Scientific concepts?

[avevale_intelligencer]

browngirl linked to this; 35 Scientific Concepts That Will Help You Understand The World (or Make You Smarter).

I've read them, and to be honest I don't feel that much smarter, or that I understand the world that much better...but then, if these are "scientific concepts" then science ain't what it used to be. Some of them are newly-jargonised versions of thuddingly obvious truisms, some of them are self-contradictory, some are so sloppily written as to be incomprehensible, and at least one is unsupported by any evidence (if you believe that correlation is not evidence of causation and are willing to entertain the notion that there are things we don't know yet).

About the only one of any significance that I could see was "Because so many scientific theories from bygone eras have turned out to be wrong, we must assume that most of today's theories will eventually prove incorrect as well." This I find greatly encouraging, since it fits my subjective bias towards a universe that makes some kind of sense, and doubtless I shall therefore find it easier to remember.

But I knew that before. And quite frankly, if the readers of Business Insider didn't know more than half of this stuff before they read the article, I think we should worry.

Comments

[tig-b.livejournal.com]

I only read the first few. While the cited authors might have published them, they are not the original thinkers/scientists who produced the ideas!

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

It doesn't claim that they are.

"The editors over at Edge.org asked some of the most influential thinkers in the world — including neuroscientists, physicists and mathematicians — what they believe are the most important scientific concepts of the modern era.

The result is "This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts To Improve Your Thinking," a compilation of nearly 200 essays exploring concepts such as the "shifting baseline syndrome" and a scientific view of "randomness."

We've highlighted 35 of the concepts here, crediting the author whose essay highlights the theory." (Emphasis mine.)

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

When you say "I've read them", do you mean you've read the actual *essays*, or just that you've read the linked article... which is really just a collection of "blurbs" attempting to hook our interest in the essays (and probably doing so with the customary near-zero levels of accuracy and/or getting-the-point of all such promotional blurbs. )