SCI-ART LAB

Science, Art, Litt, Science based Art & Science Communication

Krishna: Scientists are human beings too.

But our science training, if given in the right way, makes us think critically by overcoming all our human frailties.

However, if the training is inadequate scientists too can fall prey to cultural, traditional, emotional, political and religious conditioning of minds and behave like uneducated and untrained ordinary human beings.

There is a thing called scientific method to control such inadequacies of the human mind. A scientist can follow a superstitious life personally and privately but if s/he wants to win in the scientific world and get recognition for his/her work, s/he has to strictly follow the scientific method by overcoming his or her beliefs .

But …. some people try to overcome this by creating and publishing in junk journals, using a similar mentality people as reviewers of their work.

Scientists try to grade the journals depending on the way they publish. One way is to look at the journal rankings in Scimago (1). Good journals that strictly follow the scientific methods rank very high.

So not all research is created equal.

Although all scientific research is based on science and its methods , classifying evidence by its epistemologic strength and requiring that only the strongest types (coming from meta-analyses, systematic reviews, and randomized controlled trials) can yield strong recommendations weaker types (such as from case-control studies and anecdotal evidence) can yield only weak recommendations.

This is where the levels of evidence (2) is highly important.

Image source: compoundchem

You just cannot escape the Hawkeyes of the scientific community. You will be marked as good or bad depending on your work.

A well trained scientist can easily overcome his/her irrational beliefs.

He or she cannot succeed in the scientific world if s/he refuses to follow the scientific method and abide by the rules of science.

Scientific community doesn’t allow irrationality to rule its world.

So there are no scientific superstitions. The words are oxymoronic.

There are only some frail-minded scientists who fall on the wayside because they don’t follow the guidelines of the scientific method. We call them “pseudo-scientists”. Heard the name before?

Then there is pseudo-science, not superstitious science. Get that right first.

Footnotes:

  1. Scimago Journal & Country Rank
  2. Some Qs people asked me on science and my replies to them - part 13...

Q: Why do we experience bad luck when a black cat crosses our path?

Krishna: You don’t experience bad luck when a black cat crosses your path. You are just making wrong connections!

What has black cat to do with the accident you met? It is your carelessness or somebody else’s carelessness that caused the accident. But you want to shift the blame from you to the cat by connecting unrelated things. That’s all.

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