The scientific method can't save us from the coronavirus - The Washington Post - 0 views
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The scientific method can’t save us — because it doesn’t exist.
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there is no such thing as “the scientific method,” no single set of steps or one-size-fits-all solution to the problems we face.
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Ask any scientist: what they do, individually and collectively, is too diverse, too dynamic, too difficult to follow one recipe.
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But its nonexistence has never dampened the scientific method’s appeal. And now, in the face of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the question of who is (or is not) adhering to the scientific method feels more urgent than ever.
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The novel coronavirus causing the current crisis presents a multidimensional challenge — to personal, public, economic and mental health. There is no single tool with which to confront such a threat; what we need is a vast tool kit.
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Luckily, scientists know this. Science is about staying flexible, trying out a variety of tools as the questions we try to answer change before our eyes. It is a process, not a product
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In 1910, the philosopher and psychologist John Dewey published a brief introduction to thinking in general, based on research at the Laboratory School he had founded at the University of Chicago.
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If you paid attention, Dewey argued, you saw that children were already scientific thinkers — they were creative, they solved problems, they worked together. Science came naturally to them.
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Finally, Dewey contended that science evolves. Constant change is how organisms keep up with their environments; the same is true for science. Facts matter, but not as much as flexibility
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But Dewey’s list wasn’t meant to be the scientific method. He advocated flexibility, not stasis, and saw science as a continuation of everyday problem-solving
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Pointing to the scientific method, which so many are doing with the best of intentions, misses the thing that gives science its power: scale. Science is too big for one set of steps — and too big to fail
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The phrase “the scientific method” implies something special, static and solitary. But the history of the scientific method as it emerged last century reveals something familiar, adaptive and social. Science is human, in other words, just like the scientists who do it every day