It’s very much not.

Agreed. But I blame the rabble for that. They’ll turn anything into a religion.

Science : a method for crafting high-quality models.

Rabble : it’s the one and only truth and it dgaf wooooooo!!!

Science is religion in the same way as sex is an airplane hangar.

That’s medicine. Science just sees it as a problem to be sorted by good study design and statistics

The placebo effect works even if you know its a placebo tho.

What do you mean? Sociology I kind of get, but psychology nowadays is a purely quantitative discipline (despite its subject being squishier than other quantitative sciences).

You’re referring to quantum effects? Don’t worry about whether you’re not watching, the universe is watching. If one photon is emitted from the thing in a quantum state and hits anything, that’s the observation

Science isn’t a belief system. It’s a way of making sense of natural phenomena.

If we look at the way the universe behaves, quantum mechanics gives us fundamental, unavoidable indeterminacy, so that alternative histories of the universe can be assigned probability.

• Murray Gell-Mann

“it posits that the universe functions according to predictable rules”

• you

Not quite. Cosmologists accept a certain distribution of predictable phenomena within known parameters while leaving the door open to chaos, outliers, the as of yet unknown and unknowable.

Complexity theory is a model that posits components interact in multiple ways and behave according to local rules. From quantum physics to cosmology and the aspirational yet elusive grand theory of everything, science is prepared for a world weirder than we understand, and possibly weirder than we can understand.

Just because empirical evidence and the development of predictable rules are a very fruitful line of inquiry doesn’t mean we believe that is truth.

Philosophers of Science have rather lengthy volumes of work on the subject. I’m just a novice on the topic, but my take on the state of the subject is that we don’t accept science and even it’s laws as absolute truth, just a very practical, reliable, utilitarian form of inquiry and understanding which includes uncertainty (Heisenberg), probability, complexity and chaos. Scientists are prepared to abandon everything in exchange for something better.

Look at newtonian physics. No one thinks it’s the truth, it’s just simpler and useful for everyday engineering.

we define “science” as the aggregate consciousness of scientific researchers

This is something I wish I could preach convincingly to everyone. The activity of scientists, a social group, are arguing and trying to convince one another that their interpretation of the data acquired by using their tools and methods is what become a scientific consensus.

Forefronting the method (often a vaguely defined one rooted in a hypo-deductive model from about 150 years ago that most people learned in grade school) removes the relationships between people and other people and people and institutions.

I wish I could find the paper but there’s a wonderful enthographic study on how scientists interact with each other to transform the discourse.

Edit: Found it! Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry by Helen E. Longino

Everything is a wave if you dig deep enough.

At least, as far as we know right now. But the standard model and quantum field theory have been really solid with really precise predictions for many decades at this point. (not any kind of expert here, just find it interesting)