bad science...
ignorance is the opposite of bliss
28th January 2006
The Guardian Bad Science
I spend a lot of my time wondering: why are people so afraid of science, when it has given us so much?
To my mind there are two answers: firstly, the everyday science that you learned at school is no longer enough to understand the world around you.
Fifty years ago, a fairly well educated person could easily have a full understanding of how the technology they interacted with actually worked: you could explain a car, a wind-up record player, a fridge, or the old analogue telephone exchange network, for example, on the back of an envelope, or with the help of a science teacher, pretty quickly.
But that's not true any more. Look around you. Do you really, fully understand your mobile phone? The braking system on your car? Where your breakfast came from? Or even the manufacturing process that produced this bit of newspaper? My guess is no.
Any sufficiently advanced technology, as they say, is indistinguishable from magic, and these days, with the pace of new developments, that goes even for people who know a lot about science. And that's spooky. We don't like that, either intellectually, or in our gut.
But secondly, of course, and more infuriatingly for scientists, the decisions about technology, about how it is used - political decisions - tarnish the popular view of scientists.
Genetic modification of organisms is interesting and useful in an uncountably huge number of theoretical or even practical situations. Mass rollout of GM crops, though, makes people nervous, for some good reasons, and it's issues like this that make science seem sinister and remote.
Ben Goldacre
"Ignorance Is The Opposite Of Bliss"
28 January 2006