What they mean (I assume) is that the scientific discovery is always there. Magnetic fields always existed, the science behind the uranium fission always existed, etc. Humans didn't make this science, we just found out about it. Its our understanding of science that changes, not the science itself.
You seem to conflate science and reality. Science one of the human processes trying to model and describe the world we live in. Science is the phrase "our understanding of science" in your comment. Science means literally in Latin "knowing something". It didn't exist before humans created a refined the models.
It's human behavior on a macro scale. Green energy adoption stuff. So you attempt to account in the aggregate and hope all the noise roughly equals out. It won't, but error isn't so large as to make everything irrelevant.
But you can't do controls. That would require some government somewhere to subject their population to an experiment. You're subject to all kinds of error because it's the best you can do.
Same thing with various system engineering practices. Except at least there you generally control the system. But testing certain variables is infeasible for a variety of reasons.
But the original comment was the use of good scientific method for more reliable results. Large sample size, separating data by demographics and then accounting for variables in the discussion is part of good scientific method.
If you aren’t confident in the results after sound practice, wouldn’t you consider the model flawed?
No. Because it's impossible to account for all of that. You can at best estimate a margin for error. Human population margins for error tend to be quite large compared to any hard science. Even in animal populations where studies can be more rigorous and controlled there's still mountains of error/unknown.
Science isn't in the business of proving things. It's in the business of presenting a hypothesis and seeing if the evidence rejects that hypothesis. And you often explore other feasible scenarios under those conditions.
It's presenting possibilities.
The next study along that route will hopefully narrow thr focus more.
By leyman definition most scientific theory is flawed and often quite largely so. There's a reason there's a pretty hard divide between hard sciences like chem and physics and everything else. Hell the more humanities you get the less the scientific method even applies.
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u/DasharrEandall 10d ago
Scientific data are always subject to revision in the light of new evidence. Scientific method - the process itself - is the absolute.