Excerpt: Before we had a method for examining reality, the truth was a slippery fish, which is why your ancestors were so dumb. So dumb, in fact, that for a very long time people got smarter in a slow, meandering, and unreliable sort of way until human beings finally invented and adopted a tool with which to dig their way out of the giant hole of stupid into which they kept falling. The hole here is a metaphor for self-delusion. Your great-great-great-grandparents didn’t really keep falling into giant holes, at least not in numbers large enough to justify a book on the topic. The tool here is also a metaphor. I’m talking about the scientific method. Your ancestors invented the scientific method because the common belief fallacy renders your default strategies for making sense of the world generally awful and prone to error. Why do bees like flowers? What causes snow? Where do babies come from? Every explanation in every tribe, city, and nation was as good as the next, even if it was completely made up. Even worse, once an explanation was woven into a culture, it would often become the official explanation for many lifetimes. “What is thunder?” a child might have asked. “Oh, that’s the giant snow crab in the sky falling off his bed,” a shaman would have explained, and that would have been good enough for everyone until they all had their own kids and eventually died of dysentery. That hamster wheel of limited knowledge kept spinning until the scientific method caught on. READ HERE: salon/2013/08/04/all_hail_the_scientific_method/
Posted on: Mon, 05 Aug 2013 15:37:16 +0000
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