Wow.
I wonder if anyone who has ever written a science fiction screenplay has ever designed an empirical study, collected data, or published about it? Vonnegut worked for General Electric, I believe, although it's never clear what he did while he worked there.
What's missing is the (almost comical) care that scientific discourse demands: a well-established mode of inquiry, proof, defense, and progressive argumentation.
A nice example from Noam Chomsky: "It seems to me that one might speculate a bit further—speculate in this case, since we’re talking about the future, not the past—and ask whether the concept of human nature or of innate organizing mechanisms or of intrinsic mental schematism or whatever we want to call it, I don’t see much difference between them, but let’s call it human nature for shorthand, might not provide for biology the next peak to try to scale, after having—at least in the minds of the biologists, though one might perhaps question this—already answered to the satisfaction of some the question of what is life” [from Chomsky, N., & Foucault, M. (2006). The Chomsky-Foucault Debate. NY, NY.: The New Press, p. 7].
Most of the scientists I admire have a common distain for postmodern theory. This is interesting to me as I've tended to interpret postmodern publications as performative events rather than as arguments (which presume taking a position and not just a position that attempts to argue against positions).
