Everything's Better with Bacon
Science gets a bad rap in many circles these days.
I spend a lot of time wondering exactly why that is. Most disconcerting is the trend of anti-science sentiment that pervades American culture. My brother's wife is a Nurse Practitioner who is endlessly frustrated by the anti-vaxxer movement and the danger it poses to health in the United States. She tends to get annoyed with me when I take the conversation to a meta place. As she spouts statistics about how effective vaccines are and how illogical it is not to get them, I tend to surface the question: "Why do people want to believe this?"
It's not that I think her ideas or statistics are incorrect. It's just that she's not seeking to understand the reason people disagree with her, and until you do that, you'll have little influence over the changing their minds. Anti-science sentiment is, for one reason or another, a fit memetic complex. As human beings, we not only have the ability to inadvertently pass along pathogens like the coronavirus, but the ability to consciously choose what ideas we pass along to infect our fellow human creatures. Why do anti-science ideas have such an easy time reproducing in some large oceans of human brains?
For those who are scientists, and who work in the fields, I can appreciate becoming jaded. The company I work at is full of scientists. I had a conversation with one of them a couple of years ago in which she conceded that, prior to joining our company, she had spent 7 years in a lab working on one very specific problem in oncology, in service of earning a PhD. It was a problem that, if she had solved, would have possibly saved lots of human lives. She said that spending all that time on one problem was incredibly boring, just years toiling away in a lab, and she still didn't manage to solve the problem. She lamented that it all felt like time wasted to her.
That some human beings devote themselves to these kinds of noble pursuits, that they choose to fight and struggle against problems for years, even if there is little hope of succeeding, in the hopes that they can improve the quality of all human lives, that is what is precious to me.
Despite my reverence for this, it's not a lifestyle I would soon adopt for myself. Science is extremely hard, extremely tedious work. And as a scientist, you're more than likely going to be spending a great deal of your time chasing after the financial backing required in order to make progress in your field. We see the best minds of our generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, trying to get enough grant money to keep their pursuits afloat.
I have an uncle who was a scientist in a former life, and who now makes sense of his day-to-day life with the practices of organized religion. He once shared with me that he found no happiness in doing science, since the people doing it seemed like dullards striving for a difficult, uncertain future while missing out on the beauty of the present moment. I disagree with his belief that the solution to this is to find solace in credulity, but he has a point. And I'm not sure what the solution is.
If I have a patron saint, it would be Francis Bacon. There are several philosophers of the Enlightenment that I revere for their ideas and what they contributed to humanity, but Bacon stands out as being one of the greats. Like many of the early Enlightenment, he was writing in the wake of the Reformation, and was in the process of witnessing Christendom fracture, go to war with itself, and schism into discords that were causing civil, social, and political unrest that was causing great harm to society and benefiting absolutely no one.
Amidst all this, he was a voice in the wilderness that insisted that the process of scientific inquiry, the seeking of human beings to understand cause and effect in the natural world by means of an experimental method, of trial and error, offered humankind the best chance at escaping the darkness. He launched a full frontal philosophical assault on the entrenched ideas of Plato and Aristotle, which attributed events in the world to the will of the gods, or many other possible teleological reasons. His maxim of "knowledge is power" would probably manifest itself in today's mass media culture in the form of NBC's "The More You Know" series of public service initiatives.
In hindsight, Bacon's prostration before the potential of science is quite prescient, and it's difficult to argue that he was incorrect. The prosperity and quality of life we now enjoy cannot be attributed to the workings of any faith-based belief system; instead the credit must go to the generation and testing of new ideas against reality, in the concession of ultimate ignorance and the seeking to overcome with understanding.
Science has never been easy, because the struggle against anti-science sentiment, or the misdirective sleights of hand that nature performs for us, there was almost certainly more low-hanging fruit to discover in science a hundred years ago than there is today. There is unlikely to be another Einstein or Darwin, humans who planted a flag that established a new center around which new bodies of knowledge could expand. The frontiers of ignorance are a growing surface area, but those surfaces are now far on the fringes in lonely niche corners that don't hold appeal for a lot of people to dedicate their lives to. The days of complete revolutions in scientific thinking are not over, but it's hard to imagine where one might happen now, and it seems as though they're unlikely to cause as big of a sea change as those in the past few hundred years have. Science is now advanced slowly, with deliberate and difficult effort, a game of inches.
What I think might be lacking is not the investigations of science, but the application of what science has uncovered so far to the betterment of human life. Maybe it's hard to determine how some esoteric function of mRNA in human cells contributes to cancer, and to figure out how to solve the problem. But I think there are reams of scientific discoveries that are sitting around, largely unused, and the greatest minds don't need to build on them, but to figure out how they can be put to the best use in our world.
The achievements of many mathematicians and scientists do not yield to practical applications in the lifetime of the human who discovers them, but happen only posthumously. This is the inheritance that may bear the most fruit for humanity: the mass of scientific knowledge uncovered thus far with which we're doing nothing more than sitting on. It is technology that must be developed and deployed, with a scientific understanding, if we are to keep making progress.
I spend a lot of time wondering exactly why that is. Most disconcerting is the trend of anti-science sentiment that pervades American culture. My brother's wife is a Nurse Practitioner who is endlessly frustrated by the anti-vaxxer movement and the danger it poses to health in the United States. She tends to get annoyed with me when I take the conversation to a meta place. As she spouts statistics about how effective vaccines are and how illogical it is not to get them, I tend to surface the question: "Why do people want to believe this?"
It's not that I think her ideas or statistics are incorrect. It's just that she's not seeking to understand the reason people disagree with her, and until you do that, you'll have little influence over the changing their minds. Anti-science sentiment is, for one reason or another, a fit memetic complex. As human beings, we not only have the ability to inadvertently pass along pathogens like the coronavirus, but the ability to consciously choose what ideas we pass along to infect our fellow human creatures. Why do anti-science ideas have such an easy time reproducing in some large oceans of human brains?
For those who are scientists, and who work in the fields, I can appreciate becoming jaded. The company I work at is full of scientists. I had a conversation with one of them a couple of years ago in which she conceded that, prior to joining our company, she had spent 7 years in a lab working on one very specific problem in oncology, in service of earning a PhD. It was a problem that, if she had solved, would have possibly saved lots of human lives. She said that spending all that time on one problem was incredibly boring, just years toiling away in a lab, and she still didn't manage to solve the problem. She lamented that it all felt like time wasted to her.
That some human beings devote themselves to these kinds of noble pursuits, that they choose to fight and struggle against problems for years, even if there is little hope of succeeding, in the hopes that they can improve the quality of all human lives, that is what is precious to me.
Despite my reverence for this, it's not a lifestyle I would soon adopt for myself. Science is extremely hard, extremely tedious work. And as a scientist, you're more than likely going to be spending a great deal of your time chasing after the financial backing required in order to make progress in your field. We see the best minds of our generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, trying to get enough grant money to keep their pursuits afloat.
I have an uncle who was a scientist in a former life, and who now makes sense of his day-to-day life with the practices of organized religion. He once shared with me that he found no happiness in doing science, since the people doing it seemed like dullards striving for a difficult, uncertain future while missing out on the beauty of the present moment. I disagree with his belief that the solution to this is to find solace in credulity, but he has a point. And I'm not sure what the solution is.
If I have a patron saint, it would be Francis Bacon. There are several philosophers of the Enlightenment that I revere for their ideas and what they contributed to humanity, but Bacon stands out as being one of the greats. Like many of the early Enlightenment, he was writing in the wake of the Reformation, and was in the process of witnessing Christendom fracture, go to war with itself, and schism into discords that were causing civil, social, and political unrest that was causing great harm to society and benefiting absolutely no one.
Amidst all this, he was a voice in the wilderness that insisted that the process of scientific inquiry, the seeking of human beings to understand cause and effect in the natural world by means of an experimental method, of trial and error, offered humankind the best chance at escaping the darkness. He launched a full frontal philosophical assault on the entrenched ideas of Plato and Aristotle, which attributed events in the world to the will of the gods, or many other possible teleological reasons. His maxim of "knowledge is power" would probably manifest itself in today's mass media culture in the form of NBC's "The More You Know" series of public service initiatives.
In hindsight, Bacon's prostration before the potential of science is quite prescient, and it's difficult to argue that he was incorrect. The prosperity and quality of life we now enjoy cannot be attributed to the workings of any faith-based belief system; instead the credit must go to the generation and testing of new ideas against reality, in the concession of ultimate ignorance and the seeking to overcome with understanding.
Science has never been easy, because the struggle against anti-science sentiment, or the misdirective sleights of hand that nature performs for us, there was almost certainly more low-hanging fruit to discover in science a hundred years ago than there is today. There is unlikely to be another Einstein or Darwin, humans who planted a flag that established a new center around which new bodies of knowledge could expand. The frontiers of ignorance are a growing surface area, but those surfaces are now far on the fringes in lonely niche corners that don't hold appeal for a lot of people to dedicate their lives to. The days of complete revolutions in scientific thinking are not over, but it's hard to imagine where one might happen now, and it seems as though they're unlikely to cause as big of a sea change as those in the past few hundred years have. Science is now advanced slowly, with deliberate and difficult effort, a game of inches.
What I think might be lacking is not the investigations of science, but the application of what science has uncovered so far to the betterment of human life. Maybe it's hard to determine how some esoteric function of mRNA in human cells contributes to cancer, and to figure out how to solve the problem. But I think there are reams of scientific discoveries that are sitting around, largely unused, and the greatest minds don't need to build on them, but to figure out how they can be put to the best use in our world.
The achievements of many mathematicians and scientists do not yield to practical applications in the lifetime of the human who discovers them, but happen only posthumously. This is the inheritance that may bear the most fruit for humanity: the mass of scientific knowledge uncovered thus far with which we're doing nothing more than sitting on. It is technology that must be developed and deployed, with a scientific understanding, if we are to keep making progress.