Science
Formalized modesty; a methodology that has emerged once in human history as a means to generate reliable models that are subject to innovation over time.
A word used most often by people who do not know what it is or how it is done.
The only reliable strategy that can be employed in the pursuit of progress with a chance of avoiding total disaster. This of course means that if you claim to be progressive, you should get used to being wrong more often than not. If you believe yourself to be on the right side of broad public issues more often than not, then you are likely confused about what progress looks like.
The scientific method is uniquely positioned to serve as a bulwark against human shortcomings, and even then, it is rarely completely effective in this regard. If done properly, it is an invalidating mechanism, a deliberate attempt to seek and destroy our assumptions and bias. The necessity and importance of this cannot be underestimated. No other human tendency or model can even coherently pretend to perform this function. This means that if fields of scientific research are confused about their purpose, or if they have been captured by perverse incentives, then we are headed for catastrophe.
Even a minor examination of human predispositions paints a vibrant landscape of self-serving conclusions that remain unified beneath a banner of confounding limitations. This does not mean that the scientific method is anti-human, rather, that it is a tool we can employ to verify if our inclinations generate predictable and reliable outcomes. Stated another way: it increases the resolution of our pictures.
Because it is a tool, how it is employed, and to what end, will largely be determined by the hand that wields it. Even when starting from a perceivably noble position, it is the clumsy hand of humanity that shapes unintended consequences with such a degree of frequency that many remain rightfully concerned about the whole endeavour. When modesty is absent from the endeavour, it becomes poor quality science at best; at worst, an utterly corrupt waste of human capital and well-being.
The tempering agent for research will therefore necessarily include sharing every detail of your work with the public so it may be scrutinized. Without both persistent and ongoing formal and informal peer review, only a FOOL would consider the results of an experiment worthy of application in everyday life. Despite any peer preview, all research has the potential to garner interest, but due obfuscating human predispositions, such as confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, we need to retain an adequate amount of doubt to avoid becoming snared by maladaptive proclivities.
Without doubt, modesty is impossible. Therefore, any endeavour absent doubt should never be confused with the scientific method, these imitation approaches are referred to as THE SCIENCE.
Science cannot be settled by definition, and if you think it can, you do not understand it.
See: MODEST
Posted: 2 Jan 2023
