Last year, the wonderful Gary Taubes, whose ideas about nutrition we have written about before, gave a commencement address to the students of the Schmid College of Science and Technology at Chapman University in California.
The address is near and dear to our way of thinking, because Taubes raises a difficult and correct truth: In order to pursue new knowledge of the world, we must be confident that our ideas are correct, but because we are very susceptible to fooling ourselves, this tendency will lead us to believe lots of untruth as well. He calls it a tightrope walk: The thin line between being confident in an unpopular or yet unknown piece of knowledge and being a fool who buys into his cherished untruths.
Part of the speech is reprinted below, but be sure to check the whole thing out.
The idea is we’re always going to try to fool ourselves – that’s how our brains are wired — but here’s a way of thinking that will help us minimize the tendency. Another great philosopher of Science, Robert Merton, in the 1960s, put it this way: he said that Aristotle was right when he said “all men by nature desire to know” but then he added, what makes scientists different is they “desire to know that what they know is really so.”
Now here’s the catch: In science, as in life, you have to have faith in yourself and your ideas. You have to make decisions about what you’ll pursue, what you’ll continue pursuing despite times getting very tough, who you’ll do it with, who you’ll stay doing it with even after times get tough, where you’ll do it; why other people should do it with you and keep doing it with you through the tough times. You’ll make these decisions based on the assumption that what you believe is true really is. Without this belief we don’t do anything; it’s what drives us forward and allows us to act decisively. But if we fool ourselves, and we’re the easiest person to fool, we’ll make the wrong decisions – as individuals, as a society.
From this perspective, life becomes a tightrope walk in which you never actually see the rope. But it’s there. And, in all honesty, there’s almost invariably a net, too, so our missteps are rarely as damaging as we fear they’ll be while they’re happening. On this rope, we have to find the balance, time and again, between this need to think critically and skeptically about what we believe, and the need to have faith that what we’re doing and what we believe is right. Faith moves us forward; skeptical critical thinking keeps us balanced.
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Still Interested? Check out a few other great commencement speeches or read up on Gary Taubes’ thoughts on Why we Get Fat.