On The Meaninglessness of Evidence in Current Science
Evidence has become the diluted knockoff of science. Anything can be “evidence” as long it has been published.
Publishing is an absolute disaster in current science. We all know the usual replication crisis, deep bias, p-hacking, file drawer problem, etc.
But the fundamental flaw is the statistical machinery used to correlate anything one fancies. Simplistic linear tools forced onto a wholly nonlinear world. There is nothing more contrived and meaningless in science, outside the vacuum of space, than seeing 2 things move at the same time.
At the heart of the fallacy is the incorrect starting point; the reductionist lens many scientists *choose* to look through from the onset. This sets the entire enterprise up for nonsense, as no natural phenomenon drives its outputs from independent pieces doing independent things.
A couple of chosen measures moving together is about as significant as 2 drops in the ocean with coinciding trajectories, at the moment you happened to look their way. Worse, drops are at least real, while the concocted and highly convenient measures of an analysis are little more than some perverted rendering of nature forced to dance to the researcher’s scheme.
“Show me the evidence” … what does that mean? In reality it means “collect a number of papers showing the coinciding measures that fit my narrative.”
There is nothing intellectual happening here. Nothing to do with understanding nature, for if that were the case one would seek to discuss a phenomenon’s invariant characteristics, not inevitable correlations “found” through some derivative lens.
Evidence is little more than a basket of goodies one gets to assemble in the imitation market of today’s science. One whose meaning is fully derived from a truly unscientific paradigm of reductionism and statistical alchemy.
Evidence is a meaningless word. It is a forced lens, not an objective assessment of nature that feeds good reasoning. A mere shadow play of nature’s actuality.
Come out from the shadows and speak of science directly. Of what is known regarding a thing’s unwavering properties; what remains unchanged across different conditions, systems or frames of reference.
That which stem from deeper symmetries, group structures, logical validity, structural necessities, dynamical laws, self-organization, fractal dimensions, evolutionary constraints and unassailable preconditions.
Discuss what does not change when the context or representation does. About what remains stable across scale, frame, formulation and measurement. Of what must be true in all valid models and interpretations.
That is science.
Leave evidence for the fairytales.
