• saltesc@lemmy.world
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    29 days ago

    This is a clean example of an ignoratio elenchi fallacy.

    Statement B attempts to use Statement A to make an unrelated point that isn’t necessarily untrue, but it is still unrelated.

    This could be done with any combination of…

    “Under capitalism, <random thing> is…”
    “Under <random ism>, science is…”

    They would all result in a statement that supports Speaker B, but is no longer relevant to what Speaker A stated, as the topic has changed. In this case, from science to capitalism.

    I.e. It’s an anti-capitalism meme attempting to use science to appeal to a broader audience through relevance fallacy. Both statements may be true, but do not belong in the same picture.

    Unless, of course, “that’s the joke” and I’m just that dumb.

    Edit: I’m not a supporter of capitalism. But I am a supporter of science—haha, like it needs me to exist—and this is an interesting example of social science. It seems personal opinion is paramount to some individuals rather than unbiased assessment of the statement as a whole. Call me boring and autistic, but that’s what science be and anything else isn’t science, it’s just personal opinion, belief, theory, etc.

    • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      30 days ago

      I think you’re reading statement B too literally. I’m pretty sure the idea behind it is related to critical theory and is an objection to the idea that rationality is trustworthy and that class conflict should be regarded as a higher truth. In that way statement B is relevant to statement A; it’s an implicit rejection of it.

      • saltesc@lemmy.world
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        29 days ago

        It’s not literal; as the fallacy credits, neither is it necessarily wrong. But(!!!), they’re just not related.

        The entire post itself—and your reply—is social science. But science is incapable of alignment to any -ism. All isms are human-made. If they are 100% true, they are not isms.

        Edit: Sorry, I’m drunk af, so probably you are right…maybe… At least in my mind, I’m just reading Statement B as literally as Statement A and therefore can’t see correlation without social agenda—theyre just two very different things. Science and agenda; or agenda using “science”. It’s bias. That’s very unscientific.

        • The Stoned Hacker@lemmy.world
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          29 days ago

          This post is discussing the phenomenon of people thinking that science is objective and rigid when in reality it is anything but. The first statement is not true because it’s nonsensical. There is no universally objective truth; it is still filtered through our relativistic perceptions of reality which are fabrications of our mind created from the raw abstractions of the data we perceive.

        • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          29 days ago

          can’t see correlation without social agenda—theyre just two very different things. Science and agenda; or agenda using “science”. It’s bias. That’s very unscientific.

          The idea is that the place the OP meme is coming from is likely a belief that science and agenda are not different things and rather are inseparable. It is very unscientific, it’s a fundamentally anti-intellectual attitude.

        • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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          29 days ago

          Pure objective truths exist, but humans are not objective creatures so our process of finding those objective truths is flawed at times.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      30 days ago

      Any process unless specifically adjusted to compensate for it (and the adjustment itself is a distortion of it and has secondary effects) will be affected by the environment it is working in.

      So specifically for Capitalism and the practice of Science under it, funding and the societal pressure on everybody including scientists to have more money - as wealth is a status symbol in that environment - are he main pathways via which Capitalism influences the practice of Science.

      It’s incredibly Reductionist and even anti-Scientific to start from the axiom that environment does not at all influence the way Science is practiced (hence Capitalism is unrelated to Science) and then just make an entire argument on top of such a deeply flawed assumption

    • TriflingToad@lemmy.world
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      29 days ago

      Also statement A isn’t the truth either. It’s a highly exaggerated belief.
      “science is good” turns to “science is pure truth and always right”
      When actually science can be manipulated because humans are, well, humans. It shouldn’t be taken as always 100% fact.

    • chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      You’re dead on. Science is a process. I can science the shit out of baking soda and vinegar to make a volcano, and I don’t need government funding to do it. What you science is effected by capitalism, but capitalism is just a scare word. No matter what you want to do, if it requires a significant amount of power or work to create your materials, a cost is accrued somewhere, and someone has to pay it, whether it costs dollars or beaver pelts.

      • trashgirlfriend@lemmy.world
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        30 days ago

        This is reductive to the extreme.

        Clearly if all you want to do is to build a baking soda volcano you can go ahead.

        It’s also pretty clear that baking soda volcanoes aren’t the kind of science the meme is talking about.