>>7612I never said science was "unbiased". It is always conducted by entities that are capable of it, rather than something existing in the world "in of itself". The only reason science is regarded as a spiritual authority is because independent verification of facts is inherent to any concept of science. If someone is flagrantly and contemptuous lying to another person, they are very clearly not interested in "science" - they want the exact opposite. Whether someone is honest to another person or in society is another matter. I'm assuming, in the first instance, science is useful for oneself, and the scientist is not interested in lying to themselves. That would be very pointless. Someone conducting science would be confident that anything they're doing pertains to a world they regard as real, and that their sense is related to that reality. Any biases of the observer are things that the observer would account for, rather than asserting that the bias is unknowable or says anything about the world they observe. The observer bias is corrected by regarding that there is a world outside of oneself and outside of language, and this is a basic requirement of any genuine science. If someone says "there is nothing outside of society" or "genuine inquiry demands the human subject", that is a direct attack against the idea of scientific inquiry. It's Germanic and I hate it, and this is always dripping with contempt for any science. It exists to attack thought and impose it forcibly on others, and Germans always lie.
It is my contempt for Germanism and seeing the damage it wrought that requires me to grant to science some standing above any inquiry into nature or the world. For one, we can choose another form of inquiry into the world, or regard what we do without the aims and purposes science entails. Nothing about seeing something or measuring the length of something is in of itself "science" - that is a far more basic use of sense and reason to understand the world. Science implies that the purview of it is nothing less than all that exists. There is not in principle anything that exists that would be fully outside of the purview of science. It would not be possible to use science for things which are unknown, except as a speculative exercise. But, science can resolve questions that are about known things, and construct hypotheses. They don't become theories or anything to regard as scientific fact without independently verifiable results. The purpose of the scientific inquiry would be to find facts, or at least working knowledge of anything someone does, and this implies something more thoroughgoing than an inquiry which specifically limits its purview to something less than the whole world or a category that must tie into an overall framework to be really scientific. For example, political economy was never really conducted as a "science" - it concerned moral philosophy, and made some claims about the environment humans live in. It is a category error to make scientific claims about political economy, without qualifying what you are doing and the objects involved. You wouldn't for instance say "Labor is the source of value" as a bold assertion, nor make excuses when critics of the critique make it clear the labor theory was not Marx's version of it. But, Marx's work was analyzing a particular part of capitalism - the commodity - and answering questions about it, rather than making grand narratives about "what money was" contrary to common knowledge at the time. Marx assumes you are familiar with the labor theory from classical political economy, but he eliminates a lot of the "details" that are troublesome… like the observed history, known enough to Adam Smith and certainly known today, that monetary economics did not arise in the way it was assumed until states issued coinage, nor did it automatically happen because "this was natural". Currency was destabilizing and resisted by nearly every city or nation that it was forced on, because currency worked against the interests of nearly everyone in society. This is contrary to a narrative that was insinuated - and this wasn't really insinuated by Adam Smith - that money was somehow popular or desirable, let alone that financial institutions and debt were permitted or useful. Just about everyone in history loathes the bank, and this was the great contempt during the capitalist period - fear that they would become debt-slaves. In some abstract way "it was always debt", but there would remain an expectation that men had grounds to resist slavery and the imposition of the rich against the middling. For the lower classes, slavery was effectively the default. It did not even occur to the favored or the slaves alike that it would be different, or that there was any reason to believe human politics could be different even if humanity really tried to make amends for the literally everything humans had done. If someone was going to do that, it was always understood relations towards the lowest class and the property of all who were valid was primary before any rearrangement of society was of interest to most of humanity. All that would happen is that wealth and commerce would be rearranged by some new scheme, while the essential ordering of human society remains in place, or locks in to a caste system. We are now moving towards a scientific, eugenic caste society, with the lowest caste and the second-lowest caste locked in. The lowest caste is already marked down and gratuitously attacked in open ritual sacrifice, and if we dare say it should be different, the shrieking begins. Humans cannot change. It's too late. Failed race.
That said, that is no excuse to say we cannot conduct science properly. Forced ignorance doesn't have the ruling power that the present political paradigm claims it has. The use of forced ignorance - the shouting and bullbaiting common to this failed race - has been ruinous to the rulers themselves, and cannot create the peace they insist it will. If any of the rulers breaks away from the forced ignorance and torture cult, the apparatus that has been created "corrects history". That is the great sadness of it - that many who push this enthusiastically do not think about the damage they're doing, or worse, they think they're on the good side and will repeat the same failed system until it works.
There is so much wrong in what is said now - and largely, this is because humanity already selected who lives and who dies. "Up there", in the areas where humanity gets to go on, it's the only thing they talk about, the only thing they believe in. Every political idea with currency in the 21st century is dominated by this contest. Anyone outside of the ruling club without the "password" will only be lied to, tortured, and the enjoyment of lying and torturing becomes life's prime want. Failed race.