Patrons of Truth

"You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right."

- xkcd

Scientific research is something of an idealistic profession. You're constantly testing your own observations of the reality around you, and you're always aware that you may have to re-evaluate your current explanation for any phenomena you may encounter. That means having an open mind, and while you must always be prepared to defend your own theories, you also have to be able to accept and account for conflicting observations from another person. In essence, you are never trying to prove yourself right, but rather trying to find out what the truth is, no matter how it may invert your beliefs.

Working in science as a job complicates things. Here, you are expected to produce results. Getting results does not necessarily mean accurately predicting the outcome of an experiment before doing it; it can also mean getting an unexpected result and then figuring out what it means, and then doing a second experiment to show that the revised theory is plausible. However, the whole figuring-out process is long and painful, taking shots in the dark, as it were, so most of us would like to be correct from the beginning.

That creates a lot of pressure to "get things to work." You have a theory that something should do something you expect, and so you spend months proving that it does, even while all your experiments methodically keep failing. And it is upsetting, because you have ownership over that theory - the need for it to be right, for you to prove it - although, technically, you should have no ownership. You are supposed to be impartially seeking the truth, and therefore should be prepared to discard unsupported theories.

But it is hard to be impartial when you are working for a salary, or when you are a student on a time-limit, and when you urgently need data to publish.

It is a tough thing to balance out. And once you've discovered something important, and have been acknowledged for it, it is even harder to accept conflicting evidence which may appear later. But you have to. As a scientist, you agree that seeking the reality of the truth matters more than receiving adulation over a lie.

If you don't, you aren't a scientist. You're an attention-seeker.