Being comfortable with uncertainty, knowing the limits of what science can tell us and understanding the worth of failure are all valuable tools that would improve people’s lives, according to some of the world’s leading thinkers.
The ideas were submitted as part of an annual exercise by the Web magazine Edge, which invites scientists, philosophers and artists to opine on a major question of the moment. This year it was: “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?”
Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of Aix-Marseille, emphasized the uselessness of certainty. He said that the idea of something being “scientifically proven” was practically an oxymoron.
“A good scientist is never ‘certain’ ... The good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better elements of evidence or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use, but is in fact damaging, if we value reliability,” Rovelli said.
The physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University agreed.
“In the public parlance, uncertainty is a bad thing, implying a lack of rigor and predictability. The fact that global warming estimates are uncertain, for example, has been used by many to argue against any action at the present time,” he said. “In fact, however, uncertainty is a central component of what makes science successful.
Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Bits and Atoms wants everyone to know that “truth” is just a model.
“The most common misunderstanding about science is that scientists seek and find truth. They don’t — they make and test models,” he said. “Building models is very different from proclaiming truths. It’s a never-ending process of discovery and refinement, not a war to win or destination to reach.”
The writer and Web commentator Clay Shirky suggested that people should think more carefully about how they see the world. His suggestion was to consider the Pareto principle or the law of the vital few: a pattern whereby the top 1 percent of the population control 35 percent of the wealth or, on Twitter, the top 2 percent of users send 60 percent of the messages. Sometimes known as the “80/20 rule,” the Pareto principle means that the average is far from the middle.
It is applicable to many complex systems, “and yet, despite a century of scientific familiarity, samples drawn from Pareto distributions are routinely presented to the public as anomalies, which prevents us from thinking clearly about the world,” Shirky said.
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