Science is overrated.
Anyone capable of seeing the overarching trend throughout history knows that the prevailing scientific narratives of the day will always be used to justify the interests of industry first, not of man. It is only through the long arc of scientific history does any meaningful science actually prop up, as commercial interests shift with the changing needs of industry.
Not to mention science has some serious epistemological problems as anyone who has ever dabbled in analytic philosophy should know, with many of its paradigms of inquiry terribly reductionist.
Besides, a lot of what passes for “science” these days aren’t really deterministic explanations for how the world works, which is the science I grew up with, but rather a broad-brush statistical approximation of complex systems behaviour.
The need of the hour isn’t more information of which we have enough. The professional training system and institutions are already saturated with specialists - data crunchers and jargon spitters.
What we so desperately need are thinkers and wanderers or in other words, people who will make the most insightful connections and pose the most revealing questions. We need people who can help make sense of all the information that the specialists have dug out for us.
Because where the specialist can dig out useful information through his very specialised tools of inquiry, he cannot understand. Only a generalist can meaningfully integrate, relate and stitch together information coherently so that the words now read like a sentence. This is not much unlike our own brain, where the prefrontal cortex integrates and makes creative associations between far-ranging sensory stimuli and experiences conjured up by other specialised centers of the brain.
We need people with intuitive minds who have impeccable observational skills - those born with sensitive nervous systems that can detect BS from ten or some twenty miles away and ask the right question long before an answer becomes apparent for it - so as to direct all further inquiry in a more relevant direction.
For this is the bedrock science was founded upon - a holy sense of wonder and a general dissatisfaction with the prevailing explanations for the many whys and hows of life - not with peer-review, consensus and eminence.
