alt Hacker NewsThere are ALL kinds of things we can't run experiments on. Climate, society, evolution, tech development, surgery, and more. We don't throw our hands in the air and say "science here is impossible!". Instead we roll up our sleeves and develop more and better causal inference models that improve over time.
Replies
ttoinou • 01/21/2025
Maybe we should indeed develop different words and taxonomy to differentiate the methods in different fields. Calling anything a "Science" brings an aura of seriousness, which doesn't necessarily exists, it's a way to manipulate our minds to make us believe it is as rigorous as physics and maths
OK, name such an approach in nutrition that doesn't already fall under regular biology.
The reason we can do science on some things without doing experiments is that there's lots of hard, unambiguous data about relatively much simpler systems.
Getting good data on the extremely complex thing that is homo sapiens is just not feasible, unless you're studying specific chemical reactions in the gut, in which case it'll take an extremely long time to figure out an actual dietary recommendation.