Tyranny of science

What Hacker News says

1. culiFeb 2022
   If you want to be really challenged, I'd highly recommend checking out The Tyranny of Science by Paul K. Feyerabend.[0] Whether you agree with the points made or not, you'll definitely learn a lot and realize a lot even from arguing against his points.

   [0] https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Tyranny+of+Science-p-9780745...

   thread
2. a_bonoboAug 2023
   I've just finished reading Feyerabend's Tyranny of Science which goes down a very similar path to OP's interview:

   >In this wide-ranging and accessible book Feyerabend challenges some modern myths about science, including the myth that ‘science is successful’. He argues that some very basic assumptions about science are simply false and that substantial parts of scientific ideology were created on the basis of superficial generalizations that led to absurd misconceptions about the nature of human life. Far from solving the pressing problems of our age, such as war and poverty, scientific theorizing glorifies ephemeral generalities, at the cost of confronting the real particulars that make life meaningful. Objectivity and generality are based on abstraction, and as such, they come at a high price. For abstraction drives a wedge between our thoughts and our experience, resulting in the degeneration of both. Theoreticians, as opposed to practitioners, tend to impose a tyranny on the concepts they use, abstracting away from the subjective experience that makes life meaningful. Feyerabend concludes by arguing that practical experience is a better guide to reality than any theory, by itself, ever could be, and he stresses that there is no tyranny that cannot be resisted, even if it is exerted with the best possible intentions.

   In other words: there's a 'tacit knowledge' that we ignore by just writing down what we can measure in numbers. Feyerabend died before it became en vogue to talk about colonialism's impact, but his points are similar. (This ties in with her gut feeling: the scientific literature pretends the gut feeling does not exist, we invent a logical story of how we've deduced an insight after we've stumbled over the insight)

   Show morethread