Rant about overboasting society and the allergy science has to mistakes

Picture very remotely related to the topic, I just really like to see Rei playing chemist

Nowadays, or even before the crisis, whenever you are on a job interview, or on a debate/discussion, or even on a date, we are inclined to pursue a type of talk which highlight our good points/skills in order to look better than we actually are, while at the same time hide all our flaws.

For example, I can speak French… but the thing I never mention is that when I speak French my accent tends to be very off and my grammar is completely random. While this is not lying, as most French people will be able to roughly understand me, it is also not entirely true, falling on that grey area which we were so accustomed to declare as a “fair game” area.

 

The reason why we do this is because everyone else does. Because if we do not highlight ourselves we will be downgraded by whoever it is analyzing our profile, since everyone does this, it becomes an big disadvantage not to get into this flow.

 

Now, while on an individual scale this doesn’t seem like a much of a big deal, I think when you join the whole society striving to look/act/appear better than everyone else, you end up having a problem. Not only self-esteem and image is affected, as you start to feel like you are left behind in skill area than you would if you were in a more realistic bubble, you also get the feeling that only you make mistakes.

 

How does this then connects to the knowledge and the scientific progress? When I started having internships and jobs on the field of expertize, I started having to investigate in many sources and test things which were not yet tested but which you would be inspired by previous research. College guides you more for scientific articles, as it supposedly will show a more scientific way of research. This by all means isn’t incorrect, but there is a lot of underlines which are in these reports which you only start understanding as you read a lot of them on the same subject.

 

For example, new technologies which are tested not always come out with the most economically sound balances (often new ideas need to be trimmed to be used commercially in the future), but instead of just saying that it is not economically viable, most articles in this position will try to make a lot of argumentation on how innovative the method is and the reader is supposed to get by the lack of cost effective information that it is not economically viable yet.

 

Although, the most annoying ones is when you have 4-5 articles from similar topic which used similar methodologies… all hiding the same issue they had and even when not undermining it, the article not really telling how they fixed the problem (for example, would it freaking kill anyone to say something has tendency for bio fouling?!).

 

While I understand the whole society engine tries to push people to do this, this sort of attitude towards hiding what goes wrong/flaws in the system has the effect that information loses big part of its value. When you read an article, you are supposed to be reading a study someone did, someone’s experience or analysis over a certain topic. The knowledge exchange will already suffer through over interpretation manners (as people thoughts and connections are influenced by their background, genetic pool and nationality), don’t go adding up more holes in the research which someone might fall in.

 

Even more, failure experiments are as valuable as successful ones. Actually, I learn 10x more from my failures than from my achievements, as the failures give me clues to the directions and things I need to correct/avoid in an experiment.

Yet, basic report structure holds no neatly separated section in which you can make the list of failures before you found the right answer, as discussion only allows you to mention what might have influenced the final answer that you got.

This makes whoever repeats an experiment previously performed and tries to make some variations (in which the other person also tried variations) to often repeat the same failures the previous person which did the article made, while the new researcher could use its time focus on making new failures and see new ways of trimming the protocols.

 

So yeah, this is my rant on science and society white lies and their freaking ranges of acceptability. When looking on how we all survive, it is no wonder the information accuracy, although there is a lot more information access now that there ever was, the inaccuracy of information now is almost outstanding.