"Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself"
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Humans are expert at building stories that flatter our hopes and hide our blind spots. Science is the counter-habit: a method designed to restrain wishful thinking. Edwin Land, the inventor and co-founder of Polaroid who turned polarized light into instant photography, prized procedure over inspiration. He knew how attractive an elegant theory or demo can be, and how easily it can mislead its creator. Calling science a method redirects attention from grand claims to the architecture of discipline: hypotheses that risk being wrong, measurements that can be audited, controls that isolate causes, and a community that can reproduce or refute your results.
Land’s own work on color perception, the retinex experiments, depended on staging demonstrations that forced the eye to admit surprise. You do not argue your way past self-deception; you engineer situations where reality argues back. Double-blind protocols, error bars, preregistration, and replication are social technologies for keeping yourself honest when ego and incentives pull the other way. The method assumes you will kid yourself, so it bakes in friction.
The line also resists outcome worship. Getting the right answer by luck teaches nothing; following a rigorous method even when the result is negative builds knowledge and trust. In industry, where Land operated, the temptation to round corners is constant. Treating the lab as a place to be corrected rather than confirmed turns failure into feedback and saves companies from shipping beautiful mistakes.
Carried beyond laboratories, the lesson becomes a practical ethic. Make predictions before you act, write them down, and check them later. Seek disconfirming evidence. Invite criticism. When you feel certain, ask what result would force you to change your mind. The aim is not cynicism but humility with teeth: a structured way to protect your judgment from the most persuasive deceiver you know, yourself.
Land’s own work on color perception, the retinex experiments, depended on staging demonstrations that forced the eye to admit surprise. You do not argue your way past self-deception; you engineer situations where reality argues back. Double-blind protocols, error bars, preregistration, and replication are social technologies for keeping yourself honest when ego and incentives pull the other way. The method assumes you will kid yourself, so it bakes in friction.
The line also resists outcome worship. Getting the right answer by luck teaches nothing; following a rigorous method even when the result is negative builds knowledge and trust. In industry, where Land operated, the temptation to round corners is constant. Treating the lab as a place to be corrected rather than confirmed turns failure into feedback and saves companies from shipping beautiful mistakes.
Carried beyond laboratories, the lesson becomes a practical ethic. Make predictions before you act, write them down, and check them later. Seek disconfirming evidence. Invite criticism. When you feel certain, ask what result would force you to change your mind. The aim is not cynicism but humility with teeth: a structured way to protect your judgment from the most persuasive deceiver you know, yourself.
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| Topic | Science |
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