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This is the sort of idea that can be a) dangerous in the hands of the ignorant b) even more dangerous in the hands of "I fucking love science!" type moron cheerleaders c) incredibly powerful if you've actually done the work to understand how things like absorption spectra work
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For example, how can a telescope measure the composition of the planets orbiting a distant sun? How can we be sure of it? Solipsism and Cartesian skepticism allows us to draw boundaries and conditions on the degree to which we can rely on scientific instruments.
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This particular example is particularly powerful for me. Spent my PhD years working on interferometric space telescopes for exosolar terrestrial planet detection. The stack of assumptions underlying the instrumentation is *incredibly* deep.
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Once you've worked through the math of huygens-fresnel principle, deconvolutions, etc etc. to figure out how you might pick up the incredibly thin signal that says "planet" you realize how fragile knowledge is, and how amazing it is that we can get to *any* confidence
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Heh you think political realities can't be made to dominate in "science"? They totally can; they just can't be propped up as long as in social science, and even there, political fictions don't last forever. Politics is just science with longer falsification time constants.
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Hahah no no, they definitely can. Honestly I think physics has been held up pretty severely for 60 years it's orders of magnitude! I mean, in the psychology, there's a replication crisis. People think it's evidence of the weakness of psych, but in other fields they don't check.