Most people tend to think of science in one of two ways. It is a body
of knowledge and understanding about the world: gravity,
photosynthesis and evolution. Or it is the technology that has emerged
from the fruits of that knowledge: vaccines, computers and cars.
Science is both of these things, yet as Carl Sagan so memorably
explained in The Demon-Haunted World, it is something else besides. It
is a way of thinking, the best approach yet devised (if still an
imperfect one) to discovering progressively better approximations of
how things really are.
Science is provisional, always open to revision in light of new
evidence. It is anti-authoritarian: anybody can contribute, and
anybody can be wrong. It seeks actively to test its propositions. And
it is comfortable with uncertainty. These qualities give the
scientific method unparalleled strength as a way of finding things
out. Its power, however, is too often confined to an intellectual
ghetto: those disciplines that have historically been considered
"scientific".
Science as a method has great things to contribute to all sorts of
pursuits beyond the laboratory. Yet it remains missing in action from
far too much of public life. Politicians and civil servants too seldom
appreciate how tools drawn from both the natural and social sciences
can be used to design more effective policies, and even to win votes.
In education and criminal justice, for example, interventions are
regularly undertaken without being subjected to proper evaluation.
Both fields can be perfectly amenable to one of science's most potent
techniques — the randomised controlled trial — yet these are seldom
required before new initiatives are put into place. Pilots are often
derisory in nature, failing even to collect useful evidence that could
be used to evaluate a policy's success.
---SPSmith
No comments:
Post a Comment