The Proficiologist

The Scientific Method in Proficiology

In a sense, study­ing generic sen­tient beings is kind of like study­ing a fic­tional uni­verse. There’s no obvi­ous notion of accu­racy or cor­rect­ness – after all, a generic mind is not nec­es­sar­ily an accu­rate depic­tion of human psy­chol­ogy. The whole field seems kind of self-con­tained and any state­ment about the world of the gener­ics frankly appears unfal­si­fi­able, in the same way that the­o­ries about a fic­tional uni­verse are impos­si­ble to dis­prove through experiment.

Why should we care about such fic­tional domains? When there are high stakes to explain or under­stand a phe­nom­e­non, we look toward sci­ence for answers. It is tempt­ing to treat sci­en­tific con­cepts as con­crete things that objec­tively exist, mak­ing sci­en­tific the­o­ries seem much more tightly grounded in real­ity than the afore­men­tioned the­o­ries around fic­tional uni­verses. But I argue that in many cases, the two are not all that dif­fer­ent. Of course, I am not say­ing that sci­en­tific work is purely fic­tional. All bod­ies of sci­ence agree that state­ments must be tested against real-world obser­va­tions in order to be taken seri­ously. However, there are many dif­fer­ent ways to do sci­en­tific work, and by group­ing these meth­ods under a com­mon name we are desen­si­tiz­ing our­selves to their dif­fer­ences. In point­ing out these dif­fer­ences, I will show you how sci­en­tific the­ory can be more fan­tas­ti­cal than we ini­tially expect.