To make things worse, complete stories, ones with more details tend to be more convincing. We thus not only gravitate to stories, but stories with embellishments. Are there better (and more likely to be correct) ways of satisfying our curiosity?

Andrew Gelman gives us a bit of a hint:

Many years ago, Don Rubin convinced me that it’s a lot easier to think about “effects of causes” than “causes of effects.” For example, why did my cat die? Because she ran into the street, because a car was going too fast, because the driver wasn’t paying attention, because a bird distracted the cat, because the rain stopped so the cat went outside, etc. When you look at it this way, the question of “why” is pretty meaningless.

Similarly, if you ask a question such as, What caused World War 1, the best sort of answers can take the form of potential-outcomes analyses. I don’t think it makes sense to expect any sort of true causal answer here.

My wife and I were speculating on how long last Friday’s Rosh Hashanah service would last. We both figured on two hours, but my wife said, “Services always last longer than you expect.”

He poses the question of rational expectations. Despite years and years of experience, Hamermesh (and myself, actually) are really bad at predicting when services will end, even though the prayers are always the same.

So what gives?

Possibly, if you think services are boring, your mindset can affect your expectations about how long services will last (in which direction would depend upon the type of person you are).  Maybe we just have poor memories for this sort of thing.

Personally, I think a large part is variability within the service. At my synagogue, the first day of Rosh Hashannah services lasted a half and hour longer than they did on the second day. The rabbi was in a rush the second day and let the first day drag out. They also started late, but since they started before I got there in both cases, all I observed was the end result.

to just accept the widely accepted fact that air consists of collection of different gases you need “faith” in that science can really resolve and fully explain this kind of things

I see what he’s getting at and agree to some extent.  The general public accepts 99.9% of the basic scientific principles at face value (just intuitively) without questioning them.  But is this faith akin to religious faith?

We accept scientific principles not because we have some deep religious trust in our scientist (maybe some of the big guns have become an exception) but because the public knows, on some level, the type of rigid attitude scientific method implies.

Its a shame, but we, for the most part, no longer teach children about classic science experiments in school or even much at the university level.  I believe this lack is partly to blame for the confusion between trust and faith when it comes to science.

You cannot easily verify this fact by yourself and so you must in the end trust people that have taken to their mission to find these things out.

We can and do trust scientists to do their jobs, but this trust is not akin to faith. To have faith in the bible means you can’t check the references or repeat the experiment.  Even our most basic scientific principles, however, have been published, largely in a public forum.  Want to read about Newton’s or Maxwell’s early physics experiments?  Go to the library and you’ll see all their data and how they intepreted it.  The same goes for any branch of natural or social sciences.

In fact, here is a monthly blog carnival, The Giant’s Shoulders, dedicated to reconnecting with our scientific past.  Look through some of the posts and see how some of our most basic scientific principles used to be falsifiable, hot button issues, needed to be proven with rigor.

jaskaw, in his original post, makes this general point as well, but seems to imply that this type of trust is rational (in contrast to religious faith).  That I’m not so sure about.

Is it rational to trust scientists – who we know have political or personal agendas, who have been known to lie, publish fradulent data, use their connections to stretch the limits of high standard and peer-reviewed publications for personal gain?  We have a real scientific community, and then there’s the one the media presents us with – and it’s not always friendly – that stretches already tenuous results.  The media promises us miracle cures and cancer drugs every other week, but real progress is much slower.

Maybe people are irrational for trusting scientists so much.  99.9% of us will reach for the pill bottle without even a literature review, trusting the work of corporations and government scientists to do the proper vetting.  This is despite the fact that the media plays up reports of ineffective or dangerous drugs, because bad news sells.

Despite all of this, we approach science with a trusting, almost religious-like, blind eye.  We trust in the scientific process and the painfully slow scientific method somehow gives us great results in the end.  But, if we were truly rational about it, maybe we would reject science altogether?  And I say this as a scientist with a first hand account of what the scientific process is all about.

But it is a good thing?  I buy that it would be good for allowing “gay marriage” (in the way that all civil union contracts would be the same for all consenting adults regardless of gender) but why should the state not incentivize the survival of family structure?  How would alimony and child support payments be enforced?  I’m no expert in contract law (or any law for that matter) but treatment of these issues seems problematic – and by that I mean overlooked.  One of the highest rates of single parenthood is in poor black communities, and that doesn’t seem to be working out too well for them (here is just one report)  Maybe we need stronger incentives to retain familial structure, rather than less.

Here’s one more statement of Rizzo’s I find misrepresents reality a bit:

For many centuries the State was not involved in restricting the nature of “marriage.” The terms of marriage were the domain of the Church.

Rizzo seems to forget or neglect the fact that, for a long time, the church was essentially the state.  And I’m not even talking about medieval europe here.  For good or ill, religious attitudes still affect policy makers decisions in the United States.

This points to a larger question (I’m not particularly interesting in debating the plausibility of a real change occurring in the public’s conception of marriage law).  Without a doubt, the role of the Church in people’s lives, from daily rituals to law and governence is waning.  Therefore, is the growth of a allegedly religious-neutral State a natural way for the morality of the majority to express itself?

If we’re replacing religious doctrine with some agreed upon, democratic form of secular humanism (influenced but not dictated by traditional religious tennants) maybe common law that  governs marriage isn’t a bad thing.  Maybe leaving marriage terms up to the individual parties would generate chaos?

On the other hand, tryanny of the majority is something we’re supposed to want to avoid, as well as the assumption that politicians know best.

Truly, this a tricky issue with many layers.  Isn’t it better to discuss them all before defaulting to the standard (though admittedly defensible) libertarian-anarchist position?

PS – Hello World!