August 9, 2024

Think like a scientist

I have encountered this exhortation several times recently. Once in a conversation with a friend, who told me that he wanted to "think like a scientist" in order to form his beliefs and views. Even more recently while reading the book "Think Again" by Adam Grant who encourages his readers many times to "think like a scientist.

But what does this really mean? A person might compare this to the phrase "Support our Troops!" which Noam Chomsky once declared is empty and meaningless. How do scientists really think? It is popular to label an idea or product as "scientific" without providing any kind of basis for such a claim. This was popular in patent medicine ads and quack cure propoganda, though hopefully these sorts of claims are now outlawed. In any case, claiming science as your ally is a powerful tactic whether or not it is justified and is a mathod still in common use.

Jumping ahead of myself briefly, I would argue that rather than use this at best vague label "think like a scientist", it would be better to describe the sort of thinking that we are promoting. A number of attributes might be suggested immediately:

Real scientists

Here is a quote by physicist Max Planck --
"A new scientific truth does not triump by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die."
Realistic or cynical? This is from page 247 of Adam Grants book "Think Again". Curiously, Grant goes on in almost the next paragraph to say he "is making the case for thinking like a scientist".

Another story. From a book "The First American" by C. W. Ceram. On page 253 he mentions an Ales Hrdlicka of the Bureau of Ethnology in Washington saying:

Every young anthropologist, geologist, or paleontologist of the period would have been imperiling his career if he opposed this dictator in the slightest way.
This is the nature of things and the dark side of peer review. You won't get published, at least not in the prominent journals, if you are saying things that are not in line with the present status quo.

We could talk about "string theory" in Physics. Claims are made that if you aren't doing string theory, you have no career, you will not get published, you will not get tenure. They say this is why Physics has stagnated, making no significant discoveries in at least 50 years.

Countless other incidents of the same sort can be cited. Continental Drift was championed by a Meteorologist who was scorned and criticized by the Geological mainstream

So what is the point of bringing up these sorts of things? To underscore the fact that scientists are human beings. They can be (and are!) as political and biased as any other human being in any context you might name.

Psychology plays a huge part in these realities. Humans a tribal beings, championing race, sports teams, political parties, and scientific ideas with equal vigor and equal lack of basis. You can read about confirmation bias and desirability bias and if you think that scientists are immune, think again. Mr. Spock, the logical vulcan, exists only as a character in a television series.

Paradigm Shifts

The book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn (1962) went to some length to demonstrate that science does not progress in the ways that most people might think or hope. Science plugs along, all the while accumulating (and trying to ignore) facts that it cannot explain until a revolution forces it to begin looking at things in a new way. Kuhn calls this a paradigm shift.

What exactly is Science?

This really is the heart of the issue, and few if any, even among practicing scientists have a good definition. I asked one prominent scientist (a Regents professor at the University of Arizona) for his definition and he responded with "a search for truth". On one hand this response is of great value, but on the other it fails miserably. You might ask the fictional buddha meditating in a mountain cave what he was doing and he would tell you that he was "searching for truth". Perhaps most philosophers would say the same, and they are most definitely not "doing science".

The definition I have tried to use is that science is defined by the scientific method: form a hypothesis, design and perform an experiment, then either prove or disprove the hypothesis. This has merit for certain sorts of science (primarily chemistry and physics), but can in no way be applied to much of biology or geology. As for the social sciences, and so called sciences like "computer science", all bets are off.

Am I attacking science here? By no means. I am simply trying to promote just the sort of "scientific thinking" about science itself that started this discussion in the first place. And yes, the previous sentence ensnares us into a sort of circular meta-thinking -- but as long as we recognize that we are not in deep trouble. Let's think like scientists as we think about science.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Money pages / [email protected]