Ignorance - In a Good Way

Ah, another book to read, this time one on Ignorance, How It Drives Science, a work who's title reminds me of Beginner's Mind, the Zen approach of maintaining openness when dealing with the attainment of knowledge, something society needs to do if it is to survive the next 50 - 100 years, a time frame, yours truly thinks, is the most perilous humanity will ever face.

Many people think of science as a deliberate process that is driven by the gradual accumulation of facts. Legions of smart scientists labor to piece together the evidence supporting their discoveries, hypotheses, inventions and progress itself.

But according to Stuart Firestein, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, this view is fallacious. Working scientists don’t get bogged down in factual swamps, he says, because they don’t care all that much for facts. Facts are not what science is all about. It’s only when the facts fail that scientists really put on their thinking caps.

Scientists, Dr. Firestein says, are driven by ignorance.

In this sense, ignorance is not stupidity. Rather, it is a particular condition of knowledge: the absence of fact, understanding, insight or clarity about something. It is a case where data don’t exist, or more commonly, where the existing data don’t make sense.

The book comes at an important time. Today’s most vociferous scientific controversies turn on different interpretations of facts — about climate change, about contraception, about evolution. When politics are injected, the shouting grows louder, the thinking muddier. Uncertainty is a dirty word.

Dr. Firestein, by contrast, celebrates a tolerance for uncertainty, the pleasures of scientific mystery and the cultivation of doubt. If more people embraced the seductive appeal of uncertainty, he says, it might take some acrimony out of our public debates.

The quantum rules, to ignore it is the expression of true ignorance, the province of intolerance, religion

nationalism and fear, characteristics all too common in today's fractured world.