Science Makes Us Less Dumb

I came across a nice essay in praise of the scientific method. It's actually an excerpt from a new book, You Are Now Less Dumb, by David McRaney. The tone is similar to a friend giving us a good-natured ribbing for how dumb we can be. Here's a snippet.

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.

Boyd Petersen told a story of the time Hugh Nibley joked that he had found a mistake in the Book of Mormon. Whereas Alma 42:10 says that "man is carnal, sensual and devilish," Nibley said, "They left out stupid."

Embracing a scientific attitude toward the world and trying to become less dumb is a bitter-sweet quest. The sweet part is being able to learn and hopefully better recognize truth and error. The bitter part is coming to terms with the fact that many people apparently like being dumb, and will resist your efforts to help them be less so.

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