Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you're in deep trouble. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you.
You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. There is, of course, much data to support you.
But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all.
Some ideas are better than others. The machinery for distinguishing them is an essential tool in dealing with the world and especially in dealing with the future. And it is precisely the mix of these two modes of thought that is central to the success of science. Really good scientists do both. On their own, talking to themselves, they churn up huge numbers of new ideas and criticize them ruthlessly. Most of the ideas never make it to the outside world.
Only the ideas that pass through rigorous self-filtration make it out and are criticized by the rest of the scientific community. It sometimes happens that ideas that are accepted by everybody turn out to be wrong, or at least partially wrong, or at least superseded by ideas of greater generality. And, while there are of course some personal losses -- emotional bonds to the idea that you yourself played a role inventing -- nevertheless the collective ethic is that every time such an idea is overthrown and replaced by something better the enterprise of science has benefited.
In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. It's very rare that a senator, say, replies, "That's a good argument. I will now change by political affiliation.
In the history of science there is an instructive procession for major intellectual battles that turn out, all of them, to be about how central human beings are. We could call them battles about the anti-Copernican conceit. Here are some of the issues: We are the center of the Universe.
All the planets and the stars and the Sun and the Moon go around us. Boy, must we be something really special. That was the prevailing belief -- Aristarchus aside -- until the time of. A lot of people liked it because it gave them a personally unwarranted central position in the Universe. The mere fact that you were on Earth made you privileged. That felt good. Then along came the evidence that Earth was just a planet and that those other bright moving points of light were planets too.
Even depressing. Better when we were central and unique. But at least our Sun is at the center of the Universe. No, those other stars, they're suns too, and what's more we're out in the galactic boondocks. We are nowhere near the center of the Galaxy. Very depressing. Well, at least the Milky Way galaxy is at the center of the Universe. Then a little more progress in science.
We find there isn't any such thing as the center of the Universe. What's more there are a hundred billion other galaxies.
Nothing special about this one. Deep gloom. Well, at least we humans, we are the pinnacle of creation. We're separate. All those other creatures, plants and animals, they're lower. We're higher. We have no connection with them. Every living thing has been created separately.
Then along comes Darwin. We find an evolutionary continuum. We're closely connected to the other beasts and vegetables. What's more, the closest biological relatives to us are chimpanzees. Those are our close relatives -- those guys? It's an embarrassment. Did you ever go to the zoo and watch them? Do you know what they do? Imagine in Victorian England, when Darwin produced this insight, what an awkward truth it was. There are other important examples -- privileged reference frames in physics and the unconscious mind in psychology -- that I'll pass over.
I maintain that in the tradition of this long set of debates -- very one of which was won by the Copernicans, by the guys who say there is not much special about us -- there was a deep emotional undercurrent in the. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the analysis of possible animal "language" strike at one of the last remaining pre-Copernican belief systems:. At least we are the most intelligent creatures in the whole Universe.
If there are no other smart guys elsewhere, even if we are connected to chimpanzees, even if we are in the boondocks of a vast and awesome universe, at least there is still something special about us.
But the moment we find extraterrestrial intelligence that last bit of conceit is gone. I think some of the resistance to the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence is due to the anti-Copernican conceit. Likewise, without taking sides in the debate on whether other animals -- higher primates, especially great apes -- are intelligent or have language, that's clearly, on an emotional level, the same issue.
If we define humans as creatures who have language and no one else has language, at least we are unique in that regard. But if it turns out that all those dirty, repugnant, laughable chimpanzees can also, with Ameslan or otherwise, communicate ideas, then what is left that is special about us?
Propelling emotional predispositions on these issues are present, often unconsciously, in scientific debates. It is important to realize that scientific debates, just like pseudoscientific debates, can be awash with emotion, for these among many different reasons. Now, let's take a closer look at the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence. How is this different from pseudoscience?
Let me give a couple of real cases. In the early sixties, the Soviets held a press conference in Moscow in which they announced that a distant radio source, called CTA, was varying sinusoidally, like a sine wave, with a period of about days. Why did they call a press conference to announce that a distant radio source was varying? Because they thought it was an extraterrestrial civilization of immense powers. That is worth calling a press conference for.
This was before even the word "quasar" existed. Today we know that CTA is a quasar. We don't know very well what quasars are: and there is more than one mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, few seriously consider that a quasar, like CTA, is some galaxygirdling extraterrestrial civilization, because there are a number of alternative explanations of their properties that are more or less consistent with the physical laws we know without invoking alien life. The extraterrestrial hypothesis is a hypothesis of last resort.
Only if everything else fails do you reach for it. Second example: British scientists in found a nearby bright radio source that is fluctuating on a much shorter time scale, with a period constant to ten significant figures.
What was it? Their first thought was that it was something like a message being sent to us, or an interstellar navigational beacon for spacecraft that fly the spaces between the stars. However they were wiser than the Soviets , they did not call a press conference, and it soon became clear that what we had here was what is now called a "pulsar. Well, what's a pulsar? A pulsar is a star shrunk to the size of a city, held up as no other stars are, not by gas pressure, not by electron degeneracy, but by nuclear forces.
It is in a certain sense an atomic nucleus the size of Pasadena. Now that, I maintain, is an idea at least as bizarre as an interstellar navigational beacon. The answer to what a pulsar is has to be something mighty strange. It isn't an extraterrestrial civilization, it's something else: but a something else that opens our eyes and our minds and indicates possibilities in nature that we had never guessed at.
Then there is the question of false positives. They think for a moment that they have picked up a genuine signal. In some cases we have not the foggiest idea what it was; the signals did not repeat. The next night you turn the same telescope to the same spot in the sky with the same modulation and the same frequency and band pass everything else the same, and.
You don't publish that data. It may be a malfunction in the detection system. It may be a military AWACS plane flying by and broadcasting on frequency channels that are supposed to be reserved for radio astronomy. It may be a diathermy machine down the street. There are many possibilities. You don't immediately declare that you have found extraterrestrial intelligence because you find an anomalous signal.
And if it were repeated, would you then announce? You would not. Maybe it's a hoax. Maybe it is something you haven't been smart enough to figure out that is happening to your system. Instead, you would then call scientists at a bunch of other radio telescopes and say that at this particular spot in the sky, at this frequency and bandpass and modulation and all the rest, you seem to be getting something funny. Could they please look at it and see if they got something similar?
And only if several independent observers get the same kind of information from the same spot in the sky do you think you have something. Even then you don't know that the something is extraterrestrial intelligence, but at least you could determine that it's not something on Earth.
And that it's also not something in Earth orbit; it's further away than that. That's the first sequence of events that would be required to be sure that you actually had a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization. Now notice that there is a certain discipline involved. Skepticism imposes a burden. You can't just go off shouting "little green men," because you are going to look mighty silly, as the Soviets did with CTA, when it turns out to be something quite different.
A special caution is necessary when the stakes are as high as here. We are not obliged to make up our minds before the evidence is in. It's okay not to be sure. I'm often asked the question, "Do you think there is extraterrestrial intelligence? And then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it. And then I'm asked, "Yeah, but what do you really think? Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.
Sixty-five million people read Parade. In the article I gave a long list of things that I said were "demonstrated or presumptive baloney' -- thirty or forty items. Advocates of all those positions were uniformly offended, so I got lots of letters. I also gave a set of very elementary prescriptions about how to think about baloney -- arguments from authority don't work, every step in the chain of evidence has to be valid, and so on.
Lots of people wrote back, saying, "You're absolutely right on the generalities; unfortunately that doesn't apply to my particular doctrine. He concluded, "I am as sure of this as of anything in my experience. There is no conscious life anywhere else in the Universe. Mankind thus returns to its rightful position as center of the Universe. Most notably I have ignored the evidence for an Earth that is six thousand years old. Well, I haven't ignored it; I considered the purported evidence and then rejected it.
There is a difference, and this is a difference, we might say, between prejudice and postjudice. Prejudice is making a judgment before you have looked at the facts.
Postjudice is making a judgment afterwards. Prejudice is terrible, in the sense that you commit injustices and you make serious mistakes. Postjudice is not terrible. You can't be perfect of course; you may make mistakes also.
But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have examined the evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged.
I believe that part of what propels science is the thirst for wonder. It's a very powerful emotion. All children feel it. In a first grade classroom everybody feels it; in a twelfth grade classroom almost nobody feels it, or at least acknowledges it. Something happens between first and. Not only do the schools and the media not teach much skepticism, there is also little encouragement of this stirring sense of wonder.
Science and pseudoscience both arouse that feeling. Poor popularizations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience. If science were explained to the average person in a way that is accessible and exciting, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But there is a kind of Gresham's Law by which in popular culture the bad science drives out the good.
And for this I think we have to blame, first, the scientific community ourselves for not doing a better job of popularizing science, and second, the media, which are in this respect almost uniformly dreadful. Every newspaper in America has a daily astrology column. How many have even a weekly astronomy column? And I believe it is also the fault of the educational system. We do not teach how to think.
This is a very serious failure that may even, in a world rigged with 60, nuclear weapons, compromise the human future.
I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true. It also gives the example of Ramtha, who was only thinking to find out petroleum and mineral resources. She believes that she met a years old man.
Finally, the writer says, we must have skeptical thinking in that type of event. This essay emphasized scientific experiments to reach fact conclusion. It also says, full skepticism is not good as well as we do not have to accept anything without any evidence.
It also taught, only that thing can be accepted, which can be proved as it is right. Although the essay presents the actual life of us humans, that we all do and believe in our lives. However, my some unsatisfied statements with this text are:. But after reading this text I knew that blind beliefs, full open-mindedness are not effective.
So I have decided from today to not believing in silly things without any pieces of evidence. Your email address will not be published.
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