Introduction
Science summarizes in one word the essence of everything that has allowed us to build our modern civilization and to make the world as well as our lives better and better. In order to improve our lives we need to solve problems while at the same time create more of whatever makes us happier.
The first step we have to take in order to solve problems, especially really tough ones like diseases, is to better understand our world and what is going on. If we don’t have the necessary knowledge to begin with, we are basically just shooting in the dark – maybe we’re wrong, maybe we’re right. The funny thing though is that there are an infinite amount of ways to be wrong, but only one way to find out what’s really true, and that is science.
What Is Science Really?
Most people seem to think of science as something boring and/or hard to grasp, which is done by people in white lab coats holding valves with liquids of different colors. But really, it’s much less complicated. As Jacob Bronowski once put it: “Science is just the Latin word for knowledge”. And the way we build knowledge is rather simple – even a toddler can do it: She puts a round peg into a square hole and it doesn’t work, tries again with a round hole and sees that it works. The child just did science. It builds a hypothesis (“this can fit through here”); collects data (on both shapes); confirms a hypothesis and then builds a theory (“round pegs fit through round holes”). Unlike infinite cases (shapes) that would have been false, this one theory can now be applied to infinite cases with round pegs and round holes as true.
This, in a nutshell, is the scientific method. And it’s the most important invention of all time, because it is quintessential to all other inventions. With issues more complex than that of round pegs and holes, our methods have, of course, become a bit more refined but the principle is the same and can be used by anyone. Over time our understanding of whatever is studied is advanced further and further by some very bright minds over thousands of work hours until, often but not always, a scientific consensus is reached. That’s when we are sure – not 100% as our understanding will never be perfect – but 99.999999% or 99.9%. For example, that climate change is happening and caused by human activity; the theory of evolution; germ theory and the theory of relativity.
This is the power of science: to enable us humans to understand the world. The thing about science is though while we never gain a perfect understanding of the world, the only thing to prove science wrong is even more science. It’s not a political party or religion or boy band. It’s not a “view” or “opinion” or “just one way of looking at things”. It is the method of relentlessly applying human common sense to find out what is actually true.
Our ability to understand the world, to think logically and reason, to reflect and the fact that we are aware of being aware is what sets us apart from all other 8.7 million species. The human brain is truly extraordinary. In fact, it is the most complex object in the universe. However, if we don’t use our brains in the right way, we never gain a better understanding of reality and are thus stuck living very much like animals. Only if we apply our brains in the structured method that is science can we understand as well as shape our world the way we want it to be, better than any other animals ever could. The most basic example is the invention of farming.
How Science and Reason Are the Most Important Factors for Improving Our Lives
One great example of how we can be wrong in infinite ways, but only right in one way is the case of influenza and vaccines. For countless generations we only had all kinds of guesses and beliefs about what influenza was. Maybe it occurred because villagers didn’t pray to the sun god enough; maybe some thought the cure would be to sacrifice a few children; and so on and so forth. Millions of times over thousands of years people were wrong, but we only had to figure out once what a virus is; that influenza is a virus; and how vaccines work.
This is just one particular example of how we solved a problem by first understanding the world instead of misunderstanding it or building knowledge where there was ignorance before, using the scientific method. The same principle applies to not just medicine or technology, but also in business, politics, education and endless other situations in your daily life.
And as we can all agree (a) that our main goal is to live good lives it means that with anything we do in technology, business, politics etc., it is in one form or another in order to serve that goal or as I prefer to say, to create value. Apart from personal or political factors like human rights, our GDP per capita is the best way to measure value because money – $59,495 per American a year (1) – represents all goods and services in the economy that we, as the word says, value.
One of my favorite facts I like to reiterate as often as possible is that we’ve increased our economic output per person 34-fold over the last 180 years. That’s a truly incredible achievement. To summarize how we’ve done that is through ‘doing better things better’, i.e. innovation. This is how we’ve gone from cavemen, having barely enough to eat for thousands of years to being able to order food from a cuisine of a different area of the world on our smartphone every single day.
We’ve developed modern medicine and technologies such as computers; even laws and social security and a million other things. And at the very core all these innovations have one thing in common that when they are successful at creating value for us, they had to follow the same path starting with that we had to build knowledge (science) of different aspects of the world.
We have to observe, analyze (the deeper the better) and think rationally (how things really are and not what you want to be true) as well as refine this process in order to improve our understanding. You cannot ever build knowledge not following this logic, not applying the scientific method. When asked to justify the scientific method and why he thinks science is the way to find truth evolutionary biologist Prof. Richard Dawkins famously replied: “It works! Planes fly. Cars drive. Computers compute. If you base medicine on science, you cure people. If you base the design of planes on science, they fly. If you base the design of rockets on science, they reach the moon. It works… bitches.”
Connecting the Right Variables in the Right Way
In practice, researchers build knowledge by conducting studies where they look at a so-called dependent variable (e.g. a phenomenon like technology acceptance) and then, from real-world data, find out which factors (independent variables) lead to it and how.
Here’s a simple example:
This is a simple, but crucial thing to understand – for life in general, but also for the rest of this project’s work where the dependent variable is “maximizing progress” or “happiness for all” (the starting point) and the goal is to find the main variables and connections.
When we look at many issues scientifically and understand what leads to what and how things work (at least with high probability) we build what is called a scientific world view or a “high-resolution image” of the world as I like to call it.
How Science Is Like A Compass Showing Us the Direction of Progress and Better Lives
We still need to actually build planes and develop medicine, but science is what points us in the right direction, just like a compass, so we don’t do the wrong things forever. Hence, if we walk the ‘science way’ it is the shortest route to get from where we are now to improving our lives. You could also think of it as a stone that kills a thousand birds, not just two. I tried to visualize this logic in this graphic below (I know my graphic design skills suck, but try to imagine it as a compass):
Therefore, science gives us the direction in which we have to take the first step in order to improve our lives. If we misunderstand the world we are much more unlikely to make our lives worse. You could remove all art, all laws, even all technology and we would be able to re-create it all relatively easily. However, if you removed all science we’d all be sitting naked on rocks in caves just a second later. And to rebuild our knowledge, starting from ignorance, would be the hardest task of all.
The great thing about knowledge is that it is cumulative, i.e. we understand things better and better. In fact, the scientific output has increased exponentially since the 17th century (2). Therefore, as I’ve explained before as well, the potential of science (and technology) to solve our problems has grown exponentially while the degree to which we people unleash that potential has stayed somewhat static.
The scientific, rational approach does not guarantee that we make the world a better place; especially in the short-term the cost of science appears large. Moreover, it’s difficult (it’s easier to just do things without thinking or how you believe it’s best) and sometimes there are disadvantages (b), but it does give us the right direction. In fact, at least in developed nations, we have translated this trend into an exponentially growing economy – thanks to a tiny minority of people like scientists and engineers who’ve done the hard work.
So far I’ve shown that science is where all our progress ultimately comes from, it is the first step in the STEPS framework (article will come soon) for making the world a better place. That means that other factors are also important like ethics or putting our knowledge into action. We can have the most advanced medicine, but for example, if our health care system prevents doctors from treating low-income patients then despite the ability to do good we don’t. However, it is still best to use science and reason as a compass. For instance, modern ethics is based on our detailed understanding of the human condition (of suffering and happiness) and thus any technology or laws benefit us most when they follow sound reasoning.
To summarize so far, science has been the most important ingredient to go from cavemen to building our modern civilization. Evidently, the human brain has not become ‘better’ since we were cavemen. Individually we don’t know a billion times more and we are not a million times more rational. Here lies a trillion-dollar opportunity.
Society – the Flood Gate of Progress
The problem is that society at large is not very science-based. Again, I don’t mean that the average person knows which valve should turn which color in a chemical reaction, but the value we put on knowledge and reason. For starters, people usually don’t research things thoroughly. I wonder for how many minutes a day the average person reads content from trustworthy sources (not just Facebook pages or tabloids). Making matters worse, we mostly just follow our instincts, our emotions – things that happen subconsciously – rather than thinking things through rationally. There’s a long list of mind-blowing cognitive biases of how we disregard facts or where we refuse to change our opinion even if it’s contrary to any evidence.
Your favorite astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has something important to say:
Remember again the compass of science from above. The problem with us not being scientific is that we just walk into all sorts of random directions while the desired destination (better lives for all) is still the same. Some of the worst examples are of anti-vaccine people, climate change deniers or religious fundamentalists, but every single one of us has opinions and beliefs that are simply false, no matter how convinced you are of them. That makes progress painfully slow. If we were all aligned around science more, we would make the world a better place much faster – shooting in the right direction more rather than just hitting the target through trial and error.
To be fair, the world is a really complex place and we’re all humans, not machines, so we cannot be completely rational all the time. On small things in our daily lives this does not matter much, but on big and important issues we can’t afford to be wrong. I argue that ignorance is in one word summarized our biggest problem in the world. Ignorance may be bliss, but only in the short-term. Until your children die of the flu precisely because you’re ignorant.
To have people who don’t believe in climate change or think that vaccines cause autism is an absolute disgrace. They slow us all down: They vote (imbeciles like Trump), they oppose renewable energy and vaccinations etc. And I will not let anybody tell me that we cannot change the world or even create a Utopia in this coming generation, when a double-digit percentage of people walk around being less correct on such important issues than my dog. Yes, not even my dog is against vaccines.
While climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers are extreme cases, we are overall still far too unscientific as a society. Who even knows what the scientific method is? Ask someone on the street. Our media strives on emotion rather than reason, our politicians succeed with simple, short-term promises and people make decisions with their gut. You don’t hear anybody say “oh well, let’s look up a few peer-reviewed papers or articles from good newspapers to understand the issue better and then analyze it rationally before we come to a careful conclusion”. Yet that’s how it should be.
You might think this is completely unrealistic and too difficult, but it’s absolutely not for people who have learned how to do this. Most of the time you literally just have to look up what the scientific consensus on an issue is, i.e. you outsource your own time to thousands of smart people who specialize on that topic. It also just takes a minute to read an article from a credible source like Scientific American that covers a topic. However, because people don’t know how this works they prefer to “think for themselves” or just stick to their opinions – which doesn’t make life easier at all. The reason that people distrust scientists is the same – not understanding how science actually works.
The good news is that this is a problem we can solve: Through Education. It takes practice to really internalize this, to understand how to research and analyze information critically and rationally. Essays at university are one great example. You can’t just write whatever you want to be true, but have to demonstrate that you researched and reasoned critically, or else you fail.
People can learn many, much more complex things, like how to speak languages that have tens of thousands of words and complicated grammar rules, so why not science? It’s the most spectacular failure of politicians and society itself, because it is our responsibility that every single person, on their 18th birthday, is not just literate in terms of their mother tongue, but also scientifically literate.
What you should ask yourself is how close to the truth are the things you believe and base your actions on every single day, how informed are your opinions and how well do you understand the world you live in. How often do you really research things and how well? Do you critically analyze your opinions regularly?
Just imagine what the world would look like if people understood what science is and how it is the most important factor for making their own lives better, as I’ve explained throughout this article. Neuroscientist Sam Harris has a good point on this:
I’m convinced if we fixed this problem, through education, we’d catapult ourselves into a Utopia. How? Solving problems and making improvements ultimately depends on human actions, not just knowledge or thinking. However, as I’ve explained in my article The Innovation Habit behavior (action) stems from attitudes, which in turn are largely based on people’s understanding of, and reasoning on, a given issue.
So that means that we also need the rest of society (and not just the 1% who are researchers) to be people of science – knowledge and reason – because then we can truly unlock trillions of dollars worth of potential to innovate and make all our lives better at a much, much faster rate.
References:
- World Economic Outlook Database, April 2018, International Monetary Fund. Available online at: https://bit.ly/2FsPqKw
- Noorden, V. R. (2014). Global scientific output doubles every nine years. Available online at: http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/05/global-scientific-output-doubles-every-nine-years.html
Footnotes:
a. Of course there are fringe cases like jihadism or the atomic bomb or masochists, but even they still do it because it gives them some sort of utility. The masochists get satisfaction out of pain (for him or her that is value); the jihadist believes he is doing a good thing, so for him it gives him value etc. But generally we can agree on 99%.
b. Science ultimately gave us the nuclear bomb, guns and many other things that hurt us. However, that is the fault of humans, and not science.
Generation Utopia 