The Campaign for Simpler Science
Science is quite hard, we’ve noticed that, and then a bunch of strangers come along and criticise what you have found out and been kind enough to write down for them. It is also unfair when a lot of people like me cannot get those well-paid jobs in STEM subjects just because so much has to be learned first, which takes years and years out of your day.
This science hardness problem has led to inequality and discrimination in the labour market and people are increasingly of the opinion that this divide has become mighty unfair. After all, science hardness was invented by dead white men like Archimedes and Darwin, so it is jolly well about time we took a leaf out of those Social Justice Movement pamphlets you see blowing down the high street and did something about it.
The Campaign for Simpler Science intends to make the subject more accessible by reducing the burden of proof in all findings down to a more humanitarian and aesthetically pleasing level. Differential calculus has to go; what a lot of squiggles that is. Yes, we will return dignity to the traditional channels from which the public assemble knowledge such as reviving hearsay, old wives tales, political manifestos and accepting something is true if you read it on the internet, someone tells you it happened to them or to someone they met or it sticks to the wall best out of three, or even better seven because that’s supposed to be a lucky number.
Hypothesis: If everything gives you cancer and everything can cure cancer, wouldn’t it be reassuring to know that the official position in science is that we don’t know and you should no longer worry?
The ‘I have a hunch’ system for establishing the first standard of proof will be normalised. Who is to say a hunch cannot be correct? We think the burden of doing hard stuff should fall on the hunch-deniers instead, from now on, since they’ve had it so easy. The lesser respected ‘I have a funny feeling’ or ‘I feel it in my waters’ thresholds will henceforth be applied indisputably to the study of unquantifiable fields such as the supernatural; which includes ghosts, alternate realities, crystals, auras, diet claims, astrology, miracles, telekinesis, celebrity magazines in supermarkets and those three minute clickbait documentaries full of ads you get on Youtube.
The impact of the Simple Science movement on the economy will of course be very important. We think it would generate an exceptional efficiency saving when we no longer separate the Fiction and Non-Fiction sections of bookshops and libraries once they have become indistinguishable.
Sometimes research findings have been ignored, oh yes they have, just because scientists used a small sample group of one or got paid by a corporation to say lovely things about their product. This kind of science only works with outside funding, so it’s very upsetting for the scientist and for the company when what they’ve said in tabloid advertising isn’t completely believed.
We also kind of think science would be much easier if scientists measuring things could change what they are staring at to make it properly fit the results they are hoping for. We think this would not only make them happy but would also improve accuracy. For example, if a researcher is studying why some penguins die because they cannot find their way to the sea, it should be acceptable to glue big, red buckets onto the heads of all 300 penguins in the study and then be sure, incontrovertibly, that the reason why this is difficult for them is for the same sort of reason that science is really tricky for us.
