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The Power of Truth: Lessons from a Scientist's Perspective

In the world of science, truth is paramount, as scientists learn to navigate the pitfalls of biases, expectations, and misconceptions. This article explores the importance of truth, contrasting it with the attitudes of other professions such as politics, media, advertising, and law. Discover the unique perspective scientists have in valuing truth above all else.

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The Power of Truth: Lessons from a Scientist's Perspective

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  1. Private truth is even more important. As a scientist interacting with your experiments, you receive an education in the implacability of truth and in your own capacity to be deceived by your expectations, your hopes, or just your stupidity, that is unlike any other experience I know.

  2. And you may find the worst deceit in what religious people might call inspiration or revelation. We all know the euphoria that comes from suddenly seeing something in a new light, and the more elements that seem to take part in the new pattern, the stronger the feeling. But as every scientist finds out, the feeling is not less strong for mistaken visions than for those that will survive a cold examination.

  3. You must lean over backwards, as Feynman put it, to resist belief. All this is very different from the attitude in other professions. For a politician, truth is something to hide and twist, and to tell only when it is entirely favourable. For the media, truth is of secondary importance except sometimes as a defence to an action for libel or slander.

  4. For advertising people, truth is like the pinch of baking powder in a muffin—it puffs up a mass of misdirection into something that the public will swallow. For lawyers, decisions have to be reached on incomplete and at times artificially restricted data. The legal profession insists on making witnesses swear an impossible oath about the truth, but its members do not take that oath, and its judges arc less interested in the discovery of truth than in the observation of legal form.

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