Motivation restored. Inspiration needed.

After two and a half days of rest, it feels like I have been doing nothing for a week. While my body keeps getting more and more lazy, my mind is also growing restless.

Today, when my good friend Hanna, who wants to become a proffessional writer, told me she is getting another of her poems published in an anthology, I felt that tiny sting of jealousy that I probably needed to get my arse off the comfy armchair and want to do something with my time.

So, that sparked my motivation to write for this blog tonight.

The downside is that I lack inspiration at the moment.

I have a few ideas, but I would need to experiment with them and think them through over a couple of days before I make any promises. I might instead write a to-do list for myself. (Perhaps I'll even publish that here, to really make myself accomplish them all...)

I already have a few projects going on here already, but I do not feel inspired to work on them right now. I am just in that state where I want to come up with something new and ground-breaking... I'll need a good long think to do that!

Tomorrow, I am going on a trip to Lyme Regis or somewhere near on a fossil hunt together with the host family I will be living with in Bristol, as a lodger, next year. There may be fossils of Jurassic marine reptiles there – actual vertebrates! So, tomorrow I will surely have something new and exciting to tell!

Exams are over

Now my final exams for this year are over!

Hopefully, I will find plenty of time and motivation to blog like there was no tomorrow... but I suspect I will have at least a week of uncurable laziness!

More fossils

The day before our first exam, I was walking accross the Downs, a park-like area close to where I live in Bristol, when I saw a small patch of gravel. Just for fun, I crouched to look for some fossils. Who knows, maybe there could be something there, carried with all the rest from wherever those rocks came.

These three things I found look too much like fossils for me to think they are rocks, but too little like fossils for me to think they are fossils...

I thought: if they are not fossils, then they are the most evil-ly shaped rocks, deceptively shaped just like fossils to troll any amateur collector. Thus, logically, either these are fossils, or there is a Devil!

This looks like a rugose coral... a very short, stubby one:

This below would be one shell of either a bivalve or a brachiopod, I'm not sure...

Fossils

I found some really nice fossils yesterday! Unfortunately, due to exam preparations (which are weighing heavy right now), I do not have the time to do any write-up.

So, just enjoy the pictures!

The scientific method: strengths and limitations (1)

Part one: Introduction and logics

In our enlightened society, we tend to look down on those that blindly follow religious doctrines. We accuse them of being ignorant and close-minded, not questioning unreasonable claims by their authorities, and when challenged, resorting to rhetoric or aggression rather than logic to defend their views.

Perhaps phrased a bit extremely, this is the essence of the attitudes of most ‘civilised’ societies that are based on scientific knowledge. Science encourages critical thinking about the world, and gains knowledge by performing experiments that help us figure out how the world works. Religion, they say, only makes up facts that happened in the past to explain things in our everyday lives. That is more or less the way they tend to think.

But…are those who follow science really that different? Take a moment to think about the last time you actually thought critically about what you read in a science magazine.

It does not take much intellectual process to question a fact or opinion. ‘I think this is wrong, because of A’, where A is fact you have learnt that contradicts that claim. This is not what I would call critical thinking, something our modern society values highly, yet tends to misuse so often it is almost frightening.

Critical thinking is more about questioning the essence or nature of a statement or piece of knowledge. Thinking critically is not to question a claim with another claim that contradicts it and saying that one of them is wrong – that is just pointless argument. When thinking critically, you challenge the claim per se (lat. ‘in itself’), by assessing its fundamental reasoning. An example of critical thinking is detecting fallacies – specific cases of flawed logical reasoning – such as circular reasoning and false dilemma, both which are surprisingly common in science. (Fallacies will be discussed more in detail later.)

Having this in mind, ask yourself again: when did you last think critically about a scientific statement?

Would you then agree with me that, in general, we only rarely – if ever – do this? Hopefully, this should shock you, not only because you have realised that we then are not much different from the blindly religious people we denounce as ‘ignorant’ or even ‘brainwashed’, but also since you understand and appreciate the importance of critical thinking and realise what we are lacking.

If we want to justify our trust in science, we need to be able to convince ourselves (and eventually others) of why scientific knowledge is ‘better’ than, say, religious beliefs. To do that, we need to look at the essence and nature of science, and compare it with the essence and nature of other ways of obtaining knowledge, e.g. religion.

This is not an easy task, and it should not surprise you why so few are even able to go through with it, since not many are familiar with how scientists reason (ideally). We all know that they perform experiments and observe results. Some of us further are aware that the scientist interpret the results of the experiments within a theoretical framework, use it to generalise about similar situations, and so add to our collective knowledge. Moreover, some know of the importance of replicability (that the experiments should be repeatable), and probably fewer have heard about falsificationism (that ideas are confirmed not by trying to support them, but by trying to destroy them and not succeeding).

But how does all of this really help us understand the world? Why do we need to perform experiments? Why do we want to generalise? And why should the experiments be replicable? Why does failing to disprove something make it more reliable than if you can show that it is true? How do all these things interrelate and connect to form a comprehensive whole? In short, what are the theoretical reasons for why science is a good method for making sense of the physical world?

That is what this post series will be all about: assessing the scientific method, by bringing to light how it works, and thinking a lot about what makes it good and what problems it faces. In other words, we will critically think about the strengths and weaknesses of the scientific method.

Note that I am not intending to criticise science, but to make us think critically about it, or evaluate it. There is a difference in purpose, which is really important that you do not misunderstand. I am not going to say that science is wrong, only that it is not as right as many people think it is. Indeed, it may very well seem as I am pointing more toward its flaws and limitations, but that is mostly because that is the part the general public is less familiar with, I believe. I will of course also emphasise the really good aspects of science.

Honestly, considering all that science has achieved, most indisputably shown in its practical applications, it is clear that blindly arguing that science is all bad and wrong is just silly. All I wish to achieve is to encourage you to think for yourself about the way you see science, and whether that view is properly justified, or whether you might need to think again.

In order do this, we first need a solid introduction to the essentials of reasoning and logic, and a detailed walk-through of the scientific method. This will include a whole bunch of new words and definitions that you are probably unfamiliar with, but please bear in mind that understanding these fundamental concepts is key to understanding the rest, so I strongly urge you not to skip this part. In coming posts, I will go through each main step in the chain of the idealised scientific reasoning, analysing them in detail in the light of what we will have learned earlier. I will also address other central concepts of science, such as models, operationalisation, paradigms, the ‘data first vs. theory first’ discussion, and also the role of mathematics.