If you’re like me, you can’t leave well enough alone. That’s good, because there are people out there who want us to look the other way and stop questioning everything.
Personally, I’m concerned with ensuring that the things I believe are true. That’s my goal. I suppose it’s inevitable that I will make mistakes along the way, but that’s okay. Since my goal is to hold true beliefs and I know I will make mistakes, I place greater emphasis on how I think than on what I think.
One of my goals for this blog is to explore ways to think: tools and tactics that make us more effective at uncovering knowledge. Today, I’d like to take a look at science.
I’m worried that lately science is getting a bad reputation. It’s often criticized as an intellectual bully that won’t let us experience the whole range of truths available. Worse, some are now rejecting it as an arrogant authority, an elite and exclusive aristocracy bent on controlling us. That’s not only sad; it’s dangerous because science is actually the opposite of those things. Rather than restricting our access to knowledge, science democratizes it and makes it available to anyone who will put in the work to acquire it. It is a critical tool in our thinking kit. One that is freely available to anyone who will use it, not just the elite.
Yesterday, I introduced you to the writings of Richard Feynman. In his book, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, he makes an interesting observation about what science is. He starts by explaining that when an animal dies, the pack, the tribe, the species, loses whatever knowledge that individual had acquired over its life. Then an interesting thing happened. Some species (ours, especially) acquired the ability to pass knowledge to each other so that what we learned could be passed on and preserved beyond our death. The knowledge resides with the entire group, not with any one individual.
He writes, “This phenomenon of having a memory for the race, of having an accumulated knowledge passable from one generation to another, was new in the world. But it had a disease in it. It was possible to pass on mistaken ideas. It was possible to pass on ideas which were not profitable for the race. The race has ideas, but they are not necessarily profitable.”
Not only do we pass on, “practical and useful things”, he writes, but also, “all types of prejudices, and strange and odd beliefs.”
So what is the cure for this disease? Feynman says we need to, “Doubt that what is being passed from the past is in fact true.” He says we need to verify the information ourselves. “And that is what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile rechecking by direct experience, and not necessarily trusting the race experience from the past.”
How simple is that? Science has nothing mysterious or exclusive about it. You can do it yourself and no one can stop you. You just have to have the will to apply it and the courage to face the answers it gives.