Having a scientific education

Sunday, December 21st, 2008

Almost daily, I thank my God (cept I don’t have one) for my scientific education. It isn’t just the knowledge, it’s the discipline. Oh sure, any of you reading my blogs will point out errors of judgement or fact. I am only human. But I do like to think that mostly, I think in a structured and disciplined way.

The problem with a scientific education is that it is incremental which is to say that you have to grasp Fact 1 before you can understand Fact 2. Language learning is incremental too and there I am sadly lacking. So that means that if you packed in such an education early, you simply cannot keep up with what comes later.

However when you come to the arts, you can dip into them at any time of life. Maybe you do not have the deep sense of understanding that is possessed by a history graduate but you can still read a book on the American Civil War and understand it. You cannot do that, in the main, with Physics, even though Stephen Hawking has tried to bring it to the living room.

Same but in a different way with art itself. Oh OK I have no conception of da Vinci’s underlying message (and I seriously doubt if he had one) but I can still get that frisson of pleasure from his paintings. If you ain’t got a scientific education, then quantum mechanics is meaningless.

Then you get the pseudo sciences like psychology. I am not having a go at them but I do wonder if they have the rigour of pure science. Did one of those personality assessments once. One of my highest ratings was on ‘behaviourism’ and by this they meant the extent that I considered the behaviour of others when making decisions about people. That makes a lot of sense. When dealing with people, I never forget that they have priorities which are different to mine. I watch them and try to find out what is important to them. And, yes, I am sometimes guilty of exploiting this and manipulating them. BUT, I never judge nor do I seek to understand. I just leave the psychologist to find out if they fucked their mother. It is none of my business.

Is economics a science? There are days when I think it is close to alchemy. Oh yes, it is heavily mathematical but it’s like the weather. There are simply too many variables to deal with so that makes modelling difficult. Worse still, economics involves people behaviour and who can model that on anything but an individual scale?

Much of science still loses me but I can cope. At least I know P=IV and can therefore select the right fuse.