Science

One of the problems with interacting with others is dealing with a fundamental lack of common ground. For example, when your two view points on a topic of discussion are so far apart that there is no place to plant a flag and say "Ok, this is our mutually agreed and understood starting point". I find that these are always deeply painful discussions, which sadly are usually quite difficult to get out of. This can be pretty depressing, as they also seem quite easy to see coming.

If you are a musician, one such conversation may start "I don't see what all the fuss about jazz is, I mean, it's just picking a series of notes from your scales isn't it?" Obviously, when someone says something like this as an opener, you can just let it slide, but when they wait until half way through a discussion, you can't really just nod and smile.

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) has pretty much made a living from these kind of fundamentally opposed understandings in engineering. I once had a supervisor say to me "I don't understand why this is taking so long, if it's a computing problem, then the answer must be either zero or one. Just try them both and use whichever works." I still wonder if they were actually pretty funny and I just didn't get them.

It is perfectly possible for two people to view the same issue very differently and for both to have sensible views. Politics is full of such scenarios, however these are not the issues that concern this post.

For me, these interactions often start part way through a discussion with the assertion "well, 'Science' doesn't know everything". This statement tells me a number of things:

• My assertion that I am right in this instance has been extrapolated to an assertion that I am right about everything.
• The discussion has moved to an emotional phase
• There is evidently a deep misunderstanding about science.
• If I haven't been able to explain my point up until now, there's no chance of me doing so by continuing.

Science doesn't know everything

Science doesn't know anything... it's not an entity in its own right. There are scientists, who certainly don't know everything and as far as I am aware, they don't claim to. In fact, if ever there was a group of people who are crushingly aware of what they don't know, it's scientists. Scientists are a group of people who attempt to acquire knowledge in a systematic manner. That systematic manner is called the scientific method.

The scientific method

The scientific method is the best method we have for acquiring knowledge. Its past victories include penicillin, television, brain surgery, space travel and the atomic bomb. It is of course flawed as are the people who implement it, however it still remains, to date, our best bet for determining the validity of a claim. So, when Brian Cox appears on tele and tells you that the sun is a giant nuclear furnace, he isn't handing you down a decree directly from science itself. In much the same way, when I say "there's no evidence to show that homeopathy works any better than sugar pills and no obvious method through which it could have the effect you are stating" I am not saying that I know definitively that homeopathy is a load of crap. I am saying that there is no evidence at all to suggest that it does work and thus, it would be foolish of me to believe it did.

I am not saying that it is impossible that I have won £2,000,000 on the Spanish email lottery; it's just that it would be foolish of me to believe something without real, compelling evidence.

It's the same with homeopathy. I would gladly take homeopathic remedies, if someone could give me compelling evidence to show that they worked. It's not enough for me to hear that a friend's aunt took this potion and she swears by it, I want to see it work in a standard and repeatable manner.

Being right for the right reason

It is also important to be right for the right reasons. Being right for the wrong reasons are just luck and that is a poor strategy for future success. For example, lets say you have 2 boxes, one has £100 in and the other is empty. You can choose one box and keep its contents. The only information you have is that the box on the left is twice as likely to contain money as the the box on the right.

There are four possible outcomes depending on your choice and the location of the money:

	Left box chosen	Right box chosen
Money present	You are lucky and smart	You are lucky and an idiot
Money not present	You are unlucky and smart	You are unlucky and an idiot

My point here is that the result depends on how lucky and how smart you are. However, you can only affect how smart you are.