Essay:Science and politics
This essay is an original work by Ed Poor. Please comment only on the talk page.
We have a tendency in the United States to assume that because science has made such immense strides in the 20th century, we then must necessarily be using scientific principles in other aspects of life such as economics, sociology and psychology. Nothing could be further from the truth. Politics is as corrupt as it ever was.
Although American science and engineering have created a comfortable living environment with advanced technology, most people are still not applying logic and mathematics to their daily lives. "When I need a mathematician, I can hire one," said Edison, and US taxpayers routinely hire someone to prepare (or at least check) their tax returns. A lot of people don't even file, like young people in their first job; and how many people actually balance their checking account every month?
Our periodicals, broadcasts and websites are chock full of one-sided arguments, which is exactly the sort of thing which modern science was supposed to guard against. We have other people check our tax returns. Why don't we have other people check our political arguments?
When we want to get the right answer, we ask other people for help. When getting the wrong answer will result in a financial loss, we make sure someone who is knowledgeable and experienced checks our work for errors. We don't want to overpay our taxes or be penalized by the IRS.
But many of us don't want to get the right answer, or we know it already but want to conceal it from others. A major accounting firm was drived out of business recently when it was discovered that it had colluded with a large corporation to conceal financial irregularities. It had certified that everything was okay, when it knew that it wasn't. It got caught lying.
What does science do about this? The fundamental principle of science is that a theory is discarded is always considered disproved when the predictions it makes are contradicted by observations. When a hypothesis says one thing, and the data say another, we keep the data and throw out the hypothesis. "Back to the drawing board" is the motto.
Scientists who really want to know the truth about anything will always submit their findings to the scrutiny of other scientists. "Please find a flaw in my work, if there is one," they say. Because scientists are all aware that wishful thinking can lead to errors, they hope that other scientists will review their calculations ore even run the same experiments. If five different independent groups of scientists run the same experiment and get the same results, that's a real confidence booster. But if even one experiment gets the "wrong" results, a sincere scientist sits up and takes notice.
Einstein is credited with saying that he didn't worry if 400 other scientists refused to accept his new theory of physics, because it only takes one scientist to prove him wrong.
We all need to have the same humility.
