Feynman's lectures on the character of physical law should be something everyone sees in school.
In general we look for a new law by the following process: first we guess it, then we compute the consequences of the guess... and then we compare those computation results to experiment.
If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn't make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment its wrong, that's all there is to it.
Notice however that we never prove it right... In the future there could be a wider range of experiments, or you could compute a wider range of consequences, and you may discover then that the thing is wrong. That's why laws like Newton's laws for the motions of planets last such a long time... It took several hundred years before the slight error in the motion of Mercury was developed.
Then there is the Asimov quote : "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
The key to the quote above is that nothing is proven right.
That is the fundamental flaw with science, if you understand this, you understand science.
In science and therefore reality as we know it, nothing can ever be proven true. It is fundamentally impossible. Every single claim made by every single scientist since the beginning of science has never ever been proven true.
This “flaw” is what drives most of the debate and misunderstandings about science in the cultural and political arena. For example... No scientist can ever prove global warming to be true... it is fundamentally impossible. Hence the debate rages on endlessly.
>> In science and therefore reality as we know it, nothing can ever be proven true.
In engineering we take the science and use it to predict how a design will work. When things work as intended it is a confirmation that the science is useful, if not "correct".
To me that is what science does. It allows us to make useful predictions that can inform decisions.
Science is a process of falsification. You have a hypothesis and you attempt to falsify the hypothesis.
What you're describing is a model that has stood the test of falsification. Someone comes up with a mathematical model that can predict the future. They test that model under science to see if they can falsify the model.
If they fail to falsify the model then at best they say this model might as well be true because we couldn't determine otherwise.
That is science.
When you use the model to predict how something will happen in the real world for some real world application. That is more called "engineering."
Engineering is application, science is best attempt verification.
I think you're splitting hairs, but ok. You describe the process of science and how it produces models. I described how we use those models in engineering - not the science I suppose, but the output (useful models) from it. In a sense, engineering is hoping their efforts confirm the model not falsify it :-)
I think there is some important stuff in this, so maybe splitting hairs to explain accurately is important.
There are people who are called "scientists" who test models with scientific experiment. Then there are people are "engineers" who use the models. If our social structure splits the difference by occupation how am I splitting hairs?
Literally if you didn't run an experiment with a hypothesis you aren't doing science, and people in society therefore won't refer to you as a scientist.
Every engineer tests a hypothesis by designing things based on that hypothesis and then testing that they work as intended. We tend to use the hypothesis' that have already been elevated to the status of theory though.
I've done some Greenfield science as an engineer, and plenty of scientists do some engineering. Titles dont really mean that much to me. It's all sort of a continuum and our place on it isn't strictly defined.
Ok let's be real. You're the one splitting hairs now. There is a clear difference between what either occupation does but of course sometimes a scientist needs to do carpentry or machinist work to build the tools for his experiment. Does this make machining and carpentry the same thing as science? No.
For sure. If someone can come up with a way to prove anything to be definitively true, most of these arguments would be over.
It is this flaw in science that is the origin of all these controversial debates that surround science, religion, global warming and other controversial topics.
Nothing can be proven and therefore reality will always be open to interpretation.
Just to clarify, things can be proven false, they just can't be proven true. That's why we speak of a good scientific theory being falsifiable - there must be a way to show it's not true.
The Scientific Method then becomes a process of incremental refinement. Newton's theory of gravity didn't become "wrong" just because Einstein's theory was more accurate - heck we still teach, and use, Newton's theory to this day in both high school and college. It's useful. We just know that all bets are off when velocities approaching the speed of light are involved. Turns out that's not usually the case in everyday situations. We suspect that Einstein's theory may not be the last word on gravity either - but the cases where the theory breaks down are getting more and more extreme. It's not like apples are going to start falling up from trees because we changed our theory!
Yeah I'm already aware of this. Almost no one else is though.
Keep in mind though, Incremental refinement is not a given. There is still no way to know if each new theory is actually closer to the truth. In fact it may even be a step backwards.
Additionally limited accuracy in observation tools actually make it impossible to falsify anything either. Can you trust that the critical observation was 100% accurate? But tbh this is just splitting hairs.
I was wondering if you were going to call me out on that!
> Additionally limited accuracy in observation tools actually make it impossible to falsify anything either
That's a problem with GR too - it's true only within our current ability and accuracy to test that it's true. Better measurement may suddenly reveal something to not be true that we currently believe to be true.
> No scientist can ever prove global warming to be true
Or to be false. Focusing on "true" vs. "false" leads nowhere except, as you note, to endless debate.
The real question is, do we have models that can make reasonably accurate predictions? That is the right question for ordinary citizens, concerned about what, if any, political policies they should support or oppose, to be asking about any scientific claims.
In the case of global warming, the answer to that question is no; we have models, and they make predictions, but the predictions aren't very good, and they haven't gotten any better over the last few decades despite a lot of effort. That means we should be very careful putting much confidence in those models.
If I hypothesize that all zebras have stripes then observing one zebra with spots falsifies the entire hypothesis. This is definitive.
However, no amount of zebras that I observe with stripes can ever prove my hypothesis correct. I can observe 500 zebras all with stripes and at any point in time the 501st zebra can have spots. I can observe 1 billion zebras with stripes and the possibility still remains open that the next zebra I see has spots.
Science is not symmetric. Falsification is possible, proof is not.
Falsification of really, really simple hypotheses (like "all zebras have stripes", or the classic "all ravens are black") is possible, yes.
But no hypothesis of any real significance in science is that simple. In any scientific model of any significance, there are always ways to patch the model to account for new observations. In a model that is destined to be supplanted, the patching gets more and more cumbersome and less and less plausible over time; but there is no hard and fast breaking point at which there is too much patching, that's always a judgment call about which different scientists can disagree. Also, unless and until there is some new model available that can account for all the same observations, including the new ones, in a simpler and more intuitively plausible way, preferably also with more accurate predictions, scientists will continue to try to use the old patched model because there is no alternative.
Except science _can_ set error bounds. No, global warming can never be "true" from the perspective of 100% accurate with no room for error. Science is able to set error bounds though. The latest particle physics results come with "this theory is correct to within 99.99% of the theoretical model". That means that even if the theory is wrong, it can account for 99.99% of all observations you make. That is the power. Obviously climate change models aren't like particle physics so we don't expect such accurate error bounds (too many sources for error). However, the question you must ask is "are the error bars sufficient for the decision I have to make?".
My conclusion thus is that unlike dietary science or pop psychology, the evidence here is very likely real, despite any doubts that may persist. I could of course be wrong. That's a fundamental truth one has to admit to oneself & other peers who understand how science works. That's not a political truth that would make sense to admit because saying "I can never know but I'm pretty sure" has been weaponized into "you don't know anything & you're wrong". Same reason when speaking among science-literate friends I say "global warming" but am careful to say "climate change" to everyone else because the warming aspect got corrupted into "you said it's global warming but winter was especially cold this year".
Maybe there has been a massive social pressure within the scientific community into confirmation bias. Certainly the community does self-police & ridicule anyone who doesn't ascribe to it. Why do I think the theory is reliable & it's not a massive conspiracy (intentional or otherwise)? I trust that there's lots of very bright people who have studied the math, from within & without the field & validated the models don't have any fundamental issues of any kind (conceptual, numerical issues, computer sims are solid, etc). I trust that people outside of the field who have related degrees have validated huge swaths of it. I trust that technological advances have provided us with exponentially better sensors & monitoring and that has fed back into exponentially better simulations to validate models. And with all of that development, over the course of 20 years, the results haven't changed, no new hypothesis have borne out. The scientific community is both small & large. It's large in that there will always be some amount of bad behavior somewhere, bad or unethical science, wrong results, mistaken theories that take hold for a time, etc. It's small though in the sense that when there's a very real problem, it can be brought to light & it's really hard to suppress that knowledge. That's why the chorus about global warming has been increasing. Oil companies knew about this as a problem & suppressed their own voices to the debate because it would hurt their bottom lines. In fact, they often fund the opposition. This isn't a conspiracy theory. There are court documents showing this. A well-informed person can use all of this knowledge to make a guess about who to listen to. A less-informed person will let themselves be swayed by the opinion they want to hear & or as a "fuck you" to the scientific community for ruining their career choice.
No. This is incorrect. You're talking about model accuracy and observation accuracy.
I am talking about something far more fundamental. Using axiomatic logic and probability, you cannot prove anything in science. Even with observations that are 100% accurate with 100% precision. This literally has fundamental consequences on our interpretation of reality as we know it and has affected out perception of reality and our science as well.
This occurs because at any point in time a new observation can be made that falsifies a theory. Let's say you have a hypothesis that all zebras have stripes. You can observe 500 zebras with 100% accuracy and see that all of those zebras have stripes. But at any point in time in the future you can happen upon a hidden island that has 2 million zebras on it that has spots instead. 500 observations is minuscule in the face of 2 million and it literally renders your initial hypothesis ludicrous. Zebras are creatures that are more likely to have spots then stripes is the complete U-turn conclusion based off of new observations.
Keep in mind the new conclusion occurred regardless of how methodological and accurate your initial observations were. The accuracy of the observation is Completely and utterly irrelevant. Because at any point in time I can encounter another new island with 1 billion zebras that has stripes rendering my second conclusion completely wrong, again.
This is the fundamental flaw of science. It is far more fundamental then limited accuracy in observational measurements.
For example take newtons laws of motion. There is no 99% right or wrong on that model. Assuming that our observations are accurate, Newtons laws of motion are 100% percent wrong.
Yes they may be accurate numerically to a certain extent but the theory has ultimately been falsified and we now know relativity is a more accurate description. However, keep in mind that even relativity is not "proven" it can Never be proven and it will always be open for a complete reversal the same way Newtonian motion was.
In fact Newtons laws of motion is the perfect example. It was the ultimate example of scientific verification. All experiments pointed to the theory being completely accurate, to disbelieve the science was to disbelieve reality. It was at the time equivalent to disbelieving evolution.
This is the fundamental flaw with science. Nothing can ever truly be proven. And everything even the fundamental pillars of reality we rely on today from Newtons laws to evolution can never actually be proven to be true, and is always open for a complete rewrite.
This is the exact reason as to why people can pick and choose the reality they believe in, whether it be Christianity or evolution. Neither can in actuality be proven, nothing has and nothing ever will.
You seem to be very strong down the nihilism philosophy. I have a view point that nihilism isn't a useful philosophy & doesn't yield any particularly meaningful insights that help you find success in this world. It's very much, at least to me, of the same vein as the Omphalos hypothesis
(also known as Last Thursdayism by atheists such as myself) which says "Sure sure. You've got all these fancy theories. But how do you *know* the universe wasn't created in its current state Last Thursday & so all your measurements are meaningless?".
Worrying about an epistemological definition of "truth" that is different from the scientifically one is equally unhelpful. Scientific philosophy & the inquiry stemming from that actually yields results in any field you look into & just building on that. Worrying about a higher order definition of truth and certainty that only exists in your own mind (since no two people will agree) is irrelevant & unhelpful. Medicine has come a very long way from where it was & our understanding of it is drastically better than it was. Is it perfect? No. Is it infallible? No. Does it matter? Not really because at the end of the day it's infinitely better than where we started & continuing along this path will continue to yield results over time.
> In fact Newtons laws of motion is the perfect example. It was the ultimate example of scientific verification. All experiments pointed to the theory being completely accurate, to disbelieve the science was to disbelieve reality. It was at the time equivalent to disbelieving evolution.
I'm always fascinated by people who claim that Einstein's theory of relativity somehow undermines the bedrock of scientific inquiry when it's 100% the thing that supports it. Newton's theories weren't wrong. They were 100% correct for the environments we were testing them in. Like the all the equations behind the theory of relativity, if you turn down the speed & mass variables to every day human values, they literally turn into the same classical Newtonian mechanics equations. The *only* instance that you should be questioning the scientific validity of a field is when there's competing theories & the experiments themselves don't really help make decisions. Like dietary science. That's a field that constantly produces contradicting results. There's definitely some good advice but it's mostly hokum except for the parts that actually intersect with medical research or have really wide studies done because of the problems of limited observations. Same with pop psychology & other human-centered inquiries that don't have external sensors against which to measure results & large sample sizes to deal with the variation. Non-physical inquiries suffer very few of these problems & are easier to experiment with.
If it helps you, the scientific method of inquiry of in some ways is directly supported as a fundamental tenet of mathematics (via the fields of probability/calculus). If you sample an underlying distribution enough times with a random enough sample (no bias that's causing you to overlook things), the more the samples match your estimate of the distribution, the less likely it is that your estimate and reality diverge. That resolves, at least for me, the philosophical conundrum of "what is truth" and "have you really done enough measurements". For religious arguments, your form of argument is "the God of the gaps" or "God of the cracks". If you just focus on a crack, all you can see is all that empty space & not the bridge that the crack is a non-critical part of. Even science's philosophy is underpinned by a mathematical truth & our challenges sticking to it are our own failures, not those of science. I recognize this sounds like religion, but the difference is:
* Falsifiability. Good scientists will very quickly discourage any attempt at scientific inquiry of anything that can't be disproven through experimentation.
* Free sharing of knowledge. We're not as great here because of the economic realities of our society, but certainly better than religion organizations that tend to have more of their documentation in private vaults. That being said, this is the most fair point of criticism against scientific inquiry for me & the one where today's scientific industry gets closest to religion.
* Consistency of conclusions. It doesn't matter if a discovery fails to take hold. Over time the same thing gets rediscovered eventually. Like Calculus being simultaneously invented by Newton & Leibniz. Good ideas just have their time & inevitability comes from a build up of knowledge. Religions don't really share this property. Neither does philosophy which just has a bunch of models & no way to model/investigate them. Philosophy is useful as a hypothesis generation machine or maybe as a way to examine how humans can improve the scientific field. That's about it & we need to be quick to discard it when science starts providing answers.
* Belief or lack of it doesn't matter. Science is about making predictions. If the predictions are based on faulty science, they'll not hold up over time. If the predictions do hold up, then they're more likely to be right. Probability is where this gets tricky, especially so when polling human sentiments. That is walking a razor's edge.
Still, science is the only philosophy that's actually yielded tangible results consistently over any period of time. Religion & other philosophies have not.
> You seem to be very strong down the nihilism philosophy. I have a view point that nihilism isn't a useful philosophy & doesn't yield any particularly meaningful insights that help you find success in this world. It's very much, at least to me, of the same vein as the Omphalos hypothesis (also known as Last Thursdayism by atheists such as myself) which says "Sure sure. You've got all these fancy theories. But how do you know the universe wasn't created in its current state Last Thursday & so all your measurements are meaningless?".
What I'm talking about isn't a philosophy. This is the fundamental tenet as illustrated by academia. I'm not pulling this out of my ass. This is what educated scientists understand about science. If you don't know this you literally don't know what you're talking about. I am not arguing my opinion here, I am arguing the academic definition of science.
To prove it to you I'll literally quote Einstein:
"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."
If you don't understand why he said the above quote. You don't understand science in the same way a physicist or a scientist understands science. In fact the above was said in reference to Einsteins and newtons theories.
What einstien is basically saying is this. Science can never prove anything to be correct. It can ONLY falsify things.
>I'm always fascinated by people who claim that Einstein's theory of relativity somehow undermines the bedrock of scientific inquiry when it's 100% the thing that supports it. Newton's theories weren't wrong. They were 100% correct for the environments we were testing them in.
Your fascinated at the entire academic definition of science being different from your own personal definition? You're misunderstanding of science is the real enigma here.
Nothing is undermined. I'm not against science I am simply elucidating what science is to you in the sense that science can never prove anything to be true. Science can ONLY falsify things. It is a very limited tool, but it is also the only tool we have.
I'm an atheist like you, I get where your coming from. But you have not explored science deep enough. Look deeper into this as you are not understanding what is going on here. I am not arguing for religion or creationism or any of that BS as "valid" I am simply stating a fundamental well known flaw with science that is known by all people who know the technical definition of science.
Additionally, Newtons theory is 100% wrong in every environment. It only appears to be correct given limited accuracy of tooling. When you increase the accuracy of the observation the environment is irrelevant, it is always wrong.
>If it helps you, the scientific method of inquiry of in some ways is directly supported as a fundamental tenet of mathematics via calculus.
This is highly highly misguided. Logic and Science are completely separate. This is well known among people who understand the concept.
Logic is a game with rules axioms and a well understood domain. We create the rules and universe and therefore we're able to prove things within that universe.
Science is not the same. It is not an axiomatic game created by us. Science is the consequence of applying certain assumptions to a universe we did not create but only participate in.
We assume two things that are true in science. We assume logic is true. We assume rules like induction will always work even though we have no means of verifying it will work. We also assume probability works. We assume rolling a six sided dice will produce a certain outcome based off of probability and we again currently have no way of verify why or how this occurs. We just assume it.
Based off of these two assumptions we can create the scientific method. But this method is limited as it can only axiomatically falsify things. We can never prove anything to be true with science. This occurs, again because the domain of the real world is not limited like it is in our logical games of math. At any point in time the domain can change, shift and we can encounter a new unexpected observation that can change the entire arena.
Again, this isn't some BS I'm pulling out of my ass. This is science as Feynman and Einstein understood it. You lack understanding and I suggest you read up on the notion of what "proof" and science is.
Proof is only relevant in maths and logic, it is irrelevant in science and therefore reality as we know it. Science is the best tool we have but it is highly highly limited in the sense that it can never actually prove anything.
What ends up happening is science at best produces conclusions in the form of "We think this is true because our repeated attempts to falsify this hypothesis have failed." It can never produce anything definitive.
I find this is too simple, because it assumes the experiment is correct. Experiments can have errors and being able to doubt experiments, especially when you have disagreements between experiments, is a very important step in science.
This isn't to say that one should hold to a belief without any evidence to back it, only that we consider the possibilities that experiments themselves are flawed and take that into account, such as by designing seemingly unrelated experiments to test a single guess.
To give another Feynman quote.
>We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
>Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that ...
> In general we look for a new law by the following process: first we guess it, then we compute the consequences of the guess... and then we compare those computation results to experiment. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn't make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment its wrong, that's all there is to it.
That elides a lot of complexity, mostly around the validity of the experiment design and execution. Confounding factors, confirmation bias, selection bias, p-hacking, etc. can all skew the results in ways both overt and subtle.
The following quote from the movie 'Thank you for smoking' may illustrate:
"This is where I work, the Academy of Tobacco Studies. It was established by seven gentlemen you may recognize from C-Span. These guys realized quick if they were gonna claim cigarettes were not addictive they better have proof. This is the man they rely on, Erhardt Von Grupten Mundt. They found him in Germany. I won't go into the details. He's been testing the link between nicotine and lung cancer for thirty years, and hasn't found any conclusive results. The man's a genius, he could disprove gravity."
So no, 'if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong' is a gross oversimplification.
Not to mention that there may be very good reasons that an experiment can't (or shouldn't) be done, or that various 'natural experiments' must be relied upon.
I like it but in every theory, there is always some edge case where the theory doesn't work. In a sense, every models in natural science are wrong but some are more right than other.
I feel like authorities betraying public trust is a large part of what got us into this mess.
I trust the scientific process. I don't trust the people involved in the process and in charge of making and following policy based on scientific and technological process.
One thing that allows for this is the oft neglected "method of discovery".
The usual "scientific process" concerns itself with how to keep an experiment correct/truthful - but how do we decide what experiments to conduct in the first place? Scientific funding can be biased towards the successes of the past, and so future funding can be guided by political agendas.
Pop culture thinks science means space, chemicals, and electronics. We aren't even hearing the words of authority in this case. A scientist describing what science is doesn't sound like indoctrination or blind faith to me.
Science is a method for understanding the world, not an ideology.
I do give most non scientific people the benefit of the doubt. They are at least trying. What is really disturbing is that this is a real problem within sections of the scientific community and especially within the public relations of the scientific community. “Science Communicator” is almost synonymous with this trap. I think it stems from oversimplification and a need to generate funding for research.
It boggles the mind to see this quote by Feynman when the entire premise of the article is that this is already how we teach science and it leads to a whole host of problems.
I read the article and disagree with its conclusions about science education. I think science education isn’t actually taught the way the article says it is. At least that’s not how I was taught it in good public schools until college, at which point it was taught the way Feynman says. If it actually was taught that way at earlier points, I think we’d be in a better place.
We teach a bizarro world version of feynman’s quote, where it’s more like the way we teach the formulas in math. It’s the right formula that they’re teaching, but the way it’s taught is encouraging its use as a black box.
Asking if people read the post is against HN guidelines:
‘Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."’
I read the article. It seems to be an argument that the problems with trust in science come from teaching a kind of logical empiricism, itself a straw man, and not what you’d come away with from listening to Feynman.
There is nothing in the article that supports this claim about the cause of the ‘problem’ or even a really usable understanding of what the problem is, other than that cigarette companies have been able to make people doubt things they shouldn’t have doubted, and that climate deniers and other kinds of ‘deniers’ are doing the same building on the work of the PR firms used by the cigarette companies.
The best I can read as what the problem is, is that we think that teaching people differently could make them immune to propaganda, and so the problem is that we aren’t teaching them differently. I think this is highly questionable.
It argues that we should instead teach science based on a feminist critique.
As far as I’m concerned the article is complete bullshit. It sets up a straw man, and then argues to a completely unsupported conclusion. It’s terrible.
Having said that here’s what it touches on that is useful:
Teaching scientific method alone as ‘science’ is outdated. Science is part of public discourse and so it is important for students to understand how science works as social, sociological, and political processes, as much as it is an epistemological method.
From this point of view, I respect the various ideas that they are advancing as valid for study. However ‘valid to study’ is very different from attempting to claim that science education should be based on this ideology, and is an obvious political land-grab which must be rejected.
The article makes a bunch of naked assertions as if they are simply facts about reality, when in fact they are very much the subject of social science itself.
Consider these statements:
> Believing based on trust is a pervasive human practice, not confined to scientific inquiry.
Seems true enough, right?
> It starts in infancy, when children learn language, everyday facts, and even religious beliefs from their caregivers.
Does it? This is definitely not settled science. Obviously children learn from caregivers, but what they trust is a deeper question, and a subject of study. Also, then sources are far wider than ‘care givers’.
This seems like an attempt to anchor the conversation in a blank slate kind of conception of the emergence of belief. This is discredited in social science, but is popular in the humanities.
> Trust is only as reliable as the source of the knowledge; when that source is unreliable, we sometimes regard beliefs based on trust as the product of indoctrination.
‘Sometimes’ being the operative word.
> Trust can be eroded when there is evidence of the unreliability of the source.
Yes, but research has shown that it can be strengthened when there is evidence of the unreliability of the source, too. It depends on other factors, such as who is providing the evidence. Again this statement is simply not objective or reflective of current social science.
> Reflective knowledge should therefore include some account of the reliability of the source of knowledge.
If you delete all of the preceding elements, and just say:
Reflective knowledge should include some account of the reliability of the source of knowledge.
We are left with a reasonable proposal.
Weirdly, one which is already common amongst science students, who don’t ignore the reliability of the results on which they base their work.
I once thought that by leaving my old religion I was leaving dogma behind. But it appears that in the absence of one dogma/doctrine, people will create another.
1. The mind always tries to simplify. One way that manifests is in dogma. Many people are satisfied or just dont have the time and energy to continually update or critically assess their own beliefs (not that this is justified, just an explanation). This is the entire reason formal science education exists at the highest levels. We didnt evolve to be critical or rational. But at our best we can learn to approach it collectively.
2. Many people think that what they learn in school or from other authorities is immutable fact and that's the end of discussion. This is an unfortunate failing of the education system.
People are people. Take away any differences in appearances, beliefs, communities, etc. and people will still find reasons to divide up and seek to destroy the outsiders.
