseshit that huckster Neil deGrasse Tyson will say is authoritative truth in a public setting i.e: Big Bang, Black Holes, Dark Matter, Shrodinger's Box, basically everything called Quantum.

To be honest this answer is kinda cheating since so much of what has been claimed and stated as fact by these charlatans is basically conjecture by Redditors for Redditors, except they're redditors that got PhDs.

 

[Catler]

Modern Physics and Cosmology is filled to the brim with mental goyslop, having to convince yourself that a retarted theory is real because you did some magic with numbers is the height of self-deception

If you're going to have an honest discussion and if you wish to be taken seriously then tell us what qualifications do you have? Do you even have the slightest grasp on basic physics, much less more advanced and theoretical topics?

 

[Divine right to rule]

On the most basic level, the hard sciences are the ones that are, on the positive, based on reproducible experiments, and on the negative, have fallsifiability.
Math, Physics and Chemistry.

The different branches of engineering stand on those pillars.

 

[Pissmaster]

If you're going to have an honest discussion and if you wish to be taken seriously then tell us what qualifications do you have? Do you even have the slightest grasp on basic physics, much less more advanced and theoretical topics?

If institutions were trustworthy, this thread wouldn't have been posted in the first place. OP calls out Neil deGrasse Tyson, and here are Tyson's credentials: https://neildegrassetyson.com/profile/

Neil deGrasse Tyson was born and raised in New York City where he was educated in the public schools clear through his graduation from the Bronx High School of Science. Tyson went on to earn his BA in Physics from Harvard and his PhD in Astrophysics from Columbia.

The guy has a PhD in astrophysics that he earned in 1991, yet he's seen as a joke because of his arrogance and inconsistent takes. He is one of many, many scholars with expensive degrees with dubious trustworthiness. If that can even happen within the hard sciences, then there's no way the soft sciences are worth studying.

For me, I tend to stick to sources from before the 21st century. Hard sciences from back then are pretty much safe.

 

[AgendaPoster]

Modern Physics is filled to the brim with mental goyslop

Make better, faster planes then

 

[Pomniman]

This is an interesting question. I would say that on a personal level science should be treated as a practice anyone can personally engage in rather than a credentialed field because credentialism via the political and social structure of universities, hospitals, and governemental licensing agencies inherently leads to corruption. That's not to say you'll instantly know more than someone with a phd or md, but you should be willing to challenge ideas and experiment on your own to the best of your ability as much as reasonably possible rather than taking things for granted as givens just because someone with a phd or md is saying them. Quackery is a state of mind and any discipline can be susceptible to it no matter how hard the base science is.

 

[Fascist Frederick]

Anything that requires "trusting the science" is not science but a faith based religion.

 

[I (Don't) Have A Gun]

having to convince yourself that a retarted theory is real because you did some magic with numbers is the height of self-deception.

From all our observations of the natural world we very strongly believe that it follows predictable rules which can be explained, predicted and so to modelled. So we can use math to model physical phenomena and thus we can use math to predict them.
The problem comes in that the natural world is somewhat complicated, this means that we often lack data and our models need refining as we learn more about the natural world. So it gets all to easy to dismiss science because people think it should provide unchanging answers to our questions and not simply be a method of discovery.

Another problem is that the sheer complexity of some aspects of the natural world makes it very difficult to easily comprehend it, especially if you're a layman in any particular area. The human brain likes simple explanations because the human mind was (if by God or evolution, your choice but either way) not really made to operate in certain realms and thus comprehend certain aspects of the natural world. So it's very often the case that people will dismiss something out of hand because they don't understand it or because it seems counter intuitive to what the limited human meat brain thinks it should.
This is a bit sad though, the opposite of the "trust the science" even though the lives we live now very much is the product of magical maths and strange models which very few really understand.

 

[Colon capital V]

Everything that's about to be posted ITT will essentially be this:

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Neil deGrasse Tyson

OPs issue (among other things) is mixing science with scientism, ie trying to replace religion with "facts" covered in spiritual terms in a useless effort to dispel the nihilism of "we're just random happenstance and our set of morals is meaningless "

 

[Otoya Yamaguchi]

well, the problem is even the quakery started as or contains truth. people, usually corportations or politicians will take a concept that does exist, and attach and meld something made up to it, and thats best case scenario. worst case scenario is just out and out lies such as "ivermectin is horse medicine"

 

[John R. Brown M.D.]

Real:
Economics- the scientific analysis of scarce resources, how humans deal with them, create them and distribute them.
Historical analysis- the scientific analysis of the trends and material conditions that make history since be began to keep records.
Gender Studies- applied Sociology that tries to understand the Patriarchy and its deterious effects on civilization.


Fake:
Maths- "bro, these imaginary numbers are now real, ok? THEY ARE OKAY?! Now, I'm gonna use some DeviantArt pictures to represent concepts because I've run out of Greek letters"
Biology- "there's no God bro, there's no design, complex living beings evolved from infinitesimally unlikely random mutations through sheer trial and error, source? Trust me, bro"
Nutritionism- "please bro, stop drinking your pee and eating your poo, it's not good for you, CONSOOM kosher food instead- (((Dr. Shekelstein)))"
Geology- "bro, there's no fucking Atlantis, Plato was using a fucking metaphor, you're fucking retarded, bro"
Pharmacokynetics- "bro, 5G towers aren't telling you to have sex with trans women and masturbate to baby monkeys being tortured. Now take your graphene vaccine and put on your cuck muzzle, they're so safe and effective"
Computing- "yeah bro, every logic problem can solved with true and false, and there's absolutely no satanic rituals inside of computers"

 

[Whatevermancer]

Real: theology.
Quackery: everything else.

 

[Otoya Yamaguchi]

The guy has a PhD in astrophysics that he earned in 1991, yet he's seen as a joke because of his arrogance and inconsistent takes. He is one of many, many scholars with expensive degrees with dubious trustworthiness. If that can even happen within the hard sciences, then there's no way the soft sciences are worth studying.

well the education industry has sold lemmings on the concept that "degree = expertise or knowledge"

of course this paradigm started collapsing when people my age (im mid 30s) started entering the workforce and going to college and we started seeing retards get degrees. it became apparant that a degree pretty much means you just have money.

i have two degrees, i didnt get them by working hard or being particularly smart...college was barely even a test, you got high grades if you just do what they wanna hear. i didnt even do that, i did a couple anti SJW papers and still passed

a degree doesnt make you smart or mean you know what youre talking about

i personally stopped taking Tyson seriously when he said God wasnt real and then said he had never done any psychadelics of any kind. thats not very adherent to the concepts of experimentation and the scientific method

 

[Unsane]

You can kind of pick and choose because there's no exact science. Simple as that.

Recent example - do I trust the Convid jab to science? Erm, no.

 

[SNU]

You can find quakery in every science. It's really hard to get most people to do their job. There are different motivations ranging from laziness, pushing an agenda, even sunk cost fallacy. The last one is the hardest to spot. You can usually spot an agenda or laziness. The last one is someone spent years researching something. It's usually something niche. In they end they discover it's fruitless and not viable. Instead of just giving up and moving on they make shit up and publish. They have spent years researching it and it's a niche expertise so they usually have a reputation of being an expert in that field. Other people also don't really know much about it. So it gets treated as fact and no one challenges it.

An example I've seen. It was a chemistry researcher looking into making gels based on cheap but unorthodox materials for various applications. 8 years into it they realized it was hopeless and just made shit up. It got published and no one picked up on it. A friend of mine was doing chemistry reasearch and thought that maybe this guy's gels could be used in his experiment. He tried for a couple years in vain to recreate the gels so he could use it. Eventually he realized it was all bullshit and blew the whistle.

 

[el bandito loco]

this isn't what sciences you were asking about but my friend is in the medical field and he was telling me recently to (I haven't yet) look into the history of chiropractors because apparently the whole field is just made up, and was started by some con man, so a lot of the "benefits" from going to one are just placebo or just feels nice but has no actual physical basis which blew my mind, it's not something I've ever given much thought but it being what it was I assumed there was some actual physical basis for why they exist everywhere and people go when their back hurts or whatever.

 

[Watchfuleye275]

All of them have no idea what they are doing and have to guess at some point in their careers. Pharmacologists, Biologists, physicists, all of them.

Some pseudosciences are Phrenology, Accupuncture/Accupressure, Megalitism, and Cryptozoology.

 

[Otoya Yamaguchi]

a bit of quackery i encountered here was someone trying to say a bird is a dinosaur

public school and hollywood, kids....not even once

 

[Magicicada_septendecula]

With the exception of a few that are based in superstition like astrology and phrenology, even the "soft" sciences like sociology and anthropology can be "real" in the hands of the right person. The problem, and this is something we've seen in the harder sciences recently too, is when you get someone with a predetermined conclusion and an agenda, maybe a bit of their inflated ego in there too. Rather than use sociology in a dispassionate search to cure society's ills, Dr. Purplehair and Professor LaQueesha start with white men being the cause of all the world's problems, ignore any evidence to the contrary and present "findings" that support their ideology and call for more funding for their department. Likewise, Anthony Fauci, an actual medical doctor, has been obsessed with vaccination as the cure for all ills since at least the appearance of HIV, and his megalomaniacal actions and statements in the wake of the Kung Flu has done damage to the credibility of even the hardest sciences.