Election Day! In recent years every election day is the most critical one in history, which is just one more piece of evidence about scale-blindness and short-term thinking. I could do more political posts today, but I think I did enough yesterday, and I’m sure there will be lots more tomorrow.
Step out to the big picture. All our politics are petty tribal disputes. There is a real world out there, that exists despite human politics, even if some tribes deny it.
Washington Post, opinion by Stuart Firestein, today: The best part of science might be what rattles you, subtitled “It’s uncertain why blood pressure medicine works. That’s no reason to reject it — or other discoveries.”
The writer just published a book, It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty.
John Maddox, the longtime editor of Nature, was once asked how much of what the international scientific journal published turned out to be wrong. His reply: “All of it.”
Nature’s articles weren’t wrong, of course — just incomplete. There is always more to be learned, more to be discovered, a more sophisticated explanation to be had.
If you are worried about the world’s uncertainties, science has an answer for your anxiety. In fact, uncertainty is an essential part of science. It is what makes science the most powerful system for accumulating knowledge that humanity has ever devised. In science, revision is a victory.
Nice essay. It’s all about the simplistic, closed-world understanding of conservatives, and the open-ended view of scientists who understand that humanity’s understanding of the universe is always provisional and incomplete. This maps of course to the spectrum of human nature.
Concluding:
Uncertainty in the practice of science is optimistic. Yes, optimistic: the optimism of possibility, of being able to imagine that things could be otherwise. Don’t wait around for the final answer that will never come. Take your blood pressure medicine. Act on the nearly correct science we have now.
Unsettled science is not unsound science. It is the real science.
Is humanity a questing species or a tribal species?
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Music:
I am listening to the inner movements of the symphonies by Mahler. The 2nd and the 3rd, so far.
