Science

Science is not a dogma but a method that allows broad populations of otherwise unrelated people to form a single mind in understanding things.

This method is not infallible, but it's the best one we got.

And despite its many faults, science has cured more blindness, lameness and leprosy, alleviated more poverty and snatched more people out from the maw of death than any other method out there.

Regardless of the enthusiasm of certain advocates, science does not tell you what to believe.

Instead, science offers a way to organize your thoughts.

And this not in order to find some elusive "Truth" but rather in order to be able to confer with others — not others who think the same thoughts, but rather others who think the same way.

Science is an operating system, a method of thought, whose purpose it is to let people exchange their considerations.

Science, therefore, is much rather a language than anything else; its standards and procedures are in fact very much like those of any language.

Without them, we produce mere growls, howls and whistles but with them we can declare what's going on in intimate detail.

Science lets you say whatever you want about anything at all, in such a way that anybody anywhere in the world is able to understand what you're on about.

Its currency is information but its value is confirmation. And the growing body of confirmation is certainly not a government-issued fiat or dogma, but "a thing agreed on"; a living observation that's always subject to continued review, and thus always grows.

It's for these reasons that science is not limited to any particular topic or restricted to any particular data set but can be used to review anything at all on the proviso that anything that is asserted is falsifiable (able to be proven wrong when wrong).

This in turn means that, contrary to popular belief, science is a method that always proves wrong and never right, and thus separates the world of thought into
(a) thoughts that are definitely wholly false, and
(b) thoughts that possibly contain truth to some greater or lesser degree.

Science is like panning for gold, and with every swirl the panner separates certified dirt from the mix of dirt-and-gold remaining in the pan.

#science
(Excerpts from Abarim Publications)