When people say a country was/is “communist,” they mean it’s being ruled by Marxist-Leninists, not that it’s achieved the hypothetical level of society that usually only Marxists are familiar with.

This is a great line

Mate, first of all: chill. Second of all: me, mincing words? You’re the one who’s decided the phrase ‘natural philosophy’ only applies to ancient Greeks. It’s literally just what science used to be called. Being very very hung up on a specific definition of a word or phrase and excluding other common usages is not a good basis for an argument. There need have been no argument at all. ‘We call it science now’ seems to be what you meant, but it’s not coming across well

Oh. And you can still do science without a theory. It’s called data collection and it is absolutely vital.

Edit: a good example would be Rosalind Franklin’s work on the structure of DNA. She did some incredible science with x-ray diffraction which was vital to Crick and Watson’s theory of the structure.

Edit X2: also ‘doing it implicitly’ is totally fucking fine if the result of being invalidated is you create a more refined model of reality. Which is, like, pretty much what the whole thing about astronomy is…

That sounds plausible but is, in fact, kinda a made up distinction you just came up with. People up to and including Isaac Newton used the phrase ‘natural philosophy’ to describe what they were doing. ‘Testing’ in any meaningful sense of the word was a part of that more often than not. Even Pythagorean astronomy was implicitly testing things by making predictions of the movement of celestial bodies. So, no, but thanks.

Edit: also worthwhile, I feel, mentioning that a lot of good science is purely observational and involves no direct testing, even of theorems. E.g early paleontology would, I feel, fit into that theme

Tbh anything that can give you a curated set of options, and some resources that can help you make the final decision is pretty incredible. But that’s the thing about most AI - it needs some human vetting for good results, regardless of how powerful it is

Previously known as natural philosophy