Creationists and bug-zappers
I wonder why creationists are drawn to Science like flies to bug-zappers. They're desperate to give their opinions legitimacy with a tool that is anathema to their goal. I'm talking specifically about organizations such as The Discovery Institute.
I think I'll start calling this "Science Envy". Science works because of its requirement that accepted results are reproducible. If the psychics, dowsers, creationists, or whatever could co-opt that power, they could make so much progress in spreading their ideas.
So you get quantum-mechanical babble in sales pitches for useless bracelets. "Clinical trials prove..." in ads for useless medicinal products. They want desperately to have that power Science confers: "This works, and we know it works because it has been verified by Science!"
But ultimately, they fail because of Science's built-in self-correction mechanism - the requirement that claims (even long-accepted claims) must stand up to continued subsequent testing. This means it cannot be used to promulgate just anything; only things that work on a long-term basis.
By "ultimately fail," I mean over the course of decades or centuries. The charlatans and deluded may get temporary traction in the course of a lifetime, but over time, repeated failures to duplicate a claim relegates that claim to history.
But what about the early Greeks who thought maybe the earth went around the Sun? It was centuries before that correct result came back. The point is, it did come back, because Science continually questions itself. When experimental results started to make the Geocentric theory look too complex compared to the Heliocentric model, people started looking at the Heliocentric one again. Earlier, we just didn't have the data to support the Heliocentric model.
This does raise the issue of how we tell which theories today are correct but unverifiable, and which are just wrong. The point is, it doesn't matter. Keep testing those theories, and it will all get sorted out. The sieve of reproducibility of results is what separates us from hundreds of thousands of crackpot ideas. Sure, we filter out some correct results that we will have to rediscover. But this is a small price to pay for avoiding all of the garbage, like homeopathy, dowsing, and faith healing.
So go ahead and envy our Science. Just don't be surprised when the very thing you are trying to use turns against your theories. Science is beholden to nobody.
I think I'll start calling this "Science Envy". Science works because of its requirement that accepted results are reproducible. If the psychics, dowsers, creationists, or whatever could co-opt that power, they could make so much progress in spreading their ideas.
So you get quantum-mechanical babble in sales pitches for useless bracelets. "Clinical trials prove..." in ads for useless medicinal products. They want desperately to have that power Science confers: "This works, and we know it works because it has been verified by Science!"
But ultimately, they fail because of Science's built-in self-correction mechanism - the requirement that claims (even long-accepted claims) must stand up to continued subsequent testing. This means it cannot be used to promulgate just anything; only things that work on a long-term basis.
By "ultimately fail," I mean over the course of decades or centuries. The charlatans and deluded may get temporary traction in the course of a lifetime, but over time, repeated failures to duplicate a claim relegates that claim to history.
But what about the early Greeks who thought maybe the earth went around the Sun? It was centuries before that correct result came back. The point is, it did come back, because Science continually questions itself. When experimental results started to make the Geocentric theory look too complex compared to the Heliocentric model, people started looking at the Heliocentric one again. Earlier, we just didn't have the data to support the Heliocentric model.
This does raise the issue of how we tell which theories today are correct but unverifiable, and which are just wrong. The point is, it doesn't matter. Keep testing those theories, and it will all get sorted out. The sieve of reproducibility of results is what separates us from hundreds of thousands of crackpot ideas. Sure, we filter out some correct results that we will have to rediscover. But this is a small price to pay for avoiding all of the garbage, like homeopathy, dowsing, and faith healing.
So go ahead and envy our Science. Just don't be surprised when the very thing you are trying to use turns against your theories. Science is beholden to nobody.
posted by Almo at 11:56 AM
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