Often times, when a person who defends a holistic view of the world or who criticizes that science is shortsighted, squared off and refractory to accept pseudosciences, the criticism is often confused: the scientist is attacked instead of the science .
Science is a tool for exploration and verification of facts, and depending on the scientist it will manifest to a greater or lesser degree the aforementioned features. In fact, science cannot be short-sighted or refractory to change or new visions, because that is precisely how it progresses, that is, that is exactly how science is done, and not otherwise.
People who do not understand science like that, are not scientists, nor are they skeptics, who define themselves as people who distrust everything that has not yet been proven. Science is very careful when it comes to accepting a new piece of information, but it only progresses by accepting the new .
Science is very careful when it comes to accepting a new piece of information, but it only progresses by accepting the new
For example, it is estimated that 5,000 specialized medical journals are published every month, and so far some 15,000,000 medical articles have been printed. All this volume is only produced in the field of medicine. Many of these articles contain conflicting conclusions and statements . In order to separate the wheat from the chaff, despite the fact that all these articles have already been screened by various systems, such as peer review, articles are written that summarize other published articles, meta-analyzes, systematic reviews, etc.
Faced with this, it does not give me the impression that everything is chiseled in marble when I observe the functioning of science. In fact, science does not exist if it is not through this perpetual movement of refutation, sieve, return to refutation, sieve, and so on ad infinitum. Scientists keep an eye on each other because one way to gain prestige, in addition to publishing new discoveries, is also to uncover the mistakes of colleagues .
Even so, although the theoretical procedure is immaculate, on a practical level it suffers from many errors and burdens, as experts such as Ben Goldacre in Mala Farma report well . In other words, scientists sometimes fail; science, on the contrary, as a method is suitable. Our efforts should be aimed at improving these protocols so that scientific research works faster and more efficiently.
This is how science works. Questioning the behavior of certain people, whether they are scientists, skeptics or pseudoscientists, is not questioning science, but the weaknesses of the human being. Science was born precisely to protect cumulative knowledge from petty human weaknesses. Until the birth of modern science, knowledge was based on opinions, intuitions, circular discussions, intellectual fashions, Platonic ideas. Science was born to put order to all that mess of badly twisted knowledge, and began to systematize a method to eliminate all the knowledge that did not demonstrate, beyond the idiosyncrasy of its lighter, that they were true. And this also involved explaining how they were known to be true .
What science tries is to demonstrate that there is evidence that is universal, regardless of how the human being "perceives" it. Science goes beyond the senses of the human being. It does not matter how a person defines the color red: science has a unambiguous and universal definition, as well as pragmatics.
Science is more than just a laboratory technique. It is also a way of thinking, of approaching a problem.
Science is more than just a laboratory technique. It is also a way of thinking, of approaching a problem . Science is a system to overcome the traps of logic and the natural errors of our brain when interpreting reality. Science is, above all, a kind of implacable judge, a perpetual check so that an idea that is too subjective or contaminated with dogmatism never remains anchored in an intellectual judgment. Science is, therefore, an extramental tool, the most objective tool conceived by the human being in order to know how reality works. At least step by step, getting a little closer to her.
I insist, you, me, scientists, even the most important genius on the planet, is fallible. But science is the least fallible epistemological tool known . The one that has provided us with a leap of knowledge in a few centuries that multiplies by a thousand all the knowledge obtained since the beginning of time.
So important is science (not scientists) that great progress is made not by great individuals, but by groups of people who collaborate with each other , and even more so: ecosystems where ideas circulate freely, and are subject to scrutiny by scientists. others through strong revision controls. That is why many inventions, for example, occur in various places on the planet almost simultaneously. And it is also the reason that if any scientific genius, when he is enlightening some great idea, he is generally almost on par with other scientists, and often they must rush to register them to be authors of the same.
And precisely the ecosystems where the best ideas arise are those that use the protocols that science uses to differentiate interesting hypotheses that perhaps, after having passed all the controls, will acquire the rank of theory … of gigantic and very elaborate nonsense and nonsense of the enlightened in turn, they always believe they know more than the rest of humanity.