Unfortunately for this plan, most people fail miserably when they try to describe the neat little box that science has to stay inside. The guru knows what cult members should eat, wear, do for a living who they should have sex with which art they should look at which music they should listen to. Probably the single most reliable sign of a cult guru is that the guru claims expertise, not in one area, not even in a cluster of related areas, but in everything. Whatever the solution, it ought to involve believing true things, rather than believing you believe things that you believe are false.Ĭan you prevent the happy death spiral by restricting your admiration of Science to a narrow domain? Part of the happy death spiral is seeing the Great Idea everywhere-thinking about how Communism could cure cancer if it were only given a chance. This is the sort of cleverness that leads to shooting yourself in the foot. It sounds to me like an automobile mechanic who says that the motor is broken on your right windshield wiper, but instead of fixing it, they’ll just break your left windshield wiper to balance things out. ![]() I am generally skeptical of people who claim that one bias can be used to counteract another. So we’ll have to search for other negative things to say instead.īut if you look selectively for something negative to say about science-even in an attempt to resist a happy death spiral-do you not automatically convict yourself of rationalization? Why would you pay attention to your own thoughts, if you knew you were trying to manipulate yourself? The standard negative things to say about science aren’t likely to appeal to someone who genuinely feels the exultation of science-that’s not the intended audience. Probably they didn’t like something science had to say about their pet beliefs, and sought ways to undermine its authority. They weren’t worrying about their own admiration of science spinning out of control. If you retrieve the standard cached deep wisdom for don’t go overboard on admiring science, you will find thoughts like “Science gave us air conditioning, but it also made the hydrogen bomb” or “Science can tell us about stars and biology, but it can never prove or disprove the dragon in my garage.” But the people who originated such thoughts were not trying to resist a happy death spiral. What if Science is in fact so beneficial that we cannot acknowledge its true glory and retain our sanity? Sounds like a nice thing to say, doesn’t it? Oh no it’s starting ruuunnnnn. ![]() Though no one has fulfilled claims more audacious than Bacon’s at least, not yet.īut then how can we resist the happy death spiral with respect to Science itself? The happy death spiral starts when you believe something is so wonderful that the halo effect leads you to find more and more nice things to say about it, making you see it as even more wonderful, and so on, spiraling up into the abyss. ![]() That’s the problem with deciding that you’ll never admire anything that much: Some ideas really are that good. The man was Francis Bacon, his Great Idea was the scientific method, and he was the only crackpot in all history to claim that level of benefit to humanity and turn out to be completely right. The Great Idea would unravel the mysteries of the universe, supersede the authority of the corrupt and error-ridden Establishment, confer nigh-magical powers upon its wielders, feed the hungry, heal the sick, make the whole world a better place, etc., etc., etc. ![]() Indeed, as the man thought upon the Great Idea more and more, he realized that it was not just a great idea, but the most wonderful idea ever. Once upon a time, there was a man who was convinced that he possessed a Great Idea.
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