Wednesday, November 4, 2020

Following the Science

 

                             Following the Science

Ours is the time of the magician.

Covid has revealed a lot about us. We cheerily place ourselves under house arrest. We calmly shut commerce down and destroy countless businesses and lives. We stop education. Some of this comes from our confidence that the culture's success comes from some place other than ourselves, some weird governmental source that can maintain and nurture us. Another motivator is our strange "following the science."

For as knowledgeable and as savvy a culture as we are, you would expect some adequate understanding of science and technology. But that does not seem to be the case. Science is an exploration, a search. It is not a declaration. Fracking is technology, Covid infections are numbers, Pythagorean Law is geometry.

Science does not look at numbers and come to a conclusion. Science offers a thesis, does experiments, then reviews the results to see if the numbers justify the thesis. Any other approach is augury.

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