Is science "boring"? (Methodology & epistemology)

[Singu]

There are many misconceptions about science, like science is just about "data", "objectivity", "research" and all that "boring" stuff. They say that the world of imagination and subjectivity is much more interesting than the cut and dry objectivity of science. Actually that couldn't be any more further than the truth, since science has a lot to do with creativity and imagination, as all science starts with an IDEA, an idea about how the world might work, and then that idea gets tested and experimented against reality. All great scientists, Galileo, Darwin, Newton, Einstein, etc, all started off with an idea about how the world might work, and they were quite often ingenious and creative ideas, which then they have tested against reality to see if their ideas were right.

Of course, science, actual science requires a lot of care, meticulousness, precision, data gathering, research, etc, which could be left to academics and actual practicing scientists, while for us laymen and amateurs, we could just learn the basics of how science works.

So perhaps you can get started with learning about these basic ideas:

THEORY

HYPOTHESIS

EXPLANATION

INDUCTION (and why it doesn't work)

LOGIC

LAW

FALSIFICATION

REALISM

UNIVERSALITY

What ARE the methodologies and epistemology of science? Is it empiricism or rationalism? How does falsification play into the role of science? How do we test theories? How do we create knowledge? How do we know when something is objective? What is science, and what is non-science? Discuss.

[Grendel]

No, see, it's not the marriage to data or rigorous analysis and testing that we find boring. It's the attachment to reality. Reality is axiomatically too shit ever to bother with.

[Singu]

Reality is infinitely more varied, complex and stranger than our imagination, since the outside world is larger than the inside world.

If you could write a completely fictional world out of imagination, that is also completely logically consistent etc, then I would think that you would be a total genius, and it would be well worth having a scientific investigation of that fictional world. I'm willing to bet... that such a fictional world might even resemble reality in many ways. Because then you would need to rewrite many laws of nature from scratch.

No, see, it's not the marriage to data or rigorous analysis and testing that we find boring. It's the attachment to reality. Reality is axiomatically too shit ever to bother with.

At least, if we could understand reality, then we could change reality in a way that is closer to our ideals in our imagination. And that is kinda what happened in the past few centuries, which the world that we live in now would be unimaginable back then.

[squark]

Science is curiosity in action. Of course it's not boring, how could it be? It's all about seeking answers, solving problems, which is why I chose that path back when I was in college -interest. All learning, all discovery begins in interest, that spark of curiosity, wondering, wanting to know more. However, not everyone is interested in the same questions, so perhaps while one person finds something like the methods of secretion of common snail slime to be supremely fascinating, or the kinds of bacteria commonly found on drinking fountains, someone else might not. Science isn't boring, because science is discovery, but not all topics are going to be of interest to all people. What makes it exciting are YOUR questions, the things you personally want to find out. Those things that spark your own curiosity and desire to know more.

The methodology used to find those answers with the least amount of bias and error isn't very exciting of course, but it's necessary for accuracy. It's all just part of the process.

And, like I've said before, something doesn't have to be scientific to have value, because it all operates as idea-fodder, providing questions to ask and new avenues to explore. Much of psychology I think barely qualifies as science at all . . . still very interesting stuff.

[Singu]

And, like I've said before, something doesn't have to be scientific to have value, because it all operates as idea-fodder, providing questions to ask and new avenues to explore. Much of psychology I think barely qualifies as science at all . . . still very interesting stuff.

Well yes, but it also goes back to the question: "How do we know when something is objective?". And CAN something that is usually thought of to be subjective, like happiness or beauty, be made objective? Is there objectivity in those concepts? Can theories be made about them?

If there WAS objectivity in beauty, then it would mean that it's not something that's just random, and it's something that can be consistently and progressively improved over another.

[Muddy]

Science itself is mostly boring imo. The stuff it produces on the other hand.....

[Pallas]

Science isn't boring in principle. It's just usually boring in practice, since most science is bad science, like most cooking is bad cooking, and most art is bad art, etc. I kind of liked chemistry class because stuff blew up a lot. I really liked geology because we went on field trips and found random crystals and seashells. I didn't like physics because we just did equations. If you want science to be interesting to people who haven't been indoctrinated in it, show them obvious things. It doesn't even have to be that hands on since there are "theoretical"/"verbal" people outside of science too, just the connection between the theory and something in the real world has to be obvious or people will think you're just sitting around farting (which you probably are if you can't show anyone anything.)

[nyessss]

One time I heard from doctor nye that science ruled. I have since held tight to that opinion unwaveringly. From my science I have done I have learned a secret about the universe. It is a objective secret about your mom. She is a fabulous woman and I wish to meet her one day barring existential entry to the shadow realm

[squark]

Well yes, but it also goes back to the question: "How do we know when something is objective?". And CAN something that is usually thought of to be subjective, like happiness or beauty, be made objective? Is there objectivity in those concepts? Can theories be made about them?

If there WAS objectivity in beauty, then it would mean that it's not something that's just random, and it's something that can be consistently and progressively improved over another.

The golden ratio, symmetry, etc are ways that people have tried to quantify beauty, but people are weird and not very cooperative heh, as it's been found that too much perfection is disconcerting, and a few small flaws or unusual traits are more pleasing to the human eye. Anyway, yes, beauty is able to be measured objectively to a point. Doesn't mean people don't have their own taste and what not, but there's such a thing as "objectively beautiful" and of course people try to improve things and make things more beautiful. Before and after pictures are an example of these attempts.

And many theories have been made about happiness, and it is something that people do try to measure. But considering that happiness is something that is within oneself, and beauty is something you see outside of yourself, it's possible to call something more or less objectively beautiful, but you can't exactly say "objectively happy" because what would that even mean? You can only compare your own degrees of happiness to other times you felt more or less happy, you can't compare your feeling to another person's feeling. The expression of those feelings can be compared and measured though - ie larger smile, more eye crinkles vs less etc. (In studies trying to measure happiness, they rely on self-report questionnaires, the sample size is how they determine trends)

This is some of the kind of thing that psychology studies, and yes it's fuzzy stuff, and their "hard data" is often not all that hard after all. The significance of it is measured through statistical tests. When you see news blurbs or articles saying that some study or another has "proven" something in psychology, eh, no. It may suggest something, even strongly so, but that's about it. You never try to prove a theory anyway, you can't, you can only disprove it. Laws however are those things with so much evidencial support that they can be reasonably accepted as fact -- for instance, the Law of Gravity, and the Laws of Thermodynamics. Theories are still in question, even very well-established ones.

[Singu]

Well I think the problem with dealing with these "subjective" things and understanding them in a subjective way, is that we're only understanding them through ourselves. So for instance, you might say "Of course I know what happiness is, since I feel it, and I know it when others are happy, duh". But we actually have no idea how that happiness works. If you were to program a robot with happiness, then how would you do it?

So what we actually need is a theory on how that happiness exactly works, even in ourselves. Only then we can start to measure what happiness is, etc. Because we have understood how that happiness works, and hopefully what it is that we're measuring.

And not many people have even begun to do that, other than maybe just a few people in AI research, etc.

[squark]

You might find this interesting, and it may answer some of those questions: http://nautil.us/issue/1/what-makes-...icial-emotions

They're defining emotions as physical responses to environmental stimuli:

Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University’s Center for Neural Science, describes emotion in terms of “survival circuits” that exist in all living things. An organism, as simple as an amoeba or as complex as a person, reacts to an environmental stimulus in a way that makes it more likely to survive and reproduce. The stimulus flip switches on survival circuits which prompt behaviors that enhance survival. Neurons firing in a particular pattern might trigger the brain to order the release of adrenaline, which makes the heart beat faster, priming an animal to fight or flee from danger. That physical state, LeDoux says, is an emotion.

[The Reality Denialist]

Nothing makes me feel better than fresh data to be plotted early in the morning.


OK. Ummm... for me it is about finding constructive elements to be abstracted that makes it potentially transferable to build pretty much anything bit further. That is the coolest thing in it.

[Tigerfadder]

You should make youtube videos braking this all down! xd

[Singu]

I didn't know Piaget's cognitive/developmental theory was so interesting... it makes so much sense...:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt3-...keVRhv&index=1

This is the power of science, of actually coming up with a working theory and testing/experimenting that theory, and not just talking about random crap forever and ever.

[Grendel]

Physics these days is shit because the hubris of physicists prevents them from flat-out admitting that our physical observational abilities are limited, and that all of quantum science and speculative shit like String Theory are built upon that.
The mathematics itself, on the other hand, is just another tool derived from principles we've taken from the universe, no less a piece of engineering than a bridge or an elevator. The best science really is that which directly gives us engineering principles. Even paleontology paints a sketchy picture because of things like lazarus taxa. We spend all this time and energy trying to work backwards, then at the last second, some unforeseen variable changes and our entire framework shifts. There's no forward-moving applicable results from this however, just petty philosophical questions about where we come from "answered" by only more questions. To an outside observer, the field indeed seems more like a powerful church with conveniently-changing doctrine than anything.

Meanwhile, we have the absolute dumpster fire that is medical science, where there are clear and present social problems caused by yet-uncurable medical conditions that might be treatable were our understanding of every bodily system more nuanced. But we can't get a complete understanding, dare I say, partially because of social taboos against some types of experimentation, and partially because of useless, irrelevant, unanswerable philosophical questions like "WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?!!?? WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN AND HAVE HUMAN RIGHTS, REALLY?!?" when we all know on some level, from a deterministic perspective, our senses and consciousness probably come from some physical source, free will is an illusion, and we only have rights because we all agree it's convenient for us. Meanwhile people continue to suffer horrible plagues and die needlessly of aging because we're too pussy to grow a few lab rat babies in tubes so we can do a couple tests for the greater good.



And don't get me started on the social sciences. Millions of taxpayer dollars funneled into useless sycophantic studies like "Are some lesbians fat??" "What races like pickles??" "What gender is your furniture??" Shit should be abolished.

[Singu]

You should make youtube videos braking this all down! xd

Are you talking to me? I'm still in the process of learning all this stuff, so I'm not sure how I can break it down any further. However it is an accumulation of a bit of learning, though I've probably learned only about 1% of epistemology.

Basically, I've started with Karl Popper. Most of the scientists don't really care about philosophy or philosophy of science, but pretty much how all science works is Popperian, even if they don't know it (and scientists agree and praise the method).

For example, you can read his book, "Logic of Scientific Discovery", which I think is a good introduction, here (It's worth reading the PART I Introduction to the Logic of Science):

http://strangebeautiful.com/other-te...-discovery.pdf

[Singu]

Here's a pretty good YouTube summary of Popper:

[Tigerfadder]

Are you talking to me? I'm still in the process of learning all this stuff, so I'm not sure how I can break it down any further. However it is an accumulation of a bit of learning, though I've probably learned only about 1% of epistemology.

Basically, I've started with Karl Popper. Most of the scientists don't really care about philosophy or philosophy of science, but pretty much how all science works is Popperian, even if they don't know it (and scientists agree and praise the method).

For example, you can read his book, "Logic of Scientific Discovery", which I think is a good introduction, here:

http://strangebeautiful.com/other-te...-discovery.pdf

You should do it! xd

[Aramas]

Science isn't boring. Science classes and school are boring. Difference.

The truth is that a lot of people could be good scientists. But only a few are able to survive the banality and rigidity of the educational process needed to become a professional scientist.

Professional scientists and the government like how much money they make and how much authority they have, though, and if the process were ever "opened up" to a wider array of people, their authority and pay would decline. So the system doesn't change.

The result is banal, rigid science that is decades if not centuries behind where it could be, and science that advances the cause of tyrannical regimes.

Physics these days is shit because the hubris of physicists prevents them from flat-out admitting that our physical observational abilities are limited, and that all of quantum science and speculative shit like String Theory are built upon that.
The mathematics itself, on the other hand, is just another tool derived from principles we've taken from the universe, no less a piece of engineering than a bridge or an elevator. The best science really is that which directly gives us engineering principles. Even paleontology paints a sketchy picture because of things like lazarus taxa. We spend all this time and energy trying to work backwards, then at the last second, some unforeseen variable changes and our entire framework shifts. There's no forward-moving applicable results from this however, just petty philosophical questions about where we come from "answered" by only more questions. To an outside observer, the field indeed seems more like a powerful church with conveniently-changing doctrine than anything.

Meanwhile, we have the absolute dumpster fire that is medical science, where there are clear and present social problems caused by yet-uncurable medical conditions that might be treatable were our understanding of every bodily system more nuanced. But we can't get a complete understanding, dare I say, partially because of social taboos against some types of experimentation, and partially because of useless, irrelevant, unanswerable philosophical questions like "WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?!!?? WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN AND HAVE HUMAN RIGHTS, REALLY?!?" when we all know on some level, from a deterministic perspective, our senses and consciousness probably come from some physical source, free will is an illusion, and we only have rights because we all agree it's convenient for us. Meanwhile people continue to suffer horrible plagues and die needlessly of aging because we're too pussy to grow a few lab rat babies in tubes so we can do a couple tests for the greater good.



And don't get me started on the social sciences. Millions of taxpayer dollars funneled into useless sycophantic studies like "Are some lesbians fat??" "What races like pickles??" "What gender is your furniture??" Shit should be abolished.

Medical science is a dumpster fire because they confuse correlation and causation. No matter how many times you tell these people this simple fact, they forget it and go about their business repeating the same little mistake over and over and over and over.

Whoever allowed social philosophy to be called social science........ Well, I'm not going to say that out loud.

[Grendel]

Also, my physics teacher told me real scientists don't use the scientific method at all. ::::think::::

[Singu]

It's easy to have strong opinions. The strength of a conviction doesn't indicate how close to a truth it is.

[Bertrand]

actually in a vacuum it kind of does. all else being equal convictions are not random. individual convictions do not positively determine the truth for all, solely in virtue of being an individual conviction. but on the whole convictions serve to orient individuals in the limitless sea of possibilities at a rate higher than pure chance toward something we would call truth. at some point everything we believe was once just a conviction in an individual somewhere first. it became "truth" by your definition because of its widespread adoption, it was not always nor will it always be "true" in that sense. if I feel super strongly that 2+2=5 the fact that I feel strongly does not make it true, but if that conviction leads to an entire rational explication on my part, that society ultimately accepts, because its useful in some manner, it will be considered "true" for as long as it remains useful to do. the initial feeling was suggesting something was there, and ruled out many alternative life choices by fixing me on chasing down that feeling. such feelings don't come ready made with a mathematical proof, but they do function as a form of rationality just as coherent as chains of numbers, but they are experienced qualitatively differently i.e.: as affects. ultimately Te works backward from hunches and Fi provides the energy. this is why its dangerous to outsource your energy to the collective because it means you only have energy to do what you're told. this relies on the environment being run by the people who control it being benevolent, which is rarely if ever the case. it also redirects everyone's individual orientation system into a collective channel, which means whatever unique feats that individual was capable of had they followed their own lead will never be explored, rather those possibilities were co-opted by the system

what you seem to be arguing via subtext is the idea that the individual has no right to question 2+2=5 because its already been adopted, thus its truth value has been set. this is not entirely inaccurate, but if we left it at that paradigm shifts would become impossible since the system would run a determinate course based on its pre existing axioms. individual convictions, even irrational by collective standards ones, are precisely what fuels insight from the bottom up that revolutionizes the system itself. if we were to freeze such a process via collective logic we would kill our own potential for adaptation via what essentially amounts to "mutation." the thing is the system always operates on the assumption that we know the limits of human, i.e.: individual possibilities, which is only true of collective individuals not real individuals, because they chose, up front, to limit themselves in that way.. or perhaps nature chose them. this kind of authoritarian hivemindedness can be very powerful because of solidarity but it is inherently conservative and slow if not completely unable to adapt to changing circumstances. if we knew everything there was to know about the future and the environment and humanity itself such a collectivist logic could be perfect and be something less than an atrocity. but until that day comes it can't be "forced"--further when that day comes no one is going to resist it because the conditions causing individual striving have already been fully satisfied, thus the two halves will harmoniously meld. the problem is "imitating" that state and imposing it via force is just a farce that ultimately results in the annihilation of any society so hubristic as to believe its own lies, this is the tower of babel situation, the false God of the state, or the church, the whitewashed sepulcher etc

[Skepsis]

Science has slowly unraveled many of the mysteries the ancients had surrounding reality. There are many more mysteries to still be revealed. It's boring to people because it takes work, diligence, patience, intelligence, imagination, and rigorous methodology. It is not only one way to view our reality. Science, Art, philosophy, and literature are all creative human endeavors that can give us knowledge about the universe and the human experience.

Science is getting a bad rep. because it seems trendy to deny facts lately.

[Grendel]

Whoever allowed social philosophy to be called social science........ Well, I'm not going to say that out loud.

Because why try and understand the inner workings of societal incompetence when you can just blame a dead sand cult!

[Singu]

Science has slowly unraveled many of the mysteries the ancients had surrounding reality. There are many more mysteries to still be revealed. It's boring to people because it takes work, diligence, patience, intelligence, imagination, and rigorous methodology. It is not only one way to view our reality. Science, Art, philosophy, and literature are all creative human endeavors that can give us knowledge about the universe and the human experience.

Science is getting a bad rep. because it seems trendy to deny facts lately.

I'd imagine that it's NOT drudgery to those who are inspired by curiosity and wanting to discover what is really true and how things really work.

And if it is drudgery, then we can come up with creative solutions to not make it so.

[Singu]

@Bertrand Nice postmodernism and relativism. That has no place in science.

[Aramas]

Because why try and understand the inner workings of societal incompetence when you can just blame a dead sand cult!

Why try to understand the inner workings of societal incompetence when you can use it to push your own agenda?

[Pallas]

Everyone's just pushing their own agenda. That's life I guess.

[Singu]

In politics, we don't ask "Who should rule?", but we ask "How can we get rid of bad governance, so that they are criticized and are replaced with better ones?". We vote out parties that are doing a bad job, and replace them with ones that have better ideas. It works the same way in choosing between rival theories that are explaining the same thing.

"Deriving" knowledge from existing data would imply deriving knowledge from some source, an authority, a ruler or "the majority" of people. But that's not how we actually create knowledge, and that's why science has rightly rejected not just appeal to authority, but also empiricism ("deriving" from sensory data). Instead, we create knowledge from conjectures, guesses about how things might work, and then they are criticized (tested) until they seem like good approximations of reality. Between rival theories, just like in politics we pick the better theory that seems to be offering better explanations.

Strangely, this works in the same way as evolution through natural selection, and which the knowledge is encoded in the DNA (although this method is blind and very inefficient).

The question about the sources of our knowledge . . . has always been asked in the spirit of: ‘What are the best sources of our knowledge – the most reliable ones, those which will not lead us into error, and those to which we can and must turn, in case of doubt, as the last court of appeal?’ I propose to assume, instead, that no such ideal sources exist – no more than ideal rulers – and that all ‘sources’ are liable to lead us into error at times. And I propose to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of our knowledge by the entirely different question: ‘How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?’

‘Knowledge without Authority’ (1960)

Political philosophy traditionally centred on a collection of issues that Popper called the ‘who should rule?’ question. Who should wield power? Should it be a monarch or aristocrats, or priests, or a dictator, or a small group, or ‘the people’, or their delegates? And that leads to derivative questions such as ‘How should a king be educated?’ ‘Who should be enfranchised in a democracy?’ ‘How does one ensure an informed and responsible electorate?’

Popper pointed out that this class of questions is rooted in the same misconception as the question ‘How are scientific theories derived from sensory data?’ which defines empiricism. It is seeking a system that derives or justifies the right choice of leader or government, from existing data – such as inherited entitlements, the opinion of the majority, the manner in which a person has been educated, and so on. The same misconception also underlies blind optimism and pessimism: they both expect progress to be made by applying a simple rule to existing knowledge, to establish which future possibilities to ignore and which to rely on. Induction, instrumentalism and even Lamarckism all make the same mistake: they expect explanationless progress. They expect knowledge to be created by fiat with few errors, and not by a process of variation and selection that is making a continual stream of errors and correcting them.

[Aramas]

You're just gonna dismiss every piece of evidence against ebil jooz running a matrix to castrate whites as their own fabrication to cover their asses, while drawing disproportionate attention to smaller associations you call evidence.

I don't need to play defense with people who fight tooth-and-nail to protect worldviews that massively violate Occam's Razor because a white boot on your neck feels better than an ordinary corporatist boot. Calling it, your next response will be something along the lines of "{[(Occam)]}."


Case in point of where this kind of reasoning can take you:

Dude, what?

[Capitalist Pig]

jet fuel can't melt steel jews

[Grendel]

Dude, what?

Maybe I misread, I saw "I'm not going to say out loud" and assumed you were alluding to someone's identity and not a threat of violence. Took me a while to parse it properly, sorry.

Ugh. I need to do less /pol/. And have fewer strokes.

[Adam Strange]

My first name is Irish, my middle name is Irish, and my last name is Irish, and I basically agree with Robert Knox. Should I be worried?

[Exodus]

Well yes, but it also goes back to the question: "How do we know when something is objective?". And CAN something that is usually thought of to be subjective, like happiness or beauty, be made objective? Is there objectivity in those concepts? Can theories be made about them?

If there WAS objectivity in beauty, then it would mean that it's not something that's just random, and it's something that can be consistently and progressively improved over another.

Well I think the problem with dealing with these "subjective" things and understanding them in a subjective way, is that we're only understanding them through ourselves. So for instance, you might say "Of course I know what happiness is, since I feel it, and I know it when others are happy, duh". But we actually have no idea how that happiness works. If you were to program a robot with happiness, then how would you do it?

So what we actually need is a theory on how that happiness exactly works, even in ourselves. Only then we can start to measure what happiness is, etc. Because we have understood how that happiness works, and hopefully what it is that we're measuring.

And not many people have even begun to do that, other than maybe just a few people in AI research, etc.

It can be done, and actually socionics is just the right theory to do it. It offers the possibility of reducing "subjective" concepts like emotions and intuition to logico-geometrical ones that can be analyzed logically.

[Singu]

...I don't think it can. Besides, Socionics isn't really explaining anything when it says stuff like "This behavior is explained by Ni seeking behavior", as that would be just a reiteration of what just happened.

So YOU may understand what "intuition" or "feeling" or "thinking" is, but you can't explain it as an objective concept, as in it's not an explanation of how it works.

So you're going to have to ask the question, "If it was a computer program, then how am I going to program it?", and you'll realize that you have no idea how.

[Exodus]

Such explanations are a work in progress.

[Singu]

Yes, well I don't think it's in much of the central interest of Socionics to be offering explanations.

For example, in Socionics a lot of psychological/sociological phenomenas and concepts are bunched up together as "Fi", as it says that Fi is about relationships, morals, likes/dislikes, etc. But if you were to come up with explanations for these concepts, then it's likely that you'd have to break them up and explain them 1 by 1, such as how to explain relationships? How do they work? And then it is likely that these concepts like relationships will require sociological explanations and a framework to which it explains them from, and so Socionics may have to either come up with a sociological theory from scratch, or take in from already existing sociological theories.

But Socionics says that all of those concepts are somehow connected to "Fi", and so it has to explain what exactly this "Fi" is, and how that central idea somehow produces all those things like relationships and morals and likes/dislikes. It has to explain, for example how can something like relationships simply be a result of the transfer of "information metabolism" of Fi between individuals.

[Exodus]

"But Socionics says that all of those concepts are somehow connected to "Fi", and so it has to explain what exactly this "Fi" is, and how that central idea somehow produces all those things like relationships and morals and likes/dislikes."

Yes. Congratulations, you've just reached the kindergarten level of understanding the issue.

[Singu]

Uh? And you or Socionics haven't even begun offering any kind of explanations.

Unless Socionics can offer explanations, which it denies to do since it stresses the importance of subjectivity or something, the theory is doomed.

Why? Because ultimately, Socionics is based on observations, and observations are forever stuck in the past, literally, because the most that it can come up with is some patterns of the past history. And it is absurd to think that we are forever stuck in some pattern and doing the same thing over and over again, as obviously we are constantly doing something new and discovering something new. You cannot predict the future in that way, as the future does not resemble the past.

The only thing that can come the closest to predicting something, that is, to produce something new, is to come up with explanations for something, which is not done by deriving knowledge from observations, or induction, but by coming up with guesses and conjectures about how things might work, which are criticized, and then ultimately tested and experimented (they make predictions about the future). Then when the explanation passes the test, then we may know that the theory might be telling us something about how reality works.

[Tearsofaclown]

It absolutely is. That is why they have to add all this poetry and cartoons in Cosmos. The science alone sucks without that metaphorical narrative; which I actually think is inappropriate. The universe is not beautiful or magical. They have to add all this lame shit to make it interesting. I don't like Richard Dawkins but he made a book about genes cool. It was like Star Wars or something. He took things we already know and created a metaphorical world where we could look at them differently.

Most of what exists is boring. Science studies things that exist. Therefore it is mostly boring too. I don't care about fuckin rocks. Who becomes a glacier scientist? Seriously. lol.