[FallingLeaves]

this was originally part of a response to another thread but I felt like it would be better divorcing it from that and putting it here..
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in my view, scientists are more about trying to get agreement with each other than just about anything else. Hence the need to always be 'proving' things, and doing independent confirmations of things.

But from what I've seen, any proof you can make is by its very essence somewhat arbitrary... even seemingly fixed things don't have to be as fixed as we might suppose if we accept some of the ancient texts in the spirit they were written... and even if the 'facts' are as 'fixed' as people have been led to suppose, I still find it is possible to describe the same phenomena in many different ways. (mathematics supports the latter theory by the way). So I get a choice of which description to use? That itself is hardly fixed...

So to me any given scientific 'statement of fact' is inherently somewhat arbitrary independently of whether I want to postulate today that the facts themselves are somewhat arbitrary, and sometimes statements of fact are even slanted towards a specific agenda despite the statement by scientists that they think objectively.

But even if I'm wrong and scientists somehow do think objectively (although I'd be hard pressed to buy into that), it still often isn't the scientists who are saying thing about science, and marketing experts have a very different outlook on life... it is more about persuasion than fact... or rather it is more about using the facts about how to persuade effectively....

so I find that as with all things human science is more a matter of what various leaders can get others to buy into than anything else... it is just that the people who do the buying get to have the illusion that there is deep inherent (and seemingly immutable) meaning into what they are buying into that makes it somehow more worthwhile than believing in pink unicorns... and maybe that it somehow insulates them from the arbitrariness of other people's whims... but like i say I find that even the chosen statement of fact relies on whim even if we do decide that the facts themselves are as immutable as they seem.