The Limitations of Scientific Thinking
Can scientific thinking solve all problems?
The last two decades have brought about a renaissance for the topics of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The U.S. National Science Foundation coined the phrase “STEM” in 2001 and the use of the term has steadily grown. Educators, politicians, and the business community have all acknowledged the need for these disciplines in the 21st century.
Alongside the emergence of breakthrough technologies based on these disciplines, a new dynamic has steadily gained traction. We have seen the rise of “fake news” and opinion-based, rather than fact-based, dissemination of information. In my previous post about bias in the world of artificial intelligence, I pointed out the risks of turning our world over to algorithms developed with a biased viewpoint. This has opened us up to the proliferation of inaccurate and speculative points of view declared as “truth.”
This begs the question:
Why have fact-based deduction and rational thinking received such a bad reputation?
