4. Science sucks and why that is a good thing
The passenger door closes, and your driver’s seat moves forward a little as her knees dent the back of the cushion supporting your spine. A few minutes later you look in the rearview, to find her face forever buried in her phone. “Slow Friday night is it?”, you say, as a hopeful conversationalist. She doesn't reply. You turn on the volume to fill the space between the both of you with something other than your rising embarrassment. A sudden chillness in the car has you stretching your hand towards the heater controls. A confusing emotional eruption of anxiety, fright, and unsettlement hits you like a sack of bricks. Five or so songs later you reach her destination, pulling up along the side of the road close to the gate of what looked like her apartment building.
With both your hands clenching the steering wheel, you remember the 5-star review and sigh as you realise that you have to wait until she walks up to the gate and enters it. She doesn't move. The silence becomes unbearable. “This is your destination right”?, you say, pulling up the app on your phone to confirm the destination. There is no answer. You almost snap your neck as you turn your head, “Lady, this is your destinati…”. You stop mid-sentence, your lips circumferencing a circular void. There is no one there. The back seat is empty. The doors have been locked this whole time. You know this because you made sure to lock them right when she entered. Not even one stop had been made. You sit there, befuddled. You lose sleep for the next two days.
A few days later, after having told this story to your Uber driving peers, you are relieved to hear that some of them had had similar experiences. Some, even scarier than yours had been. Their anecdotes bolster your experience and cement your belief in ghosts so hard that any doubt would be an admission of insanity.
Science sucks, because this experience, which is extremely rich in emotional content and meaning, is less plausible than the admission of insanity. It is much more likely, according to science, that such an experience was a result of hallucination, regardless of the conviction of the individual. We've all been there, where the stars seem to align in our favour. One might decide to stay home and call in sick for work, only to discover later that day that the usual route they take witnessed an accident, claiming the lives of several people. We've all had that unsettling dream, leaving us emotionally perturbed, only to witness a similar event in real life." Science sucks, as it falls short in acknowledging the veridicality of such phenomena. These experiences, serving as evidence, are as insufficient as good intentions are for being a good person. And I am here to make the case for why that is actually a good thing.
The results of science speak for themselves; even the most superstitious or religious person has very little choice but to bend the knee to the utility of science. Such acknowledgement need not necessarily be vocalised, for it can easily be demonstrated. Imagine you fall sick tomorrow. Depending on the progression of your illness, in the following hours or days, you might find yourself at the other end of a pharmacist’s counter, or with a doctor at your bedside. Unbeknownst to you, a team of hundreds of scientists went through an arduously long process, vacillating between different approaches, experiments, and opinions. This ultimately led to the creation of the drugs that the pharmacist or doctor would inevitably prescribe for you. Behind the scenes of the generation of these drugs, is a rigorous process that typically takes a decade and a half to complete. This process is demarcated into different phases, each phase more challenging than the next. The process typically begins with basic research, progressing to drug discovery, followed by preclinical research, leading to clinical research, and finally concluding with drug approval. The stubbornness of the scientific process, the stringency of its methods, and the effort required to prove a hypothesis, delays the progression of one phase to the next. The level of evidence needed to prove a hypothesis is quite high. While that sucks, it is quite ironically the very element that safeguards a lot of lives on a daily basis.
This element provides a self-correcting mechanism to science, where good science prevails over bad science. While it is true that bad science and bad scientists exist, the determining factor lies in the weight of evidence and the epistemic approach. There are numerous examples where bad hypotheses and beliefs were overturned by good scientific practices. For example, to study personality, psychology and neuroscience replaced phrenology. With phrenology, it used to be thought that personality could be read by feeling the contours of the skull. During 2500 BCE, trepanation (boring holes into the skull) was a common surgical procedure across many cultures. The brain was not considered the seat of consciousness, nor connected to the mind, for thousands of years, as the heart was thought to be the superior organ. During The Scientific Revolution, religious authority was displaced by science, and various fields of inquiry were transformed, with the claims of alchemy and astrology losing scientific credibility and being replaced by astronomy, and chemistry, respectively. Quantum physics provided a more accurate description of the behaviour of particles at the quantum level. The change in Scientific thought, refined these disciplines, transforming the world and bringing about the Enlightenment. Although it became increasingly difficult to substantiate hypotheses, the result was the generation of more reliable scientific models with more predictive accuracy, and rational coherence. This led to increased technological, agricultural, medical, and even ethical advancement. The rigorous element of science makes it optimally flexible, and less prone to dogma.
The scientific method, generally, involves asking a question, formulating a hypothesis, conducting experiments, observing and recording data, drawing conclusions, and typically sharing the findings. However, one quickly learns that defining a question is difficult, and that it can at times be more challenging than conducting the experiment. A scientific question must be simple, concise, precise, and falsifiable (can be proved to be false). Concision and precision of speech do not come as naturally to most humans. For this reason, even getting one’s foot in the door is difficult if a question is badly formulated, not to mention the subsequent results derived from it. Bad questions lead to bad results, leading to bad science. However, given that most of us are professional scientists, one can learn to leverage the power of this method and use it in their own lives on a daily or weekly basis.
There can be a lot of utility in doing this. Let us start with a controversial example. The question: are horoscopes accurate? Bear in mind, are horoscopes true is a less simple version of the question. The hypothesis: horoscopes are accurate. The experiment: if horoscopes are accurate then one should be able to identify one’s horoscope amongst the 12 options, if the names of each are hidden. Let someone read all 12 horoscopes, pick out the one that applies to you, and then read the name. Is it accurate? If yes? Great. Next, pick out five friends or family members and run the same experiment. Did it work on all 5 of them? Let us say it worked with maybe 4. Good. Then this should work with 20 people. Do it with a hundred people, collect the data. What is the percentage of accuracy? If it is less than 50% then your confidence should be high that the claim ‘horoscopes are accurate’ is false. That is roughly how applying science in your life would work. It may seem challenging, but it also makes it awesome because it ensures that one’s willingness for something to be true meddles less than it has to in it actually being true.
It is difficult to think like this. A lot of emotional significance is stripped from one’s life when the weight of evidence is taken as seriously. This is due to the fact that we are living beings who are also a bit more rational, rather than rational beings who are also living. It is important to keep this in mind, for no matter how much logic you apply to matters in your life, you are still constrained by the deep conscious and unconscious need to further the needs of your survival and cognitive processes, which are not as concerned with rational coherence and truth as we like to believe they are. It is important to caution against the intrinsic arrogance that comes with knowledge and understanding. Understanding this allows one to separate the science from the scientist, as one would with the art and the artist.
The public has lost a lot of confidence in science, partly due to the inaccurate or ever-changing information disseminated during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is understandable to empathise with this loss of confidence in a field whose advocates often appear to be more focused on scoring points and financial gain. The result is that people who are outside the sciences think to themselves, ‘Science sucks’, and they never get the other side of the story, that science is awesome. Next time you use your phone, scroll through social media, drink a cough syrup, take a plane ride, microwave your food, ride an elevator etc; be reminded how great science is.
Until next time, Blogger’s Musings, adding value, one essay at a time.