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polairscience | 9 months ago

Which, at its core, is the point of science. There are plenty of things we know are real phenomena, that have important impacts, that we can't actually describe mechanistically. The entire idea of science is to be able to do that. And doing that well can be very hard.

Which is IMO why "science literacy" is so hard.

In an analogy: you can very easily point to chimps and humans and gorillas and say "those are similar, it's self evident" but it took a good few millennia for humans to be able to describe the hows and whys of the similarities in detail. Mechanistically.

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jhrmnn|9 months ago

Crucially, the intuitive thinking can be often wrong, and that’s precisely what science aims to avoid with all the extra effort.