Chapter 1. The need for making good choices

Knowing what to trust and what not to trust is crucial to much of our lives, yet making the right choice is often not obvious. The scientific method is a simple yet useful and proven way of making decisions about virtually any issue. And it can be mastered by anyone.

Many choices are made for us every day, and we increasingly rely on our society to make many important decisions affecting us. Decisions are made by our governments about traffic flow, school boundaries, flight zones, water quality, tolerable pesticide residues in produce, acceptable exposures to radiation, medicines that can be marketed, how much money should be allocated to schools, and on and on. And of course, private businesses make many choices that affect their futures and affect our options as well. We are largely ignorant of and immue to most of these decisions that affect us, and we largely trust that whoever is making those decisions is doing the right thing or staying within certain bounds of acceptability. At least, we don’t attempt to inquire about or interfere with the vast majority of such decisions until something goes terribly wrong for us. As individuals, we make many choices as well. However, most choices the average person faces have immediate consequences only to themselves and friends or family, and those consequences are often of little more than entertainment value.

Making the right decision can be difficult. Obviously, if we are trying to decide which movie to watch or what restaurant to dine in, the consequences of one choice versus another is trivial. It does not matter what choice is made. But in other circumstances, a decision can affect lives and livelihoods:

• Is there enough evidence that mercury-based tooth fillings are a health hazard to warrant having them replaced with non-metallic fillings?
• Is the radon gas in your home at a high enough level to warrant expensive alterations to the ventillation?
• Should we overturn rape convictions based on eyewitness testimony when DNA evidence contradicts the eyewitness accounts?
• Should we subject students and faculty to random drug-testing?
• How much alcohol can a woman drink during pregnancy without harming her child?
• Are there long-term health effects of taking drugs?
• If you had been pregnant and exposed to increased levels of radioactivity 100 miles downwind of the Chernobyl accident, would you have terminated the pregnancy? Some 250,000 Soviet citizens did.

The consequences of our answers to these questions and countless others are obviously important. Furthermore, the best answers to these kinds of questions cannot be settled without extensive study.

To a large extent, we rely on various government bodies and other social units to make these important and complicated decisions, whereas we concern ourselves chiefly with the easier and usually more trivial decisions that affect only us. However, that division of labor means that a large fraction of our populace is ill-equipped to make informed, intelligent decisions about complicated issues. We may be inclined to read or listen to the advice of others when making important decisions, but then we must face the equally difficult task of deciding who and what to trust. There is a lot of disinformation out there.

As a reflection of this poor ability to make informed decisions, there is an alarmingly large fraction of U.S. citizens who say they believe in some aspect of the "paranormal" and other scientifically foundless ideas:

(based on a 1991 poll of 1,236 Americans; Gallup, G.H. Jr, and F. Newport. 1991. Skeptical inquirer 15:137-147). Likewise, even many of us in this class at least suspect there is some validity to several of these ideas.

Belief in magic, aliens, and recent dinosaurs is undoubtedly harmless in most cases and can even be entertaining – people rarely carry such beliefs to extremes that might harm themselves, and believing in astrology can take some of the dullness out of life. But there can be many social repurcussions when a large fraction of a population does not know how to decide what is real -- wholesale criminal convictions of innocent people, failures to make medical and technical advances, failures to make other improvements in the standard of living, a decay in education systems, and much more. There are even personal ramifications of not being able to know how to make an informed decision; most generally, you become a prisoner of what others want you to think and believe. Unfortunately, our educational system reinforces this trap, because it is heavily invested into teaching students what to think, rather than how to think.

This book is not about past glories of dead scientists or the infatuations of living ones. It is instead about a method that empowers people and institutions achieve their specific goals. This method is widely known as the scientific method, though this term is a misnomer. Not only do scientists solve problems using this method, but it is also the mainstay of improvement in business and industry, and it provides a unique perspective on social institutions. Our goal in this class is to teach you how to use the scientific method and apply it to everyday health and social issues. If your career is one in which you will be called on to solve problems, whether in business, law, or government, this style of thinking should be helpful in those areas as well.

However, because of this goal, the class emphasizes critical thinking rather than rote memorization of facts. In teaching you to tackle novel situations, we will teach you to analyze arguments and descriptions of new findings. For example, you will be given short news articles and asked to interpret the articles and to identify whether the research has certain features. So if your goal in taking a nonmajors biology class is to obtain an encyclopedic knowledge of biological facts, this class is not for you. But if you want to know how to identify weaknesses of a study or how to identify potential science frauds and cons, then this class should serve that purpose. Below, we list a few more examples of the ways that this class might help you as a nonscientist to think about everyday problems.