Those poor rats. Why don't we put humans in cages and restrict their calories, and have a control group of humans with no exercise wheel for them? Because it would be unethical. Why is it ethical to treat fellow mortals such as rats in a way that's unethical to treat humans?

Let us cease testing animals, unless we can get their informed consent. Instead, let us research and develop things like organs on a chip. Then inform the rats of the findings too, so they can live happier, healthier, freer lives along with us.

We should be collaborating with animals to expand knowledge, not killing them in unreproducible experiments.

Why should we use price signals to determine knowledge and technology advancement? That kind of thinking led the government to stop investing in alternative fuel research when the price of oil dropped to $10/barrel in the 1990s. That is precisely the time government should have been funding more research into alternative fuels, as a hedge against market groupthink.

The government is not a business and should create money for the General Welfare (as the private sector creates money on the order of tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars a year, for personal profit).

Scarcity thinking applied to money throttles progress.

"This isn't about principles. It is about throttling the message."

Funny because that's what corporations do best, shut people up. Non-competes, non-disparagement clauses, DMCA takedowns, threatened lawsuits, outright censorship. No CEO swears to uphold the Constitution. Money spent on politics is designed to drown out any other speech.

The answer though is more public money. Dilute the influence of money on politics by giving money to everyone so we can drown out those who want to drown us out. Remove money from relevancy by increasing the money supply and transferring it directly to individuals.

Inflation is negated through indexation such that purchasing power does not decrease, no matter how much the money supply increases.

Yeah but those "sound scientific principles" include a lot of wiggle room. Engineers use safety factors which can cover up a lot of behavior that doesn't fit the model. The model is faith-based, ultimately. Any faith can guess right.

Scientific skepticism is an assumption, a conclusion without proof, which is faith.

I don't hate science. I pursue computer science. I also think there are religions such as Jainism which allow for modification to their philosophies. Mahavir added the Brahmacharya vow, for example. He changed the religion. That is part of the Jain philosophy, that the religion can evolve.

The Dalai Lama has also said that if science conclusively proves some aspect of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change.

I think scientists like Krauss are basically ignorant about the full scope of religion. I think they have personal issues with Christianity and assume all religions are like that, with a creator god. But Jainism has no creator god.

Thus I think both science and religion are blundering towards the truth. I wish science would stop rejecting theories based on priors that basically become one though, which means no evidence will disprove them. So I wish scientists would be more humble and not automatically place themselves in opposition to religion.

But this is not exclusive to science, nor absent from religion. Karma in Indian religions is the law of cause and effect. Hinduism abandoned the sacrifice because of karma, because the predicted results of sacrifice didn't materialize.

In science, prediction often applies within a narrow range of physical phenomena. But scientists faithfully extend that range. Conservation laws are one common example. We don't know that energy is conserved in every detail, but we assume it does because of the law of conservation. Thus, the law is circular.

And the commitment to a model's axioms is always implied by scientists as a precondition to whatever explanation they are offering.

The evidence itself most often is based on what an authority told us. Authorities exclude evidence, throwing out data they don't like. Then the "evidence" comes to us, pre-packaged and prepped for us to come to the exact same conclusions as the authorities who doctored it (unconsciously, most often).

Authorities rely on the same tricks as preachers when presenting their evidence. They use emotion to underscore their points. They hand-wave a lot in their equations, setting variables arbitrarily, changing terminology, redefining terms, idiosyncratically using accepted symbols. In conclusion no, I don't trust authorities in science. I think science holds on to inherently flawed models way longer than it should, using the excuse about "rational thought" that you made in your post. I think science authorities should be more humble and admit that their model is flawed and not immediately dismiss other theories.

I think scientists have huge priors, in Bayesian terms, and the more entrenched a theory becomes socially the closer those priors get to 1. Then no amount of conflicting data will change their minds. So geologists attacked Wegener's continental drift theory for decades, using all sorts of disingenuous arguments to discount his reasoning. Was that rational? You define it as such. I see it as emotional gossip.

I think the evidence used to support current models is shaky. So in engineering you use a safety factor of 2 or more, which can cover up a lot of contrary evidence, for example.

Yeah but the cool thing is, we can build simulations of both and make a personal, individual choice which we'd rather live in. So the two (and other) theories can be implemented by computer science, making them true even if they weren't before. And they can all be true at the same time, in parallel.

I think the Buddha's Kalama Sutta, called his "charter of free inquiry" , is relevant here. The current Dalai Lama has said "If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."

Problem is scientific laws couldn't even predict dark energy or dark matter which together make up 96% of the universe, so it might as well be that someone created it. Quantum predictions are just probabilistic, and could also be explained by particles making conscious choices. Back to the macro scale: events keep occurring that require far more energy than current models can supply. So scientific predictions, well maybe for a fraction of the 4% of the universe we can see. But huge gaping holes exist in scientific explanations and it is only an act of the purest faith to assume that there are scientific explanations for them.

Probability doesn't help when you predict a particular from your sampling of the universal, but the particular doesn't follow your prediction. Yet you still have faith in the law, despite it's failure to predict in a specific case. And you have faith in the law of noncontradiction, despite problems with inconsistency as Penrose, quoted in my post above, points out. Godel also points out that the axioms of math sacrifice completeness for consistency, so science (because it relies on math to express laws) loses expressivity. Science takes the consistency of nature on faith, assuming that all the problems that are observed empirically can be resolved eventually someday.

I don't know, it's taken on faith that conservation laws are obeyed because we can't measure everything, so we assume because some authority told us to. I'd say slashdot discussions are a great example of how conservation laws are celebrated based on the great authorities Noether and Kelvin and steps are taken (in peer review and grant funding and such) to preserve these faith-based laws as much as possible.

It took science a few decades to admit Mendel was right, too. Science has lots of authority problems. See Feynman in Cargo Cult Science, where he describes how researchers subsequent to Millikan found ways to fudge their more correct observations about the charge on an electron, because they wanted to agree with the great authority whose experiment they were replicating. Or Feynman's account of how an important finding about rats is ignored by science.