How Thinking Like A Scientist Can Improve Your Daily Life (Synopsis) [Starts With A Bang]

“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” -Ernest Rutherford

It’s a difficult thing to do, to go against your gut instinct. It’s even more difficult when your gut is backed up by the facts you’ve found doing your own independent research. But the greatest hallmark of science isn’t digging into your conclusions and finding all the evidence you can to support them; it’s to constantly challenge them, to attempt to knock them down, and to see where your present knowledge can be superseded or improved.

Whether through libraries, archives, traditional media, the internet or other forms of new media, independent research can be informative, but only to a point. Image credit: Washington, D.C. OWI (Office of War Information) research workers / U.S. Government.

It may seem that there’s a battle on as far as who you can trust for information, but scientific thinking isn’t about trusting one camp over another. Rather, it’s about looking for the expertise, at the full suite of facts and at the recommendations of those who are more knowledgeable than any of us can ever be ourselves. It’s a difficult and humbling path to take, but it’s how we can arrive at truths that are greater than any of us, individually.

Decades ago, many households switched from butter to margarine, believing the latter was healthier. As new evidence accumulated, however, it was determined that trans fats, not saturated fats, were the fats that were linked to heart disease. Image credit: Bill Branson.

Come get the full story on how each one of us can value science in our daily lives, and how doing so just might save the USA.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kNKXMT

“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” -Ernest Rutherford

It’s a difficult thing to do, to go against your gut instinct. It’s even more difficult when your gut is backed up by the facts you’ve found doing your own independent research. But the greatest hallmark of science isn’t digging into your conclusions and finding all the evidence you can to support them; it’s to constantly challenge them, to attempt to knock them down, and to see where your present knowledge can be superseded or improved.

Whether through libraries, archives, traditional media, the internet or other forms of new media, independent research can be informative, but only to a point. Image credit: Washington, D.C. OWI (Office of War Information) research workers / U.S. Government.

It may seem that there’s a battle on as far as who you can trust for information, but scientific thinking isn’t about trusting one camp over another. Rather, it’s about looking for the expertise, at the full suite of facts and at the recommendations of those who are more knowledgeable than any of us can ever be ourselves. It’s a difficult and humbling path to take, but it’s how we can arrive at truths that are greater than any of us, individually.

Decades ago, many households switched from butter to margarine, believing the latter was healthier. As new evidence accumulated, however, it was determined that trans fats, not saturated fats, were the fats that were linked to heart disease. Image credit: Bill Branson.

Come get the full story on how each one of us can value science in our daily lives, and how doing so just might save the USA.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2kNKXMT