Unsettling Science
Unlocking Innovation
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today’s Topic is Part 11 in our Keys to Innovation series and tackles the idea of “Settled Science,” showing just how myopic and resistant to new information that idea really is. Worse, it lacks creativity and locks out innovation when consensus can no longer be challenged, preventing us from learning, unlearning, and relearning.
Intro
If you’ve been around the internet or watched the news for more than five minutes, you’ve heard the term “Settled Science.” It’s held up as a conversation ender, not an opener. No need to go further, no need to ask questions. Just accept and move on. Doing otherwise turns you into a ‘denier’ who can be dismissed with prejudice.
However, the utterance of “settled science” is also a key tell that the person fundamentally doesn’t understand how science works because it’s never been settled, and I hope it never settles as we continue to expand our understanding.
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
That said, science can be useful and applicable even if it’s not perfect. To quote George Box: "All models are wrong, but some are useful.” This is true because science can merely model the world, and models, by definition, are a reduced facsimile of reality. That doesn’t mean the model isn’t useful, but the model is also never perfect and, I’d wager, never can be. At its best, the settled science is what works for what we need, and science rests on a lot of proven work, even if it's incomplete.
Physics is a great example of how four different models operate like Russian nesting dolls, where each works on its own scale but fails when applied to a more complex one. For example:
Euclidean Physics operates at the everyday scale and governs our perception of flat, three-dimensional space by providing static rules for how shapes interact. Your house is fundamentally built with these principles, and this was sufficient for most of our history, and it’s settled science that was challenged.
Newtonian Physics takes over with motion and structural loads of more complex buildings. This level of understanding becomes crucial to aerospace. It governs a more complex level and is also settled science that was challenged.
Einsteinian physics governs the universe, in which mass warps spacetime, affecting time and gravity at high speeds or on massive scales. Until recently, it had zero bearing on our lives, and upended the scientific world that only knew Newtonian physics, but this, too, was challenged.
Quantum physics addresses the unpredictable world of atoms and electrons, where particles behave as waves and probabilities that none of the other three layers are considering. It’s still challenging our understanding of reality and, as yet, is not a settled science.
Each one builds on the previous and, at a certain point, for mere mortals, it’s irrelevant to daily survival. Eclucidian and Newtonian physics are all we really need to understand, but they are still incomplete, and new theories continue to emerge.
However, the layers do matter, and one fun example of an intersection is your cellphone’s GPS. To pinpoint your location on a map, the system relies on a Euclidean grid of coordinates. It needs Newtonian orbits to track the satellite positions, but that’s not all, because the satellites are moving fast (Special Relativity) and sit high above Earth’s heavy gravitational pull (General Relativity), their onboard atomic clocks tick slightly faster than clocks on the ground. Engineers use Einstein’s equations to subtract 38 microseconds every day from the satellite clocks because, if they didn’t, your GPS location would drift by about 6 miles daily.
Settled Science
Now, as far as ‘settled’ goes, each layer is built on the ‘settled’ science of the previous layer, but it also required challenging the previous layer, even though it worked, to find out where it failed, and expand the realm of understanding. Its usefulness and general acceptance provided a springboard for the next idea.
But if you think each layer of experts just went along with that challenge and progressed, they didn’t. We’ve had gatekeepers for millennia who have regularly weaponized “Settled Science” to shut down critique and curiosity. It’s so prevalent that Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, noting that science is not a smooth curve of growth, as people tend to believe. Instead, it’s revolution, discovery, ossification, and then revolution, where paradigms shift dramatically.
That’s because those models aren’t wrong per se, they’re just incomplete. The problem also isn’t that they’re incomplete; it’s that when people believed the science was settled, they lost their curiosity and became more inclined to defend their position rather than challenge what they think they know. Max Planck describes it as:
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
This is known as the Planck Principle, often summarized as “Science progresses one funeral at a time,” because they viewed science as settled and stopped exploring. Eric captured this recently with the best two lines I’ve read on the topic:
Science isn’t a cathedral for you to defend. It’s a frontier for angry, curious, difficult people to attack. The moment you declare it settled, you don’t become wise. You become dead weight.
Frankly, there’s a lot of dead weight out there. It’s incurious, dogmatic, often ideologically driven, and is certainly not what we think of when it comes to scientific progress. We’ve run into these folks a lot over the years, and here’re a few of the topics we’ve poked at which have garnered that defensive response:
How The Climate is Changing, but CO2 is an arbitrary baseline and is actually a fertilizer, not a pollutant. Moreover, as the models have improved over time, the position keeps shifting, but the narrative remains apocalyptic. (I just wish the climate alarmists understood the psychology of their behavior)
Or the follow-up regarding the Rates of Climate Change and how increasingly more sophisticated measurements show a historical pattern that contextualizes what we measure today, as not as extreme as we are told.
One of my favorites is on Polio and how the hyper reductive method of identifying a virus caused us to redefine what polio was, reclassify an entire family of symptoms as something else, and actually didn’t cure the full suite of symptoms because it also has a connection to Pesticides (Fun fact, Polio, the family of symptoms, still exists, they just call it something else)
And in a related investigation, we found that Masks Do Work, however, not the way we think, and that actually led to increased COVID infection rates through risk compensation.
Each of these has a common thread: detractors constantly used “Settled Science” to shut down curious exploration. However, as we found in each topic, there’s still more to explore!
For the climate, we need to learn to adapt to a dynamic planet to survive. There’s no magic “Stop” button that lets us prevent change. Similarly, if polio symptoms still exist, and it’s not virally induced, we have millions of humans we can help by reopening the investigation. Likewise, with masks and virology, instead of sticking susceptible people together and saying masks work while the infection rips through, had we remained curious and open, had we not shut down the conversation as “settled,” millions more would have survived.
To me, ‘settled science’ is what particulates out of the creative formula and sticks like gooey residue clogging up the system. That so many people fall into this logical fallacy is unsettling, but that’s not quite what I mean here. Every once in a while, we need to stir things up, flush the system, eliminate the dead waste, and let the creative process continue. Unsettling science is revolutionary.
Unsettling Science
Clearly, the consequences of settling science are profound and regressive. That’s why I’m advocating the unsettling of science. We need to keep shaking it up. We need to keep challenging. To quote Eric again, here’s how we can do that:
Read the old masters. Ask rude questions. Hunt for the places where the priesthood gets angry and evasive. Teach your kids that doubt and wonder are not sins, but despair damn sure is.
Despair is a good way to look at it. When the science is settled, the potential solutions become limited, and the only option is despair because we’ve eliminated the opportunities for innovation. Flip that idea back around on our examples:
It’s climate alarmism that’s despairing, not inventing. Even when they do think they’re innovating, there’s a lot of greenwashing to make it appear better.
It’s viral terror, wearing a mask in panic and despair that no one else is, vs. understanding the nuanced protocols that can actually help.
It’s vaccine certainty, despairing when people raise questions, instead of recognizing that vaccine theory has merit, but the application does have legitimate concerns. (Did you know that vaccine manufacturers have been absolved of liability since 1980 because the financial risk was too high?)
That despair is the opposite of innovation, which is why unsettling science is our next Key to Innovation. Unsettling rigid structures also allows greater freedom of maneuver and a greater ability to form, unform, and reform ideas because they’re no longer locked in place dogmatically.
We can apply this concept elsewhere, too, because settling and becoming ossified happen in our personal lives, too. In our ongoing discussion over personalities, pathologies, neurodivergency, and more, Kit Perez recently wrote about how The Cost of Identity-Protective Systems destroys the dynamic adaptability that life demands. “Settled Science” is another perfect example of an identity-protective system and clearly shows the consequences in our daily lives.
Conclusion
The next time you hear the words “Settled Science,” just know that you’re hearing the defensive gasps of unscientific people, violating the core principles of the scientific method rooted in Popper’s Principle, which postulates that for any theory to be considered scientifically valid, it must be inherently testable and capable of being proven wrong.
That principle is powerful for both how we view the scientific world and how we view our own lives and beliefs. Just imagine how much we could unlock, personally and professionally, if we remained curious, testable, and open to challenge. Think about how antifragile that approach is when we invite that debate. Imagine the innovation that can be unlocked when the drive is to find something better by challenging the way things are done today! Unsettling Science is one of the fastest ways to do that and forces us to Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn and remain curious.
“True Innovation comes from those willing to break the rules”
- Anthony Pompliano
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