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by mrtnmcc
2006 days ago
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You could spend ten minutes debating whether the growing bright light and rising Doppler sound exactly matches the expected profile of an oncoming train.. or you could just get off the tracks. Here absolute fact is only clear when the effect is so strong it's too late. |
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This! I strongly agree that one should not mix up scientific hard knowledge with hypotheses, statements of likelihood, educated guesses and so on.
However, I do not agree at all with the demand that you always need to be 100% sure to act decisively on something important. That is just not how life works!
It does not work like that in the small. If you are a parent and you smell smoke, and your children are playing upstairs, there is no requirement that you know with certainty there is a fire before you get your kids out of the house. You get them out.
If you are a bus driver packed full with people chopping a long a foggy motorway in the morning, and three hundred meters ahead appears something which looks like an overthrown heavy truck, you do not need to be 100& certain to hit the brakes. You brake.
If you are captain of a frigate in heavy weather and with serious navigation difficulties, and ahead appears something which looks damn likely like a rock or a VLCC, you do not need absolute certainty to change course. You just change.
And in fact we demand the same from industrial and military leaders all the time. It is even one defining element of leadership to act both wisely and decidedly under uncertain conditions.
And now, we go and demand that the evidence we get from scientists has 100% certainty before we act. That's wrong. It is not intelligent behaviour because a lot of things will have irreversible consequences before we have certainty about the situation.
(And interestingly, we have seen exactly the same pattern on the topic of climate change.)