 The base is under attack, repeat, the base is under attack. Our brains suck at figuring stuff out. I mean they tried their little hearts out and they're the best thing we have available, but man do they suck. Take gravity. For almost two millennia it was common knowledge that heavier objects felt faster than lighter ones. Everyone who read Aristotle knew that. It took more than one and a half thousand years for someone to actually run a proper experiment, examine the results carefully and say, Oh no, that's totally wrong. Think about that for a second. Century after century after century of smart, observant, open-minded people believed something about the universe that could be disproven relatively easily in about two seconds with a pair of weights. Not one person noticed in that entire time. So yeah, our brains really suck at figuring stuff out. And yet, here we are, I'm talking to you on a screen over a massive network of computers. The technology in my watch alone represents an incredible mastery over the forces of nature and a really deep understanding of how it works. How did we get here if our brains suck so much? How did we go from heavy things fall faster than light things to an intimate understanding of gravity and electrons and circuits and chemistry and all of this amazing technology which harnesses that knowledge to bring you this? Put simply, our brains didn't really manage it on their own. We sort of needed to develop a whole new way of thinking, one which was governed by a strict set of rules to shepherd our wayward brains and keep them from messing up our understanding of the world with their suckiness. You probably remember the scientific method from elementary school. If you were anything like me, you wondered why everyone was making such a big deal about this relatively simple flow chart that describes a process which is fairly obvious. To learn new stuff, you try something and see if it works. Duh. I mean, babies do this. Why are we spending so much time on it? Why am I making a poster board of this? It took me a long time to appreciate exactly why that particularly well-defined stepwise process was so important. It's a sort of navigational tool, a rigorous system that allows us to find our way in regions where we can't always trust what our brains are telling us, regions beyond what's obvious or self-evident, without getting ourselves lost. Just like you'd never try to navigate a desert without a compass or a GPS, researchers cling very closely to this flow chart for a good reason. It's the only reliable way that we've found to navigate ourselves to the underlying principles of our universe, to find out how it works, how to harness its power to our desired ends without our brains screwing everything up. It's designed as an algorithmic replacement for our intuition. And that's part of the problem that we face since we first developed it. You might follow your GPS to something really incredible, but if someone asks you something about how you got there, you might find it difficult to come up with a meaningful response. Well, I followed the directions. This is the intrinsic problem of science communication. Researchers are exploring the furthest boundaries of human knowledge and paying very close attention to the scientific method to be absolutely sure that their brains' biases and prejudices and preconceptions aren't going to leave them lost in the wilderness. But that whole process is substantially different from how humans are used to thinking, and is easy to forget that it's tapped into something that we don't usually have access to. Something essential is necessarily lost when moving from the realm of research to the realm of normal human thought, the realm of things like rhetoric and argument and policy. Many people are currently discussing a war on science, which probably sounds hyperbolic or inflammatory. I mean, nobody's forming picket lines with science like down with chemistry or no more physics. What's the deal? Well, there are a few obvious things that are cause for significant concern. Believing in climate science has become a badge of political affiliation. Diseases which we've had under control for decades are killing people because some parents no longer trust the robust findings of medical science. Some lobbyists are pushing for creationism, which is a theological or philosophical position, to be taught alongside evolutionary science in public schools. And the current administration in the United States has cut funding for all sorts of different research initiatives, including environmental science, climate science, and medicine. However, despite the fact that they're terrifying, these phenomena can be seen as symptoms of a more general cultural shift in attitude regarding the place of science in society. All sorts of different things are driving that shift, from the unintentional equivocation by journalists of knowledgeable researchers and crackpot theorists, to deliberate PR campaigns to undermine the credibility of scientists who advance inconvenient theories or findings, to the echo chamber effect of social media allowing people to restrict the sort of scientific information that they're exposed to. But the overall result is a general loss of trust in scientific primacy, the idea that if science conflicts with anything else, the science wins. That's important, because brains can come up with all sorts of cockamamie ideas of how the world ought to work, and if you don't value science over that wishful thinking, you can end up believing all sorts of crazy stuff. The war on science isn't about a group of people who hate technology and development, or who want to destroy all scientific inquiry, or who think that all evidence-based medicine is nonsense. Instead, it's about subtly dethroning science as the most reliable source of objectively true information about the world, painting it instead as one source, among many. Useful as a rhetorical tool when it happens to support our beliefs, but safely ignored when it doesn't. That is the most pervasive anti-scientific attitude right now, and it's not hard to understand where it comes from. It's difficult to bear in mind that scientifically obtained information is categorically different from other kinds, and shouldn't be treated the same way. For example, it can sometimes seem like researchers change their minds over and over again. In other sources of knowledge, that sort of vacillation can indicate confusion or ignorance. I mean, if your shopping buddy says that you look good in green, then that you don't look good in green, then that you look good in green again, at some point you're going to get the impression that they don't know what they're talking about. People will mistakenly use that principle to dismiss the findings of researchers. First aches were good for you, then they were bad for you, now they're good for you again. These guys must just not know anything. But remember, we're operating off the edge of the map here, with our faces buried in our GPS. Those shifting recommendations represent a complex web of data and analysis which is becoming more and more refined over time. Even if they change, they're changing to the best possible guess. Another example. Many people point to instances of scientists being flat out wrong, or contradicting each other, as evidence that science is just as valuable as anything else. After all, there are some published studies suggesting that vaccines might be harmful, or that the global climate isn't changing. If you have some pluses and some minuses, then surely we can just pick and choose the studies that allow us to believe whatever we like, right? Well, no. The inductive statistical nature of science is an inherent part of its operation, and researchers are all too aware that even diligent experimentation can sometimes produce anomalous results. That's why those results are always given as a probability. There's always a very slight chance that something weird happened while they were recording data. But again, the balance of that data is still the most accurate picture that we have. We actually expect it to be wrong a small percentage of the time, but that doesn't imply that the entire gross body of data should be ignored. Now, I'm not going to argue for scientism, the idea that science has all the answers. I think that there are definitely areas which no amount of carefully collected data will tell us what to believe or how to feel. It's also true that some people deliberately publish incorrect or misleading information in a vaguely science-y format, and that scientific consensus has been wrong, even very wrong in the past. However, I will argue this. For any question about the world and how it works, it is always better to trust a scientific conclusion than whatever this comes up with. Most people won't claim that they oppose that position, but they will suggest that scientists just don't know for sure yet when scientific findings conflict with their desired beliefs. If you see a meta-analysis which demonstrates that spanking is an ineffective disciplinary measure and think to yourself, eh, they just must not have controlled for something. That's the war on science. If you read the NIH's Dietary Recommendations and think to yourself, yeah, but my grade on T8 like that and she died at 55 of cancer, that's the war on science. Those attitudes are unilaterally corrosive to scientific primacy, and while their short-term effects can just be frustrating, their long-term effects might be disastrous, as our near future is going to depend a whole lot on those researchers and their navigational tools to lead the way. We can either rely on this system with a proven track record and the knowledge that we gain with it to steer and predict and inform that future, or we can just try to wing it the way that we did for millennia, you know, like with gravity. How can we convince people that science holds a privileged position over other sources of information? Are you going to march for science on Saturday, April 22nd? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to follow us, subscribe, blah, share, and don't stop thunking.