this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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I love science. But like the way catholics don't know anything real about god (obviously), I don't know anything real about science. I just know (or believe) that science can provide real answers and if it does something wrong, it will be corrected. I cannot provide those answers, but I trust in the people who can.
Science is like my religion. I am a simple believer, scientists are the monks and scribes, science communicators are the pastors and preachers.
Idk at least the scientific method includes some kind of testing process that religion just doesn't
My take on their comment was that they know this but consider it their 'religion' anyways because they don't understand the process and so, in the absence of true understanding, take it on faith alone that the process actually works out
But the evidence is all around us even if you don't understand the processes themselves: Science built us a moon landing, religion built us the dark ages
I know it is a hard comparison to make, but if you don'thave faith in the scientific method, you get idiots like... populists. And they can just call "fake news" and be done with it.
Truth is not an absolute value. The science can be clear as day, but if it is not supported by the people, it will simply be rejected. You gotta have people believe in science for it to be valuable.
I guess it depends on how much faith you have in empirical evidence, then?
You sound learn advanced calculus, there’s a small set of rules to follow and personally I think it’s fun.
Then you can choose to never do it by hand, but understand the principals that govern so much of our world.
How would one do this if they were say, someone that took algebra 20 years ago and didn’t do particularly well and then white knuckled “statistics for non STEM majors” as a requirement for something else and had no other maths background?
What are the steps?
Try something like Khan Academy and some YouTube lessons
start with “functions”, refresh yourself on polynomials, skip trig to start with, and then look for calculus and derivatives.
Functions are the foundation of modelling change, then calculus is the tip of the iceberg. When you understand derivatives, the next course would be anti-derivatives and integration. For calculating integrals just focus on the concept, there’s a whole world of methods to calculate them that’s less important than understanding the idea.
It’s a good idea to do lots of excercises on paper and most frontier AI will be able to make you problem sets and evaluate your work.
This is actually one of the better takes that I've seen on the image. Usually the top post is something to the effect of "don't tell me what to like!"
But the truth is considerably more nuanced. Science is slow-moving, often boring, and can be incredibly frustrating to do long-term. People get the benefit of summarized very old results complete with diagrams and images and animations and whatever have you.
You can go on YouTube and learn quite a bit about quantum physics and black holes without really needing to have a deep understanding of what's going on. I do this as my PhD is in a completely different area from physics.
But ultimately for most people what you're liking isn't the science but the results once they're cleaned up. They're fundamentally two different things. But there is absolutely no reason you can't be a fan of the idea of science.