Do you trust science?

In Mindshifting, we deal with how snap decisions can sometimes harm our effectiveness and happiness, and how that happens in institutions as well. Institutions and bureaucracis adhere to rules or policies, people make snap decisions from heuristics.

Trusting science has very little to do with trusting the scientific establishment.

Science is the process of trying to disprove what we think is true. In science, you format a best guess or hypothesis, then an experiment that might disprove it, and then revise the hypothesis based on the results.
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The scientific establishment, similar to the medical establishment, the education establishment, or almost any establishment, is a rules based bureaucracy. The difference between the two can be illustrated by peanuts.
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Anyone can understand that some people have peanut allergies; when they eat peanuts or products made with peanuts, they get sick and may even die. It's a natural path to consider that because babies cannot tell us if they are sick, we are safest to keep peanuts away from babies; and the proof is that young children who do not eat peanuts do not show any signs of getting sick from them as long as they stay away from them.
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The scientific/medical community took this and starting in 1997 made their recommendation that parents should keep their children away from peanuts and peanut products.
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Science, would have dictated that we test that. Are children who are not exposed to peanuts more likely or less likely to get sick, to develop peanut allergies, to live healthier lives. And starting in 1999, scientists did conduct experiments and found that there were very few benefits to isolating children from peanuts and that when children were not exposed to peanuts at a young age they tended to develop peanut allergies.
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Did this change the establishment's mind? Nope, not until 2019 did they change their recommendations.
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And we have seen time and time again that establishments are more concerned with consistency, preserving past policies, closing ranks, maintaining consensus and groupthink, than they are in evidence and conducting scientific inquiry.
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Makes me want to adapt the Missouri mindset whenever someone prescribes an action saying it's evidence-based or science, show me, show me the data, don't just tell me what to do.

This Mindshifting story wa inspired by the NY Times article, The Medical Establishment Closes Ranks, and Patients Feel the Effects, and also Nissam Nicholas Taleb's book, "Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets"

The next Mindshifting class starts October 22. You can find out more and register below.

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