Have you ever felt like scientists were assholes? Or at least super arrogant?
I often hear scientists sound this way. And when I was in academia it seemed they surrounded me. Being an academic seemed synonymous with being so arrogant that you turned people off.
I think many of us have experienced this and it does academia and science a disservice.
It’s like a medical doctor with no bedside manner. If you can’t communicate with ‘normal people’, whatever level of intelligence or value you offer society can be ineffective.
In other words, if you can’t talk to people in a way that doesn’t turn them off they won’t hear what you have to say.
Think about that.
If we can’t communicate well we run the risk of losing our meaning. Our value to society can be severely diminished.
That’s why I have podcasted here and here and even here about the importance of being human — being NON-SCIENTIFIC. Being humble.
When I say Science is Not the Truth, I mean it. When you hear scientists claiming they (and usually only they) know the truth or have some special access to reality, you should believe them less.
When I say “I Don’t Know” are the most powerful words in the English language, I mean that, too. If you hear someone sound so confident that they stop questioning their brilliance, you should believe them much less. If at all.
I talk about the truth and facts and science and arrogance a lot. Hell, my very first Episode was about this.
I talk about this so much because it matters. It is important for us to act as informed consumers. Of goods and services but also of information. It is up to us as a society to reach a consensus via a science-informed discourse.
Unfortunately, what happens nowadays is that we treat scientists as either Gods or pariahs. Neither moniker is fair or accurate. This is a dangerous practice.
It’s obvious to me that not everything can be effectively studied using science. Science requires measurements and numbers.
At the most basic level, all science does is convert reality to numbers and then use math to answer questions.
If you accept that explanation (and I get it if you don’t, because, well, this article and every link in it) then you can entertain the idea that the ‘goodness’ of science is dependent on the ability of the measures to be measured effectively and accurately.
In other words, for things that can’t be effectively measured AND replicated (i.e., measured many times or have many different units to measure) then science just won’t work.
And I am VERY guilty of this because as a scientist I studied streams. Each stream is unique. Every part of every stream is unique. As Hericlitus is supposed to have said,
No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he is not the same man
His lack of gender appreciation notwithstanding, this is essentially accurate.
Despite my inability to replicate streams I still used math to assess my data. In reality, this makes my science weak, at best.
Psychological science suffers from a similar shortcoming. It’s hard to measure human intelligence, the brain, or our emotions. But we use scientific methods anyway.
There are many who would thus consider ecology and psychology to be ‘soft’ sciences or pseudoscience. And I don’t really care what we call it. To me, the conclusions from studies like mine and others are still valuable.
Are they the refutable truth?
Absolutely not. But neither is anything else, either.
I’m not here to tell you what the alternative is or to profess that I have some alternative method of understanding reality. All I am saying is that there are MANY ways to understand reality. Every single one of these is going to be wrong.
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
The real issue here, if I may be so bold, is fear.
We are so afraid of not knowing things that we would rather believe in a false God than no God at all. The solution, then, is to address this fear.
Why are we afraid of the unknown? Why do we try so hard to find ‘proof’? Why do we want to reach some point where there is nothing else to know?
I moved a little closer to this question this week. I will continue to explore our relationship to the unknown and try to figure out why we would rather lie to ourselves than be uncomfortable about things we don’t (and can’t) know.
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