Disclaimer: we still have pragmatic reason to follow the evidence suggested by our best scientific theories. I’m just poking fun at scientists in the spirit of Hume. There’s no guarantee that the future will resemble the past, and even our best scientific theories are amenable to future evidence.
Except this isn’t a criticism of the scientific position…
We absolutely do not expect our instruments and our math to be reliable in the future. Literally everything about science is done with the understanding that we’re still figuring things out and that our tools and models will change as we learn more, and that we will learn more as our tools and models change. The problem isn’t posting a philosophical meme, the problem is that it’s a bit ass-backward.
Evolutionary ecology and multilevel selection theory have undergone massive changes just in the course of my career. I remember when the news that mitochondria and chloroplasts had their evolutionary origin as independent and then symbiotic organisms really started to penetrate public awareness. I remember when evolutionary developmental biology started to pick up steam. There’s far too many books about all of those kinds of things and new papers being written every day. That’s not even touching on the world-view changing developments in physics, material sciences, social sciences, and so on. We update our models as we learn - that is what learning is.
Fair enough, I concede that the meme falsely portrays scientists as being unaware of this limitation. But maybe that’s where the humor comes in; although I don’t think many people see the meme as funny. Maybe I should have used a different format…