5.) Conservative Bias of Science (My Critique of Occam’s Razor)
By MARTIN REZNY
Missed the first part of this series about scientism? Go back.
Probably the simplest failing of science is that when you base your entire methodology on doubt, you will always err on the side of something dramatic or radical not being true. While that’s only temporarily embarrassing in areas where proof can foreseeably be provided, it becomes a problem in fields where proof is hard to come by. Remember, science has an immaculate authority and any conclusion it backs will be widely believed and lived by.
To demonstrate a clear cut example of how it happens, let me paraphrase the famous astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Every time this issue comes up, he always says that he’s no longer just going to believe that there’s only one of something in the universe, including the universe itself. We thought the Earth is essentially everything, then the solar system, then the galaxy, and then the universe. Now, multiverse is a real possibility. Conservatism has failed so far, consistently.
And yet, being a conservative is something like the prime directive in science, it even has a name, Occam’s razor — entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. What it means is that statistically, the least outlandish explanation will most often be true, but if you assume it all the time, you only make sure you’ll be wrong in all of the cases that you find hard to believe. Sometimes, you just don’t buy you should wash your hands, sometimes it’s much bigger than that, like whole continents moving.
Some grave problems lead to a substantially decreased damage the quicker you act, and one such problem is climate change. The scientific bias to wait for an overwhelming proof and to underestimate the severity of projections may achieve its own priority of not making an embarrassing mistake, but it’s not helpful in addressing the situation. Sometimes, an irrational overraction is a better strategy, and when global survival is at stake, rationality may kill us all.
But it will all be good, because we died knowing for sure what killed us. As even evolutionary biologists or psychologists like Richard Dawkins admit, what they consider to be irrational impulses must have evolved through natural selection and can have a helpful purpose, like believing in agency behind natural dangers, though in the case of religious belief, Dawkins in particular would maintain that what he doesn’t like must be just useless.
As a famous statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains in The Black Swan, the best strategy isn’t betting everything on what seems to be likely to succeed, nor is it to bet everything on something unlikely. It’s to put majority of what you have on the conservative thing, while simultaneously distributing the rest among multiple unlikely things with a potential for high reward. Many scientists joke about theologians being “experts on the unknowable”, but it becomes less funny when you realize that unknown unknowns exist.
There are real truths that transcend our knowledge, and where scientists wish to see a shrinking “god of the gaps”, others see that the more we know, the better we know how little we know. In a very recent development in astrophysics, what we believed to be all that there is only a few decades ago is now only 5% of all that there is. And we have no idea what the remaining 95% are, or, and that’s not often noted, how much more there really is.
Wanna read the next one about the experimenter effect? Click away.
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