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Sunday, Aug 4, 2013 5:45 PM UTC
The scientific method's the best way for
people to get smarter, precisely because theories get revised and
improved
By David McRaney
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when Shakespeare said you were the paragon of animals, both noble in
reason and infinite in faculties, he did so during a time when
physicians believed the body was filled with black bile, yellow bile,
phlegm, and blood, and all sickness and health depended on the
interaction of those fluids. Lethargic and lazy? Well, that’s because
you are full of phlegm. Feeling sick? Maybe you’ve got too much blood
and should go see a barber to get drained. Yes, the creator of some of
the greatest works of the English language believed you could cure a
fever with a knife.
It’s easy to laugh at the very wrong things
that people once believed, but try not to feel too superior. My friend
Susannah Gregg was living in South Korea and working there as an English
teacher when she first learned about fan death, a common belief among
people in that country that oscillating desk fans are among the most
deadly inventions known to man. She was stepping out for a beer with a
friend when he noticed, to his horror, she had left her fan running with
her pet rabbit still inside her house. Her friend, a
twenty-eight-year-old college graduate, refused to leave until she
turned off the fan. He explained to her that everyone knows you can’t
leave a fan running inside a room with the windows shut. That would mean
certain death. It was shocking to him that she was unaware of something
so simple and potentially life-threatening. Susannah thought he was
kidding. It took several conversations to convince him it wasn’t true
and that in her country, in most countries, no one believed such a
thing. She successfully avoided absorbing the common belief not because
she was smarter than her friend but because she had already done the
experiments necessary to disprove the myth. She had slept in a house
with a fan running many times and lived to tell about it. Since then,
she has asked many friends and coworkers there about fans, and the
response has been mixed. Some people think it is silly, and some think
fan death is real. In 2013, despite the debunking power of a few Google
searches, the belief that you shouldn’t fall asleep or spend too much
time in a room with a running electric fan is so pervasive in South
Korea that Susannah told me you can’t buy one within their borders
without a safety device that turns it off after a set amount of time.
The common belief is so deep and strong that fan manufacturers must
include a safety switch to soothe the irrational fears of most
consumers.
Your
ancestors may not have had the toolset you do when it came to avoiding
mental stumbling blocks or your immense cultural inheritance, but their
minds worked in much the same way. The people who thought the world
rested on the back of a great tortoise or who thought dancing would make
it rain — they had the same brain as you; that is to say, they had the
same blueprint in their DNA for making brains. So a baby born into their
world was about the same as one born into yours. Evolution is so slow
that not enough has changed in the way brains are made to tell much of a
difference between you and a person from ten thousand years ago. That
means that from gods in burning chariots to elves making cookies in
trees, people long ago believed in all sorts of silly things thanks to
the same faulty reasoning you deal with today. They, too, were fueled by
a desire to make sense of reality and to answer the age-old question:
“What, exactly, is happening here?” Instead of letting that question
hang in the air, your distant relatives tended to go ahead and answer
it, and they kept answering it over and over again, with newer yet
equally dumb ideas because of one of the most profoundly difficult
obstacles humans have faced since we started chipping away at flint to
make heads for spears. This malfunction of the mind is called the common
belief fallacy.
In Latin, it is
argumentum ad populum,
or “appeal to the people,” which should clue you in that this is
something your species has worried about for a long time. The fallacy
works like this: If most people believe something is true, you are more
likely to believe it is true the first time you hear about it. You then
pass along that mistaken belief, and on and on it goes.
Being a
social creature, the first thing you do in a new job, new school, new
country, or any other novel situation is ask people who are familiar
with the environment to help you get acquainted with the best way to do
things, the best places to eat, the hand gestures that might get you
beheaded, etc. The problem, of course, is that your info is now based on
opinions that are based on things such as conformity and emotions and
norms and popularity, and if you’ve spent any time in a high school, on a
dance floor, or at a rave, you know that what is popular is not always
what is good or true. It isn’t exactly something we’ve overcome, but at
least we now have a strategy for dealing with it.
Before we had a
method for examining reality, the truth was a slippery fish, which is
why your ancestors were so dumb. So dumb, in fact, that for a very long
time people got smarter in a slow, meandering, and unreliable sort of
way until human beings finally invented and adopted a tool with which to
dig their way out of the giant hole of stupid into which they kept
falling. The hole here is a metaphor for self-delusion. Your
great-great-great-grandparents didn’t really keep falling into giant
holes, at least not in numbers large enough to justify a book on the
topic.
The tool here is also a metaphor. I’m talking about the
scientific method. Your ancestors invented the scientific method because
the common belief fallacy renders your default strategies for making
sense of the world generally awful and prone to error. Why do bees like
flowers? What causes snow? Where do babies come from? Every explanation
in every tribe, city, and nation was as good as the next, even if it was
completely made up. Even worse, once an explanation was woven into a
culture, it would often become the official explanation for many
lifetimes. “What is thunder?” a child might have asked. “Oh, that’s the
giant snow crab in the sky falling off his bed,” a shaman would have
explained, and that would have been good enough for everyone until they
all had their own kids and eventually died of dysentery. That hamster
wheel of limited knowledge kept spinning until the scientific method
caught on. Even then, there was a long way to go and lots of cobwebs to
be cleared from common sense.
Scholars used to believe that life
just sort of happened sometimes. Learned people going all the way back
to Aristotle truly believed that if you left meat outside long enough it
would spontaneously generate new life in the form of maggots and flies.
The same people thought that if you piled up dirty rags and left them
alone for a while they would magically turn into mice. Seriously. The
idea started to fade in 1668 when a physician named Francesco Redi
tested the hypothesis by placing meat and eggs in both sealed and
unsealed containers and then checked back to see which ones contained
life. The sealed containers didn’t spontaneously generate flies, and
thus the concept began to die. Other thinkers contested his discoveries
at first, and it took Louis Pasteur’s great fame and his own experiments
to put the idea away forever some two centuries later.
People
learned that science, as a tool, as a lens to create an upside-down way
of looking at the world, made life better. Your natural tendency is to
start from a conclusion and work backward to confirm your assumptions,
but the scientific method drives down the wrong side of the road and
tries to disconfirm your assumptions. A couple of centuries back people
began to catch on to the fact that looking for disconfirming evidence
was a better way to conduct research than proceeding from common belief.
They saw that eliminating suspicions caused the outline of the truth to
emerge. Once your forefathers and foremothers realized that this
approach generated results, in a few generations your species went from
burning witches and drinking mercury to mapping the human genome and
playing golf on the moon.
The twisting path to becoming less dumb
has led to many stops and starts, yet humans persist. Sure, scientists
are just people, prone to the same delusions as anyone else, but the
enterprise, the process, slowly but surely grinds away human weakness.
It is a self-correcting system that is always closer to the truth today
than it was yesterday.
The people who came before you invented
science because your natural way of understanding and explaining what
you experience is terrible. When you believe in something, you rarely
seek out evidence to the contrary to see how it matches up with your
assumptions. That’s the source of urban legends, folklore,
superstitions, and all the rest. Skepticism is not your strong suit. In
the background, while you crochet and golf and browse cat videos, people
using science are fighting against your stupidity. No other human
enterprise is fighting as hard, or at least not fighting and winning.
When
you have zero evidence, every assumption is basically equal. You prefer
to see causes rather than effects, signals in the noise, patterns in
the randomness. You prefer easy-to-understand stories, and thus turn
everything in life into a narrative so that complicated problems become
easy. Scientists work to remove the narrative, to boil it away, leaving
behind only the raw facts. Those data sit there naked and exposed so
they can be reflected upon and rearranged by each new visitor.
Scientists
will speculate, and they will argue, but the data they extract from
observation will not budge. They may not even make sense for a hundred
years or more, but thanks to the scientific method, the stories, full of
biases and fallacies, will crash against the facts and recede into
history.
This excerpt is a shortened chapter from the book “You Are Now Less Dumb.” Reprinted
by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A
Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © David McRaney, 2013.
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