Some Thoughts Arising From Science and Learning.
It dawned upon me today that the importance of research and the scientific method serves not as a tool for progress, but rather takes on a more humbling role of serving the skeptical human mind. Thinking back, major advancements cumulating to the modern anthropoid are not so much built upon the rock solid foundation of science than the indomitable spirit of trial and error, or even from the mere stroke of luck. A provocative statement maybe, but not unfounded.
Edison didn’t just ‘find 100 more ways not to light a light bulb’, nor was it the academic diligence of Fleming that gave us Penicillin. Common ‘science’, as we have been brought up with through the doldrums of national education is often underrepresented as ‘Physics, Chemistry and/or Biology’. More specifically, it would be more apt that the subjects be seen as proponents of science, ambassadors of empiricism that made them eponymous with their modus operandi.
Of course, that is not to take away the credit of what science has to offer us. Instead of blind men touching elephants in the dark, we have systematic framework. Instead of Brownian guesswork, we have systematic trial and error. Brute force method decryption. As a platform, scientific empiricism has allowed investigations of nature universal proceedings that served as the hallmarks of quality, robust claims of phenomena. Like a humble servant, its reliability in traditional sciences compel scientists to honour it the way they know how – by making it the unanimous namesake for all variants of work that employ its methodology. Thus chemistry became a science, but not alchemy, and psychology became a social science, but not phrenology.
However, through the wheels of evolution and constant refinement of techniques, modern ‘science’, more often than not, is more so due to its often unmentioned cousin: statistics. Numbers don’t lie; to have an experiment replicated hundreds of time is insignificant if the equations say that it is not replicable. Just like how a trickster manages to pluck flowers out of thin air, doesn’t necessary mean that the Garden of Eden exists in the sky. In this sense, science is like Pluto (the planet no more) – a homage to ideas (and methods) of a distant past, sustained only in loving memory. (Of course, unlike Pluto, should it be struck off the list altogether, children’s report cards would now read ‘Scientific Investigations of Natural Phenomena Reinforced By the methodology of Statistics’ instead of the succinct S-word, which is simply not parsimonious, and would most probably not leave much space for the scoring of marks.)
Which brings me back to my motion of discourse. For all its worth, tools do not drive progress. No doubt, they make life easier, but as exemplified from the Industrial Revolution, work efficiency has improved production, but the efforts saved are now expected to be channeled elsewhere. People are still working the same number of hours as the pre 1850s, if not more, thanks to this so-called ‘revolution in technology’. In the ever changing dynamics of society, interaction factors reign.
In modern language, efficiency triumphs over efficacy. The establishments of science, while robust suffer greatly from the effects of Newton’s laws. Inertia in developments carries researches on, while impact of extraneous factors drive on its momentum. In fact, science as a body is its own lock, stock and barrel, the erosion of epistemology being a good example. Never before, has the knowledge of learning been more scaffolded by multiple procreations of definitions and redefinitions – with the question of its redundancy begging the question. Not forgetting the third law, momentous idea(l)s would be viewed with equally vehement repression, regardless of the opacity of resistence.
So what gives the impressed force? Not science, for that is only its tour de force. The currents of progress leave no stone unturned, and science is but one of its channels of memes generally used to shut critics up. As the media finds new ways to distract and detract the detractors with various strategies - information desensitization and overload being the more salient methods that come to mind - even that is slowly changing. While the stoicism of science is what gives it strength and impartiality, it is precisely so that disconnects it from the mainstream and hence dangerously close to running itself obsolete.
Labels: FFT (Food for thought)
