Building Trust in Scientific Results from the Perspective of a Scientist

The goal of this chapter is to realize that our strengths are also our challenges as human beings in that we are good at making initial “decisions” on observations, but without measurement, we can make the wrong initial conclusions when it comes to the natural world. For eons, humans have observed conditions, and changes that we use to our benefit. Over the past few hundred years through the Scientific Method, we have realized that our initial impressions can be different from the actual natural world. Furthermore, with the advancements of artificial intelligence, is this a new breakthrough, or simply a new set of tools that will need to repeat our trust-building exercises in the future? Humanity is excellent in finding a set of empirical conditions that work for a given problem, even if we don’t understand all the parameters at a given time. So, our ability to build trust in the science that we are working toward is paramount so that real discoveries can be realized regardless of what new advancements come along in the future.