One big problem is the standard caveat, "We're describing how things are, and are making no value judgments. How things are should not influence how things should be or how one should react to things." This caveat is a very tricky one to work with in practice, I think.
It's not actually that difficult to deal with; most people just suck at dealing with it.
The problem is when you're trying to break into a commercial medium, you need to do something that will sell. Dry facts do not sell. Controversy does. Thus, a lot of "popular" EP consists of misinterpretations of studies.
If you actually had a study that demonstrated that most women are happier as housewives, then you could possibly conclude that it's because being a housewife makes full use of their genetic tendencies. You have to have the study, though, and it has to demonstrate exactly that, and it has to be peer-reviewed, etc. It's a lot easier for most people to sound like they know something and just spout off whatever they think will sell.
Hence, look critically at EP articles. Check the source of the article, then check the research.
The problem is when you're trying to break into a commercial medium, you need to do something that will sell. Dry facts do not sell. Controversy does. Thus, a lot of "popular" EP consists of misinterpretations of studies.
Here I totally agree. There is no quick way to say what a simple article claims is accurate or not because they never provide enough information (though it is more likely than not that they are inaccurate). The best way to determine accuracy of a conclusion is to look at an experiment and see what are they testing and comparing that to what they claim as findings.
An interesting thing to look at is what articles make it to the top of Digg and what the titles are. Quite often, the same information may be posted by more than one person, but almost invariably, the poster with the more entertaining and often controversial title (and the largest support network) will receive the greater number of diggs. Of course, my point here is the title.
With so much news out, how does one cherry pick the information they consume? Usually, we first select some filter to present the "most important" news to us. In which case, do we trust an established organization to filter our information such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.? Do we rely on the majority of people to vote on the most worthy news, such as Digg? Or do we rely on some weighted hierarchy of voting forces such as /.? Once we have this list, then what? Do we read everything? Odds are, no. We take the initiative and cherry pick out of that. We pick articles in our area of interest (sports, entertainment, business sections). And we pick articles that attract our attention, which have some hook that catches our eye as we skim down the page. And of course, here is the rub. How does the writer catch your eye? Too often it is at the sacrifice of content.
And, thus, we have the paradox of information overload. There is too much information for us to process all at once and it is too widespread for us to be eye witnesses to it all. So, to some extent, we must rely on filters. But the greater degree we rely on them, the less reliable they become. Damn it all, I cannot remember the scholar this is primarily associated with. Maybe it will occur to me later. Anyhow, the point is, it's a matter of cost. Do you sacrifice resources (time and money) to access the most accurate information possible--read the full scholarly work on a finding, watch on scene footage, talk to eye witnesses? Or, as most people do, do you sacrifice accuracy for convenience and rely on filters that select what information is worth your attention and candy coat it better for your consumption?
You can't just dump a reporter in the river to see if they drown to determine if they are reliable--that only works for witches. The truth takes effort and the only person you can 100% rely on in probably yourself.
This thread is great! I hope I can add to it in a small way.
Read The Prince of Nothing series. That'll help you see what I mean, at least I hope.
I am reading the Prince of Nothing, but, as of yet, I do not concede the predicatbility of the individual human. We can track mass patterns, but the interactions I have read of thus far strike me as improbable. People with a greater understanding of humanity can have a greater influence, but I cannot believe that a complete study of reason would make an individual infalable.
I have lead two day workshops on juggling technique that I title "Cause and Effect". What has juggling got to do with this? Well, a juggling pattern is a very complex thing. Most people don't see the individual actions that make up the pattern, they just see the paths of the balls in the air or the overall shape of the pattern.
In my workshop I teach people to go to the root cause of the problem to fix it. Without exception, every single person who has taken my workshop has been surprised just how far back in the process you can find the cause of a mistake that leads to a drop. At the start of the workshop I ask someone to show a trick they are struggling with. Once someone got up and showed a 5 hat juggling pattern, a very hard trick by anyone's standard and one I can't do.
He did the trick and dropped after about 15 throws. I said "When you get ready to start, hold your left hand higher." He tried again, and once he had dropped at 25 catches he told the workshop that he just broke his personal record with 5 hat juggling.
So how did I do it? Well, the first time he dropped it was because a hat he threw went too far forward. I spotted this was throw number 11. It was thrown too far forward because the hand was moving forward when it was thrown. The hand was moving forward because throw number 8 was also thrown too far forward, and so instead of making two distinct actions (first making a good throw, then moving the hand forward to catch), the juggler had mixed the two motions. So why had throw number 8 gone too far forward? Well, it was because throw number 5 had landed too early, and as there was less time to make a good throw, the juggler had let go of throw number 8 a bit early to have enough time to catch. Due to physics, letting go too early when swinging your arm up makes the object go forward (just take my word for it). There are two possible causes for the early arrival of throw 5: it was thrown early or it was thrown too low. I could see right away it was thrown too low. Why? Throw number 5 is the last "first" throw of an object, but it is still "caused" by throw number two, the first throw from the left hand. Again the mistake was due to the timing of the incoming hat, and he was doing a faster but less powerful throw, but this time it was because the incoming hat was thrown too late, not too low. I realized it was thrown too late because the timing of the start of the first "down up" motion of the left hand was too late. I could have said "Start the action with your left hand sooner" but I thought his rhythm was pretty good and didn't want to upset that. So I told him a new start position for his left hand and that did the same thing: start the same time but go a shorter distance. This wouldn't be a problem with balls or rings but hats are made of felt so are a bit floppy and are harder to control and they change direction a bit slower than a solid object. The root cause was "This juggler is ignorant of the differences in the physical properties of plastic and felt." Or another step back would be "This juggler wants to juggle hats" although at that point it becomes less helpful to give the advice "Juggle rings instead!"
Did you get all that? Probably not. I worked out all of those causes and effects in a pretty complex system within a few seconds. I didn't know when he began when he would drop, but once he did drop I pictured the entire event in my mind, worked my way back and remembered the position of his left hand. I can do this because I've been juggling for 16 years, spend a lot of time helping people, and have also spent a lot of time training and breaking juggling world records. When at a show at a juggling event, a juggler on stage drops, half the audience has already seen it coming before it happens. It is funny to hear the reactions of those watching, as you can tell who is an experienced juggler by when they sigh before a drop is made. Non-jugglers find it amazing. Like when two people are passing, juggling a pattern between two people, non-jugglers think the person who drops the most is the worst juggler. This is most often the opposite of the truth, as the person who dropped is the one trying to catch the crap throws of the bad juggler.
In other fields the same thing happens: A novice reversing a three trailer rig. It looks great to me, but the expert watching says "Nah, it's all over!" way before I saw anything wrong. Here is a video of someone with the same expert knowledge doing a much better job.
What makes the human mind different? It is a very complex system, sure, but if someone was bred over 50 generations, and over those same generations a set of skills were defined and refined on how to spot the same signs in people rather than trucks or juggling patterns? And the person was trained from birth to be an expert in those signs? Sure, it is science fiction in the book (though mixed with fantasy elements) but it isn't inconceivable.
In juggling, I see the darkness that comes before. The truck expert saw the darkness that came before. By influencing the earlier state of a complex system, with enough knowledge it is possible to predictably change the outcome. Humans are just a bigger challenge.
PS. If you want to read more fiction on this subject, check out Dune or the Neverness books by David Zindell.
Ladyobsolete: Great points. The only way to determine what is valid information and what isn't is to look at any article critically, but with so much information out there, you can become paralyzed with choices and just eventually say "the hell with this!" There's a great TED lecture about the problem of choice in the information age.
We deal with this problem in the food safety field. The push is increasingly to inform consumers; the problem is that information is useless without the ability to interpret and apply it. "Organic" food is an excellent example; people see something labeled as "organic" and assume it must be better for them, because that's what popular science tells them. If you care to read the riveting hundreds of pages (7 CFR 205, for the curious) of regulations, and had the science knowledge to interpret them, you'd understand that "organic" has next to nothing to do with food safety or nutrition.
The solution I see is that we need to educate people first, and inform them second. We have all this information, but most people don't know what to do with it, and the few things they DO know to do with it lead to some scary conclusions.
The real crux comes back to what I said before: I cannot believe in "free will." However, this is not exactly apracticalway to live, so I sort of accept that I'm at least partially lying to myself, and go from there. The "soft sciences" all accept that selfsame lie. The hard sciences have trained me to be aware of it, but as a person, I recognize that it's not very practical to live that way.
Is this not at least a little like believing in a religion or in parts of a religion? The rational person might understand that he is lying to himself by believing in a religion or in picking and choosing parts of a religion to believe, but he might have decided that it is easier to live with the comforts of belief.
We deal with this problem in the food safety field. The push is increasingly toinformconsumers; the problem is that information isuselesswithout the ability to interpret and apply it.
This is why I think the caveat is so difficult. For many people, truth is useless and irrelevant unless it leads to a should. A study outlining which plants are poisonous has the built-in should "should not eat if you want to live." If people didn't care if they lived or died, there would be no should, but they would also not care about whether the study was true, or in any sort of efforts to increase their understanding of that truth. Besides the minority with an intellectual fixation on Truth for Truth's sake, people interested in the truth are looking to modify behaviors based on new shoulds created by that truth. This also means that whoever has control of the popular understanding of what is true has a great deal of influence on the actions of others, which politicizes the whole process.
The solution I see is that we need toeducatepeople first, and inform them second. We have all this information, but most people don't know what to do with it, and the few things they DO know to do with it lead to some scary conclusions.
Absolutely. I am an advocate of media literacy: teaching people how to consume media, to recognize reliable information from unreliable information, etc. While it is valuable to learn, but too many educational institutions only teach people to take media content and accept it at face value rather than asking who made this work and to what ends. This equally important to the actual content to be consumed since it may add or take away from the validity of the information.
I wonder what the strip for the Humanities and the Arts would look like..... Hmmmm?
AWESOME!!! And decidedly more aesthetically appealing.
(Not to say that I don't like xkcd. I tend to span the disciplines.)
I wonder what the strip for the Humanities and the Arts would look like..... Hmmmm?
AWESOME!!! And decidedly more aesthetically appealing. (Not to say that I don't like xkcd. I tend to span the disciplines.)
I double majored in Theatre (Acting & Directing Track and Technical & Design Track) with minors in Philosophy and English. While I appreciate the Sciences, I am much more of an Arts and Humanities gal! ^_^
*Nerdly voice* OMG!!! YOU FORGOT TO LINK TO TEH ALT TEXT!?! YOU HAVE RUINED THE MASTERPIECE OF MONROE'S GENIUS! HOW DARE YOU!! Now if you will excuse me, I have a super secret XKCD meeting where you can only find the GPS coordinates if you factor the prime numbers of the first 200 comic link ID's and then normalize the vectors of each respective longitude and latitude. *End Nerdly Voice*
It's perfectly linked, I can see it right there. Can't you? Sure, one could make an argument that "OMG TEH TITLE ES PART OF TEH LINKS!" but that's not true, for the only part of the tag that actually links anywhere is the src attribute. On the other hand I agree, it's just as easy to just select the image, right-click, View Selection Source and double click the img tag line. I have since stopped bothering people to supply the title of the comics, since those who have already read the comic already read the entire thread on the XKCD forums, and those who haven't probably don't care and won't notice if it's missing or not.
For those who care:
On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.
The real crux comes back to what I said before: I cannot believe in "free will." However, this is not exactly apracticalway to live, so I sort of accept that I'm at least partially lying to myself, and go from there. The "soft sciences" all accept that selfsame lie. The hard sciences have trained me to be aware of it, but as a person, I recognize that it's not very practical to live that way.
Is this not at least a little like believing in a religion or in parts of a religion? The rational person might understand that he is lying to himself by believing in a religion or in picking and choosing parts of a religion to believe, but he might have decided that it is easier to live with the comforts of belief.
You're right. I have no problem with people following a religion because it makes their life easier; I only have issues with religions where it attempts to explain things that we can explain more thoroughly and, well, correctly. That, and when religions breed hatred and intolerance. Oh, and when religious fanatics kill people who don't believe in their BS. I have problems with that as well. As long as you abandon a religious belief when a scientific belief contradicts it, I don't really give a rat's ass what you pray to; if it helps you deal with life, go for it.
Both religion and science are branches of philosophy. Religion USED to be the way we explained things to people, and it's been around for a while. Science is an outgrowth of skeptical philosophy that seeks to explain things in a more rational way. A major difference is that religion offers answers, while science generates more questions. Science also generates explanations, but those explanations rarely have the ability to answer things in the way most people like.
Really, though, the main difference is in uncertainty. The consequences of Cogito Ergo Sum mean that there's not a whole lot we can "know" with certainty. Science accepts this principle, and then attempts to explain things rationally from there. Essentially, the philosophy of science is to assume as little as possible in order to understand reality. Even then, we keep track of the things we assume, and that all gets rolled into our uncertainty factor. There is always uncertainty in science, as there is necessarily quite a bit of uncertainty in existence.
Most religions, at least the way they're packaged and sold, exist to quell uncertainty by offering fake certainty. Religious philosophy makes more assumptions than scientific philosophy, so that it can appeal to people's emotions rather than people's intellect. All living creatures seek certainty and stability, and fight against things that upset balance; it's very natural that religious philosophies are popular, as they provide a (false) sense of security where more intellectual pursuits, like science, only provide doubt and uncertainty. This unfortunate tendency leads a lot of people to believe that there actually IS a thing such as "certainty," at least beyond Cogito Ergo Sum, and so we get a lot of misconceptions about science because people think it's unreliable. In reality, the scientific method will generate the most "real" knowledge a human can have; anything else makes more assumptions and so is less accurate overall.
So, if a rational person wants to "believe" in a religion for purely practical purposes, I'm all for it. My only beef is when that belief attempts to contradict what we otherwise know about reality, or when they try to force that belief on other people, or harm other people for not holding the same belief. The latter two examples arise out of an instinctual need for stability, and we need to educate people as to how they can find stability in the face of the myriad uncertainties of science.
We deal with this problem in the food safety field. The push is increasingly toinformconsumers; the problem is that information isuselesswithout the ability to interpret and apply it.
This is why I think the caveat is so difficult. For many people, truth is useless and irrelevant unless it leads to a should. A study outlining which plants are poisonous has the built-in should "should not eat if you want to live." If people didn't care if they lived or died, there would be no should, but they would also not care about whether the study was true, or in any sort of efforts to increase their understanding of that truth. Besides the minority with an intellectual fixation on Truth for Truth's sake, people interested in the truth are looking to modify behaviors based on new shoulds created by that truth. This also means that whoever has control of the popular understanding of what is true has a great deal of influence on the actions of others, which politicizes the whole process.
There aren't very many scientists interested in Truth for Truth's sake, either. "Science for the sake of science" has a hard time securing funding.
As I mentioned above, science is a branch of philosophy, but it's applied philosophy; so is religion, but that's a different scenario. Science is the application of skeptical philosophy to understand as fully and completely as possible all the underlying mechanics of existence, so that we can deal with problems in that existence. If stuff didn't go wrong for humans, we wouldn't really need science. As it is, we have questions and problems, and science is applied to find real, viable solutions.
The problem with reality is that it's uncertain, and that makes most people uncomfortable. When facts are generated from a study, the tendency is for people to change the fact to fit what they already think they know, rather than change their beliefs in the face of new evidence. I would say that it's not that people want facts to lead to any "should;" rather, they want facts that fit their idea of "should." That's why it's hard for most people to look at a purely scientific conclusion and not immediately make it lead into their own idea of "should."
The "should" of science is generally a Secular Humanist perspective: do the thing that will be good for people and minimize hardship. It's intensely important to address science in that very neutral, often cold tone; if we start putting our own spin on data, we lose that Secular Humanist perspective and start favoring some groups over others.
Hence, this is why we need to properly educate people in the sciences. If you train people to think more like scientists, they'll better understand scientific perspectives, and (hopefully) not be so quick to look at things from a so heavily biased perspective. A very pie-in-the-sky idea, I know, but if we're going to have goals, they might as well be lofty, eh?
Comments
The problem is when you're trying to break into a commercial medium, you need to do something that will sell. Dry facts do not sell. Controversy does. Thus, a lot of "popular" EP consists of misinterpretations of studies.
If you actually had a study that demonstrated that most women are happier as housewives, then you could possibly conclude that it's because being a housewife makes full use of their genetic tendencies. You have to have the study, though, and it has to demonstrate exactly that, and it has to be peer-reviewed, etc. It's a lot easier for most people to sound like they know something and just spout off whatever they think will sell.
Hence, look critically at EP articles. Check the source of the article, then check the research.
An interesting thing to look at is what articles make it to the top of Digg and what the titles are. Quite often, the same information may be posted by more than one person, but almost invariably, the poster with the more entertaining and often controversial title (and the largest support network) will receive the greater number of diggs. Of course, my point here is the title.
With so much news out, how does one cherry pick the information they consume? Usually, we first select some filter to present the "most important" news to us. In which case, do we trust an established organization to filter our information such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.? Do we rely on the majority of people to vote on the most worthy news, such as Digg? Or do we rely on some weighted hierarchy of voting forces such as /.? Once we have this list, then what? Do we read everything? Odds are, no. We take the initiative and cherry pick out of that. We pick articles in our area of interest (sports, entertainment, business sections). And we pick articles that attract our attention, which have some hook that catches our eye as we skim down the page. And of course, here is the rub. How does the writer catch your eye? Too often it is at the sacrifice of content.
And, thus, we have the paradox of information overload. There is too much information for us to process all at once and it is too widespread for us to be eye witnesses to it all. So, to some extent, we must rely on filters. But the greater degree we rely on them, the less reliable they become. Damn it all, I cannot remember the scholar this is primarily associated with. Maybe it will occur to me later. Anyhow, the point is, it's a matter of cost. Do you sacrifice resources (time and money) to access the most accurate information possible--read the full scholarly work on a finding, watch on scene footage, talk to eye witnesses? Or, as most people do, do you sacrifice accuracy for convenience and rely on filters that select what information is worth your attention and candy coat it better for your consumption?
You can't just dump a reporter in the river to see if they drown to determine if they are reliable--that only works for witches. The truth takes effort and the only person you can 100% rely on in probably yourself.
In my workshop I teach people to go to the root cause of the problem to fix it. Without exception, every single person who has taken my workshop has been surprised just how far back in the process you can find the cause of a mistake that leads to a drop. At the start of the workshop I ask someone to show a trick they are struggling with. Once someone got up and showed a 5 hat juggling pattern, a very hard trick by anyone's standard and one I can't do.
He did the trick and dropped after about 15 throws. I said "When you get ready to start, hold your left hand higher." He tried again, and once he had dropped at 25 catches he told the workshop that he just broke his personal record with 5 hat juggling.
So how did I do it? Well, the first time he dropped it was because a hat he threw went too far forward. I spotted this was throw number 11. It was thrown too far forward because the hand was moving forward when it was thrown. The hand was moving forward because throw number 8 was also thrown too far forward, and so instead of making two distinct actions (first making a good throw, then moving the hand forward to catch), the juggler had mixed the two motions. So why had throw number 8 gone too far forward? Well, it was because throw number 5 had landed too early, and as there was less time to make a good throw, the juggler had let go of throw number 8 a bit early to have enough time to catch. Due to physics, letting go too early when swinging your arm up makes the object go forward (just take my word for it). There are two possible causes for the early arrival of throw 5: it was thrown early or it was thrown too low. I could see right away it was thrown too low. Why? Throw number 5 is the last "first" throw of an object, but it is still "caused" by throw number two, the first throw from the left hand. Again the mistake was due to the timing of the incoming hat, and he was doing a faster but less powerful throw, but this time it was because the incoming hat was thrown too late, not too low. I realized it was thrown too late because the timing of the start of the first "down up" motion of the left hand was too late. I could have said "Start the action with your left hand sooner" but I thought his rhythm was pretty good and didn't want to upset that. So I told him a new start position for his left hand and that did the same thing: start the same time but go a shorter distance. This wouldn't be a problem with balls or rings but hats are made of felt so are a bit floppy and are harder to control and they change direction a bit slower than a solid object. The root cause was "This juggler is ignorant of the differences in the physical properties of plastic and felt." Or another step back would be "This juggler wants to juggle hats" although at that point it becomes less helpful to give the advice "Juggle rings instead!"
Did you get all that? Probably not. I worked out all of those causes and effects in a pretty complex system within a few seconds. I didn't know when he began when he would drop, but once he did drop I pictured the entire event in my mind, worked my way back and remembered the position of his left hand. I can do this because I've been juggling for 16 years, spend a lot of time helping people, and have also spent a lot of time training and breaking juggling world records. When at a show at a juggling event, a juggler on stage drops, half the audience has already seen it coming before it happens. It is funny to hear the reactions of those watching, as you can tell who is an experienced juggler by when they sigh before a drop is made. Non-jugglers find it amazing. Like when two people are passing, juggling a pattern between two people, non-jugglers think the person who drops the most is the worst juggler. This is most often the opposite of the truth, as the person who dropped is the one trying to catch the crap throws of the bad juggler.
In other fields the same thing happens:
A novice reversing a three trailer rig. It looks great to me, but the expert watching says "Nah, it's all over!" way before I saw anything wrong. Here is a video of someone with the same expert knowledge doing a much better job.
What makes the human mind different? It is a very complex system, sure, but if someone was bred over 50 generations, and over those same generations a set of skills were defined and refined on how to spot the same signs in people rather than trucks or juggling patterns? And the person was trained from birth to be an expert in those signs? Sure, it is science fiction in the book (though mixed with fantasy elements) but it isn't inconceivable.
In juggling, I see the darkness that comes before. The truck expert saw the darkness that came before. By influencing the earlier state of a complex system, with enough knowledge it is possible to predictably change the outcome. Humans are just a bigger challenge.
PS. If you want to read more fiction on this subject, check out Dune or the Neverness books by David Zindell.
We deal with this problem in the food safety field. The push is increasingly to inform consumers; the problem is that information is useless without the ability to interpret and apply it. "Organic" food is an excellent example; people see something labeled as "organic" and assume it must be better for them, because that's what popular science tells them. If you care to read the riveting hundreds of pages (7 CFR 205, for the curious) of regulations, and had the science knowledge to interpret them, you'd understand that "organic" has next to nothing to do with food safety or nutrition.
The solution I see is that we need to educate people first, and inform them second. We have all this information, but most people don't know what to do with it, and the few things they DO know to do with it lead to some scary conclusions.
luke: Good post. Interesting stuff.
Also, mad respect for the juggling skills.
I'll bet this strip is displayed on every Math and Physics professor's office door.
(Not to say that I don't like xkcd. I tend to span the disciplines.)
Now if you will excuse me, I have a super secret XKCD meeting where you can only find the GPS coordinates if you factor the prime numbers of the first 200 comic link ID's and then normalize the vectors of each respective longitude and latitude. *End Nerdly Voice*
For those who care:
Both religion and science are branches of philosophy. Religion USED to be the way we explained things to people, and it's been around for a while. Science is an outgrowth of skeptical philosophy that seeks to explain things in a more rational way. A major difference is that religion offers answers, while science generates more questions. Science also generates explanations, but those explanations rarely have the ability to answer things in the way most people like.
Really, though, the main difference is in uncertainty. The consequences of Cogito Ergo Sum mean that there's not a whole lot we can "know" with certainty. Science accepts this principle, and then attempts to explain things rationally from there. Essentially, the philosophy of science is to assume as little as possible in order to understand reality. Even then, we keep track of the things we assume, and that all gets rolled into our uncertainty factor. There is always uncertainty in science, as there is necessarily quite a bit of uncertainty in existence.
Most religions, at least the way they're packaged and sold, exist to quell uncertainty by offering fake certainty. Religious philosophy makes more assumptions than scientific philosophy, so that it can appeal to people's emotions rather than people's intellect. All living creatures seek certainty and stability, and fight against things that upset balance; it's very natural that religious philosophies are popular, as they provide a (false) sense of security where more intellectual pursuits, like science, only provide doubt and uncertainty. This unfortunate tendency leads a lot of people to believe that there actually IS a thing such as "certainty," at least beyond Cogito Ergo Sum, and so we get a lot of misconceptions about science because people think it's unreliable. In reality, the scientific method will generate the most "real" knowledge a human can have; anything else makes more assumptions and so is less accurate overall.
So, if a rational person wants to "believe" in a religion for purely practical purposes, I'm all for it. My only beef is when that belief attempts to contradict what we otherwise know about reality, or when they try to force that belief on other people, or harm other people for not holding the same belief. The latter two examples arise out of an instinctual need for stability, and we need to educate people as to how they can find stability in the face of the myriad uncertainties of science. There aren't very many scientists interested in Truth for Truth's sake, either. "Science for the sake of science" has a hard time securing funding.
As I mentioned above, science is a branch of philosophy, but it's applied philosophy; so is religion, but that's a different scenario. Science is the application of skeptical philosophy to understand as fully and completely as possible all the underlying mechanics of existence, so that we can deal with problems in that existence. If stuff didn't go wrong for humans, we wouldn't really need science. As it is, we have questions and problems, and science is applied to find real, viable solutions.
The problem with reality is that it's uncertain, and that makes most people uncomfortable. When facts are generated from a study, the tendency is for people to change the fact to fit what they already think they know, rather than change their beliefs in the face of new evidence. I would say that it's not that people want facts to lead to any "should;" rather, they want facts that fit their idea of "should." That's why it's hard for most people to look at a purely scientific conclusion and not immediately make it lead into their own idea of "should."
The "should" of science is generally a Secular Humanist perspective: do the thing that will be good for people and minimize hardship. It's intensely important to address science in that very neutral, often cold tone; if we start putting our own spin on data, we lose that Secular Humanist perspective and start favoring some groups over others.
Hence, this is why we need to properly educate people in the sciences. If you train people to think more like scientists, they'll better understand scientific perspectives, and (hopefully) not be so quick to look at things from a so heavily biased perspective. A very pie-in-the-sky idea, I know, but if we're going to have goals, they might as well be lofty, eh?