“Guys. Science is really so cool.
This is a science-y book. That’s how this relates.
I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of science stuff, especially space in relation to a project I’m working on, and can I tell you something awesome? Something that’s great about scientists that we should all adopt?
When scientists make a decision, they still pay attention to contrary evidence, and they aren’t afraid to say, “I’ve changed my mind.”
Bill Nye wrote a book, and in that book he talked about the problems with GMO’s. That’s genetically-modified organisms, not Monsanto. Monsanto MAKES GMO’s, but is not, itself, a GMO. Let’s start there.
Bill (can I call him Bill? I feel like he was pretty much my middle school science teacher) then learned some more, and he changed his mind. While he doesn’t necessarily endorse the business practices of companies like Monsanto, he thinks that GMO’s are a good way to do more with less. To grow more food that’s more nourishing with less space and less water, which is kind of his whole battle cry when it comes to environmentalism. For him, it’s not about asking people to give up their luxuries and the things they like. He grew up in a time when environmentalism was about things like not flushing your toilet and not driving a car, and the failure of that dream has caused him to rethink things and consider environmentalism as doing more with less, still having these luxuries while lessening their negative impact.
The point is, he thought one thing, then he changed his mind.
And I wish that everyone would adopt that. Give themselves that freedom to think one thing and then, later on, think something else.
Politicians are all about their track record, and that’s how they get stuck. They can’t say, “You know, I struck down a gay marriage bill 30 years ago, but since then I’ve seen that gay marriage is totes fine and nothing to worry about, and I don’t need to do the same thing over and over just to make a point about how I’ve never been wrong.”
Trevor Noah, when he was announced as the host of the Daily Show, got in some trouble for some 5 year-old tweets (http://time.com/3764913/trevor-noah-twitter-backlash/). Which I just think is stupid because it’s not hard to imagine that a comedian would say something in 2010 that he wouldn’t say in 2015. Something that he would say about South Africa WHILE LIVING THERE in 2010 might not be something he would say about South Africa in 2015 as the host of the Daily Show living in America. His circumstances have changed, his audience has changed, and most likely, his mind has changed.
And it would be the instinct of many, politicians and comedians, to scrub the old opinions, views and jokes in order to make sure and not taint the chances of a new endeavor. But the scientist? Does Bill Nye deny the opinions in his old book? NO! He writes a NEW book. As a scientist, what he says in 2015 doesn’t have to be the same things he said in 2014.
This is all over the place. Science has to respect the past, even when it was wrong, because most scientific endeavors are going to be wrong at first. And as they evolve, they have to be frank about what the last people got right, what they got wrong, and where to go next. You would never have scientific progress if you scrubbed all the mistakes and bad shit from the past and scientists in the present could only draw from successes.
It’d do us a little good to be more like scientists in this way. To ask questions that we don’t already know the answers to. To allow ourselves to make decisions on things and then change our minds later on in the face of compelling evidence.
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