Science And Meaning

Good science is bloody hard stuff - not only to do, but to attend to.

Much of human experience revolves around judging what things mean. Is this good for me, or bad for me? Do I want this? This kind of judgement is a skill that we are stupendously good at - and it accords perfectly with what we need in life. In some ways, it's crucial to living.

But objective reality doesn't mean things, in any kind of human way. It just is. Science often boils down to heavy arcana - on seeing a mathematical proof of some theorem, our instinctive response is to ask what it means. And if the brilliant insight codified in the numbers is explained in as close to a bias-free fashion as possible, the question remains. What does it mean?

Scientific institutions spend a great deal of time teaching students to speak and think in structures that reduce bias and suspend judgement. These same institutions use peer review to dig for further bias and drive it out. This doesn't work perfectly, and likely never will, because the participants are human. But it does allow participants to maintain a simulation of objective reality that is good enough to give us all a host of marvels.

From time to time, some scientific finding will make headlines - or make it out into the wilds of human society at large. When this happens, the finding itself is almost always heavily distorted. The news is spun by reporters to grab at attention, or adapted by the untrained into "folk science". The components and results of an attempt at objectivity have fallen into the hands of meaning-makers.

I've had an Epidemiologist tell me that he found the expression "viral media" annoying. I live with a lovely lady Ecologist that occasionally wants to throttle uninformed blatherers. I know a Geneticist that has a whole collection of entertaining rants in the vein of "So very, very wrong."

Their objections are accurate and understandable. But this kind of thing is never, ever going to to just "stop happening". We need meaning, we live on spin. Passing snap judgements and making stories out of science is the nature of the beast.

(This post is a reformulation of the earlier "Classically Irrational", which has been junked.)