Quote from the latest Spotlight titled "Science as Thief":

[1:08:08] "That's where science is right now. Science is killing us. It's killing us by saying: We're not allowed to think certain things. And in so doing, it's creating enormous, vast type 2 errors. Their type 2 errors are killing us."

This statement contains a category error. What is a category error?

A category error is a semantic or ontological mistake where things from one category are incorrectly treated as if they belong to another category, or a property is ascribed to something that cannot possibly have that property. For example, asking which player in a cricket game performs "team spirit" is a category error, as "team spirit" is not a role that can be assigned to an individual player.

Courtney is making a category error by ascribing a property to science that true science cannot have.

Let's look at the definitions:

• Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe.

• Knowledge in the scientific sense is the awareness of facts.

• A fact is a true datum about one or more aspects of a circumstance, or an occurrence in the real world.

Therefore, true science must be built on the awareness of facts. It cannot be built on ignorance of facts. Courtney, like most people on this planet, accepts a definition of science that seems to include ignorance as a valid part of science, thus destroying its very definition. In doing so, they create a new category, but fail to recognize this new category.

The solution to any category error is to be strict about definitions, which means to assign a different name to the category if core properties of the category change.

In other words: Don't call it science if the discipline allows to be ignorant of facts.

This is semantic escape artistry.
Nobody means “science” as an abstract Platonic ideal floating in perfection outside human institutions. Courtney is obviously talking about the real-world scientific establishment: journals, universities, funding systems, peer review cartels, prestige hierarchies, taboo enforcement, reputational punishment, and materialist dogma posing as neutral inquiry.
And yes, that structure absolutely suppresses entire domains before investigation even begins.
The irony is that your own definition destroys your argument.
If science is “organized knowledge based on facts,” then large parts of institutional science are objectively failing scientifically whenever:
data is ignored,
anomalies are ridiculed,
consciousness is excluded a priori,
psi results are dismissed regardless of statistics,
UAP evidence is socially quarantined,
or careers are threatened for crossing ontological boundaries.
That is precisely Courtney’s point.
The issue is not that science contains ignorance. The issue is that institutions frequently protect paradigms more aggressively than they pursue truth.
And history is full of examples where “scientific certainty” later became intellectual embarrassment:
ulcers,
germ theory,
meteorites,
continental drift,
quantum nonlocality,
neuroplasticity,
etc.
Institutional science routinely behaves less like pure inquiry and more like reality border control.
Especially around consciousness.
So no, the real category error is pretending the current scientific establishment behaves like the idealized epistemic system described in textbooks

@Gewo:

"So no, the real category error is pretending the current scientific establishment behaves like the idealized epistemic system described in textbooks"

Well, that's exactly what I said. People call it science, while in reality, it's not.

@Gewo:

"Courtney was clearly criticizing the institution that currently operates under the name science, not the idealized scientific method described in textbooks."

But you seem to have a problem with me saying that the institution that currently operates under the name science is not true science. Why?