
How We Got from Doc Brown to Walter White - pmcpinto
http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/how-we-got-from-doc-brown-to-walter-white
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usrusr
Walter White is not really about him being a scientist, but about him being a
grown-up, trained professional.

Or maybe that's just supporting the point of the article, that scientists in
fiction are not lab-coated magicians anymore, but just one of many breeds of
white collar workers. But strictly speaking, I still would think of Walter
White as a former scientist at best, because as a school teacher who clearly
does not do research. Just like being trained in computer science does not
make you a scientist, working in computer science research does.

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aaron-lebo
The show's been around for awhile now, but there's a spoiler which takes
suspense out of a major scene in the first paragraph....

To me what most of these portrayals lack is how mundane real scientists are.
Completely brilliant in one area and boring, ignorant, and ill-informed in
others - just like anyone else. Neil Degrasse Tyson (just one popular science
figure today) is as likely to have a valid opinion on politics or history as
Joe Montana - but you wouldn't think it.

There's a very real appeal to authority inherent in it, but as long as you can
appeal to a scientist - you're alright. What's slightly terrifying to me is
the worship of "science" and it being used to justify every Reddit thread,
when in reality we're training the public to worship scientism.

Doesn't _Big Bang Theory_ run on the same network as _Two Broke Girls_ after
football games? It's popularity might not have much to do with science...

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jhbadger
The thing is, scientists really _do_ have a greater chance of having an
informed opinion of politics, or history, or any other subject than do actors
or football players because to be a scientist you have to know how to evaluate
claims based on evidence. That doesn't mean that their opinions are 100%
correct of course, but yes, being trained in the skill of thinking makes their
opinions more valuable than those whose skills are in looking good or running
fast. "Scientism" is a meaningless word because every question that can be
answered is part of science in the broad sense (which includes history and
social science in addition to laboratory science).

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RodericDay
> "Scientism" is a meaningless word

What do you mean by this? People prematurely assuming that science has a good
explanation for something it doesn't has a long and storied history.

Scientists saying women couldn't vote because blood flowing to their ovaries
fled the brain causing poor decisions, saying that black people had lower IQs
because they had smaller craniums, that the Irish were a totally different
inferior race than whites, etc. And people latching onto their authority as
justification.

Most recently, many outlets have discussed the Clinton campaign's over-
reliance on "data" and "science-like" methods, via their ADA "algorithm" and a
refusal to go for grassroots tactics and instead trusting analysis of
millenials or w/e.

"Scientism" is alive and well. People who think more numbers == more truth,
even without putting those numbers and their underlying generating assumptions
to any scrutiny, are very very plentiful.

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jhbadger
But science is literally the only way we have of explaining anything. Yes,
many 19th century opinions are now known as incorrect. But how do we _know_
that? Because later science showed that ovaries don't work that way and so on.
And while Clinton's campaign was unsuccessful, arguing the merits of various
strategies that could have been taken is clearly a form of social science, not
an alternative to science. If "scientism" is a real thing there have to be
answerable questions that not addressable by science.

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jnicholasp
You seem to be using a very broad definition of 'science'. What do you mean by
the term? Do we know mathematical truths via science, or is that a different
realm of knowledge? Are philosophical arguments categorizable as science? What
about questions that are in theory testable, but the test involves huge
numbers of complex interfering factors and decades of time (like many
questions of political and social policy) - are they usefully labeled as
scientific questions, or do we gain something by recognizing them as requiring
some other mode of knowledge than just empirical observations?

> answerable questions not addressable by science

So what does 'answerable' mean? There's no such thing as proof, rigorously
speaking, outside of math and other formal systems, and not always within
them. The answers that the best hard science provides are strong, but not
provably certain, and the spectrum of certainty extends a long way down from
there - at what level of certainty does an answer stop being an answer? I
think there are many important questions that don't admit hard scientific
answers, and for which 'science' as I understand the term isn't the most
useful mode of knowledge for finding the 'answers' that are most likely to be
fruitful.

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jhbadger
Science is a process in which conclusions are made from evidence. It does not
deal in proof and scientific conclusions change when new evidence is
available. Obviously a historian uses this process as much as physicist.
Mathematics in itself is not science, but it can be used as a tool for science
if the assumptions in the mathematical models are based on evidence. An
answerable question is one in which evidence can actually be used to test
whether one answer is better than another.

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RodericDay
Historians do not do science. Your definition of science seems is so broad
it's meaningless.

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jhbadger
Do paleontologists do science in your opinion? Or archeologists? They also are
using evidence to answer questions of the past. What makes historians
different? What is meaningful about the broad definition of science is it
separates the people using evidence from those just using "gut feeling" (or
mystic intuition or whatever they want to call it).

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ArkyBeagle
We got to Walter White because that was the design goal of "Breaking Bad" \-
to turn Mr Chips into Scarface. The mechanism in use was, IMO, a partial ( and
perhaps oscillating/varying) reductio ad absurbum on the very idea of heroes
and villains in narrative.

Eastwood's played the antihero for decades now. It's not new.

But it's Science! ( ala Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science"). Sort-of
_yawn_. That way lies ex deux machina and Merlin figures...

