Science is not a warehouse of answers but a structured inquiry into ‘what we don't know’
Science is not a warehouse of facts but a structured interrogation of what we do not know; failure is the normal condition and uncertainty is the hallmark. What the public really needs to learn is how to ask a good question.
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Science class teaches the conclusions and never the science itself
Sean opens with a view he has held for a long time: science education is like an art class that only shows you the masterpieces and never teaches you how to mix paint, or a piano class that plays recordings and never teaches fingering. Students get F=ma, rock classification and natural selection drilled into them, and then get examined on how well they remember. But the daily reality of science is failure, surprise and not knowing. The public misreads how science works precisely because school never shows the process, only the results.
— Sean CarrollIgnorance is not a hole in science, it is the fuel
Firestein named his two books against intuition: ignorance is what drives science, and failure is the reason science succeeds. At a conference, scientists talk only about what they don't know; nobody stands up to present what is already established. Every known fact drags ten new questions in behind it. Failure is the normal condition, and because science deliberately gives up authority and demands evidence, infallibility is not part of a scientist's job description. The public, meanwhile, sees science as a stack of answers — the misconception most in need of correcting.
— Stuart FiresteinThe scientific revolution began by deliberately manufacturing ignorance
The first move of the scientific revolution was to manufacture a great deal of ignorance on purpose and rebuild from a blank slate. Firestein quotes Bacon: truth used to come from authority, and from that point on authority came from truth. Bacon also invented the experiment — cutting a slice out of nature, controlling the other variables, and putting one small piece of nature to the question. But nobody foresaw that most experiments would fail; failure was written into the genome of the scientific method from the start.
— Stuart FiresteinThe scientific method is after-the-fact rhetoric, not how the work is done
The ‘scientific method’ is Firestein's main target: no scientist actually works through the hypothetico-deductive checklist, which is just elegant rhetoric applied afterwards. Hypotheses are cheap, you use one and throw it away; what matters is imagination and creativity. He also doesn't believe in serendipity — when a Nobel laureate calls it an accident, that is false modesty. Somebody who was not in that position doing that work would never have stumbled into that discovery; you have to already be hard at work before an accident has any chance of hitting you.
— Stuart FiresteinIntuition is best at producing errors that look correct
Firestein illustrates counterintuition with a body-disposal trick a magician friend taught him: bury the corpse eight feet down, and bury a dead dog at four feet. Police and cadaver dogs dig, hit the dog, and call off the search — intuition says it is just a pet grave. Our intuitions manufacture high-quality errors of exactly this kind all day long, and scientists are no exception. Being counterintuitive means digging a little deeper, and not letting a result that happens to look beautiful turn into a paper too early.
— Stuart FiresteinThe more certain a claim is, the more likely it is pseudoscience
The demarcation problem has never had a precise solution in the history of philosophy. Firestein offers a practical test instead: the difference between science and pseudoscience is that science is uncertain and pseudoscience is certain. Someone who always has an answer and never changes it is not to be trusted; a real expert concedes uncertainty precisely because they can see the holes, the competing theories and the missing data. Pseudoscience, for its part, is happy to borrow ‘scientifically proven’ as a selling point.
— Stuart FiresteinOptimism is an invention of science, not a temperament
Optimism is not a word about mood but a philosophical position, and it was only coined by Voltaire in 1759. Firestein argues that science invented this kind of optimism: for the previous 250,000 years human beings could only accept things as they were, and after the scientific revolution we could say for the first time that it could be otherwise. Uncertainty is possibility, and pluralism is more possibility; as long as the options remain reasonable, more of them means more grounds for optimism. This is muscular optimism, not lemonade made after giving up.
— Stuart FiresteinScience must be arrogant enough to try and humble enough to fail
Firestein doesn't flatly reject the Babe Ruth conspiracy theory. He says that asking how we know such a person really existed in history is itself a legitimate scientific question — what is wrong is the way the question gets put. Science is a mixture of arrogance and humility: arrogant enough to claim we can figure the world out, humble enough to admit we may not manage it in our lifetimes, or ever. That coexistence of modesty and ambition is what the public most needs to see in science.
— Stuart FiresteinIn their own words · checked verbatim
But science is clearly about what we don't know, right? I mean, scientists get together at a meeting and we don't talk about what we know. Nobody cares about that, right? We only talk about the crap we don't know and how we're going to figure it out.
Stuart Firestein11:28
Previously, truth came from authority, but henceforth, authority will come from truth.
Stuart Firestein15:37
If you do an experiment and it proves the hypothesis, you've made a measurement. And if you do an experiment and it doesn't prove the hypothesis, you've made a discovery.
Stuart Firestein25:49
Oh yeah, Occam's razor, the magician's best friend.
Stuart Firestein33:47
the most uncertain people in the world are the best experts. Whoever has the most expertise in some field is also the person most uncertain about that field, because they see all the holes, they see all the other possibilities, they see the competing theories, they see the missing data.
Stuart Firestein38:23
the difference between science and pseudoscience is science is uncertain and pseudoscience is certain.
Stuart Firestein41:32
science is this interesting amalgamation, as it were, amalgam of hubris and humility. We have the hubris to think, 'Yeah, we could figure this stuff out. We could figure out how all this works,' and the humility to know, 'Yeah, it's not likely to happen in our lifetime, if ever.'
Stuart Firestein1:15:29
Figures
| Share of 12th-grade students interested in science | under 5% | 45:31 |
| Year the word optimism appeared | 1759 | 58:15 |
| Length of Barwich's postdoc in Firestein's lab | nearly 4 years | 5:25 |
Glossary
- demarcation problem
- The philosophical difficulty of separating science from pseudoscience; it has long resisted any agreed precise solution.
- pluralism
- The view that several valid answers can coexist for the same scientific question — which is not relativism.
- provisional truths
- Scientific conclusions can be revised at any time and must not be equated with absolute truth.
- pragmatism
- The American philosophical school that judges a claim by whether it lets you achieve your aims; Peirce and Dewey are its representative figures.
How to listen
Research administrators, science educators and technology investors — anyone who has to judge whether a high-risk direction deserves a bet; and scientists who get pressed by students and the public on what science actually rests on.
The martini small talk and the Ann-Sophie reminiscence at the top (0:00-5:25) can be skipped.