1. The essence of science is skepticism. The enemy of science is dogmatic certainty. That is also the enemy of humanity.

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2. Also: the scientific method is all about testing and challenging previous results and previous theories. If you’re not questioning received wisdom, you’re doing philosophy, not science. If you’re bowing to authority or consensus, you’re doing theology, not science.
   As I like to put it: if facts were settled by consensus, we wouldn’t be here, because Columbus would have fallen off the edge of the flat earth.

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   1. If you’re not questioning received wisdom, you’re not even doing philosophy. Nor theology, for that matter.
      I’m not sure what the right word is for the groupthink / virtue-signaling spiral, but none of the old academic disciplines seem to fit.

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3. I work in IT, and one of the principles my group and I work under is summed up as, “Strong beliefs, loosely held.”

   If you believe you know what’s happening and how it works, by all means pour everything you have into that belief.

   However, the SECOND your strong belief is challenged and found insufficient, inaccurate, incorrect, or otherwise wanting, you let it go and re-evaluate based on the new information you just received.

   “Strong beliefs, loosely held.”

   This is what puts the Science in “Computer Science”. We don’t often think of it as the usual Scientific Method, but it’s very similar and we live it every day.

   Sadly, the Administration just keeps going with “weak beliefs, tightly held,” doubling down on verifiably false information that I don’t honestly think even Dr. Faux-chi truly believes.

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   1. One of my favorite ways to distinguish sciences from other academic pursuits: if the political persuasion of the practitioner matters, or if it is mentioned, then that field is not a science.
      This shows, for example, that economics is not a science, nor is (any longer) climatology. Physics, on the other hand, still counts; one does not need to speak of “liberal physicists” or “conservative physicists”.

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      1. And the attempt to distinguish between “Jewish physics” and “Aryan physics” didn’t turn out so well.
         Nor will the current effort to distinguish between “white supremacist math” and “POC math.” (2 + 2 = giraffe, for sufficiently fuchsia values of 2.)

4. “The Ascent of Man” was one of y favorite PBS series when it first aired in the ’70s, and “Knowledge or Certainty” was hands down, my favorite episode. Somehow PBS, that endlessly recycles Ken Burns’s documentaries, hasn’t aired “The Ascent of Man” in decades. Maybe because it fosters critical thinking.

5. Wait… I thought Dr. Bronowski knew everything, including which zoo the penguin came from.

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