ThirstyFish

The title says it all.

In yesterday's post, I wrote that Science, despite its claims of "objectivity, inherently has to make assumptions to build a narrative or theory. The same set of "facts" can often be interpreted and build multiple different theories.

I'm sure you've read somewhere that in the year 1800, life expectancy was only 40 throughout the world. It is an often repeated but very deceiving statistic. In the year 1800, child mortality rate was extremely high. Just for the sake of the argument, let's assume that half the population lives to 80 and the other half die as infants. Can we really say that Life Expectancy is 40 years across the board? The moment you grow past infancy, wouldn't your Life Expectancy be 80? As Nassim Nicholas Taleb puts it: "Life expectancy increases aren't due to people living longer but because fewer die prematurely".

Think about that for a moment. Even if it is a "fact" that on the average people only lived 40 years in 1800, interpretation of that data could be extremely misleading. As simple as that example is, scientists regularly make such errors. Once again, Science constructs "theories" through the marriage of a bunch of facts with a set of unverified or unverifiable and subjective assumptions.

"The proof of the sun is the sun. If you require proof, don't turn your face from it." --Rumi