何谓科学？你还相信科学吗？

何谓科学？你还相信科学吗？
阿图·葛文德，白宫最年轻的健康政策顾问、影响奥巴马医改政策的关键人物、受到金融大鳄查理·芒格大力褒奖的医学工作者、《时代周刊》2010年全球100位影响力人物榜单中唯一的医生、哈佛公共健康学院教授、哈佛医学院教授、世界卫生组织全球病患安全挑战项目负责人、《纽约客》SLATE杂志医学专栏作家、美国麦克阿瑟天才奖获得者、2003年美国具佳短篇奖得主、2002及2009年美国最佳科学短篇奖得主、2009年荣获哈斯丁斯中心大奖，2004年被《新闻周刊》评为“20位具影响力的南亚人物”，2010年入选《时代周刊》评选的“100位具影响力人物”。

代表作品有医生三部曲《最好的告别》《医生的修炼》《医生的精进》。

下面这篇文章是葛文德于2016年6月10日在加州理工学院毕业典礼发表的演讲，讲述了科学面临的公共性难题，并阐述了如何重塑公众对于科学的信任。

撰文：Atul Gawande
译者：朱小钊
The mistrust of science
科学的信任危机
If this place has done its job—and I suspect it has—you’re all scientists now. Sorry, English and history graduates, even you are, too. Science is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation. Th e thing is, that isn’t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive. It has to be learned. Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense. Common sense once told us that the sun moves across the sky and that being out in the cold produced colds. But a scientific mind recognized that these intuitions were only hypotheses. They had to be tested.
加州理工的同学们，我相信贵校已经把你们都培养成了合格的科学家。

是的，英语系和历史系的毕业生们，你们也是科学家。

因为科学不是一门学科，也非一种职业。

科学需要系统的思维方式，旨在通过检测和事实观察来构建知识体系，解释宇宙现象。

科学不同于日常的思维方式，是非自然、反直觉、后天习得的。

科学的解释往往站在神学、经验和常识的对立面。

常识告诉我们太阳每天都在天空中移动，待在寒冷的室外会感冒，但富有科学思维的人会意识到这些常识不过是一些有待验证的假设罢了。

当我离开家乡俄亥俄去上大学的时候，最令我不安的是，无论是自然界还是人类社会，我之前对世界运作的多数认知都大错特错。

我向我的教授和同学请教，并改变了之前错误的观念。

学有所成的我回家后告诉我的父母，他们此前信奉的观点其实是错误的。

然而，我也只是给他们灌输了另一套理论罢了。

我花了很长时间才意识到科学家独特的思维方式。

伟大的物理学家埃德温·哈勃在加州理工学院1938年的毕业典礼上这样描述科学家：“无论对于他人还是自己的观点，科学家都有持有合理的怀疑态度、审慎的论断和严谨的想象力。

”即科学家有着实验性而非律师般争论性的思维方式。

As a student, this seemed to me more than a way of thinking. It was a way of being—a weird way of being. You are supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much. You are supposed to suspend judgment, yet exercise it. Ultimately, you hope to observe the world with an open mind, gathering facts and testing your predictions and expectations against them. Then you make up your mind and either affirm or reject the ideas at hand. But you also hope to accept that nothing is ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probable knowledge. A contradictory piece of evidence can always emerge. Hubble said it best wh en he said, “The scientist explains the world by successive approximations.”
这对于学生来说，这不单是一种思维方式，更是一种生活方式，
而且是一种与众不同的生活方式。

你应该拥有一定的质疑能力和想象力，不要急于盖棺定论，而是不断进行验证，最终你会尝试用更开放的心态去观察世界，收集事实来验证你的预言和期望，再决定是否接受自己的观点。

但是你也要学会接受没有什么是绝对定论的，所有的知识都只是目前我们能得到的最合理的解释，任何结论都可能随时被推翻。

哈勃对此有过精妙的评述：“科学家只能不断接近世界的真相。

”The scientific orientation has proved immensely powerful. It has allowed us to nearly double our lifespan during the past century, to increase our global abundance, and to deepen our understanding of the nature of the universe. Yet scientific knowledge is not necessarily trusted. Partly, that’s because it is incomplete. But even where the knowledge provided by science is overwhelming, people often resist it—sometimes outright deny it. Many people continue to believe, for instance, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that childhood vaccines cause autism (they do not); that people are safer owning a gun (they are not); that genetically modified crops are harmful (on balance, they have been beneficial); that climate change is not happening (it is).
科学的无穷力量早已彰显。

得益于科学发展，人类的寿命在过去一个世纪里延长了一倍，全球资源更加丰富，人类对于宇宙本质的理解也更加深入。

诚然，科学知识未必完全可信，因为知识本身也在不断更迭发展中。

可是，即便科学知识再有说服力，人们依旧会拒绝接受科学，甚至有时会彻底否认科学。

比如说，尽管大量证据表明接种疫苗与儿童自闭症无关，但很多人仍然相信疫苗是儿童自闭症的罪魁祸首；很多人认为公民持枪能保平安，而事实并非如此；总体来说，转基因作物利大于弊，人们却依旧认为转基因产品有害；气候变化正在发生，但仍有人否认。

Vaccine fears, for example, have persisted despite decades of research showing them to be unfounded. Some twenty-five years
ago, a statistical analysis suggested a possible association between autism and thimerosal, a preservative used in vaccines to prevent bacterial contamination. The analysis turned out to be flawed, but fears took hold. Scientists then carried out hundreds of studies, and found no link. Still, fears persisted. Countries removed the preservative but experienced no reduction in autism—yet fears grew. A British study claimed a connection between the onset of autism in eight children and the timing of their vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella. That paper was retracted due to findings of fraud: the lead author had falsified and misrepresented the data on the children. Repeated efforts to confirm the findings were unsuccessful. Nonetheless, vaccine rates plunged, leading to outbreaks of measles and mumps that, last year, sickened tens of thousands of children across the U.S., Canada, and Europe, and resulted in deaths.
比如刚才提到的疫苗恐惧情绪，已被数十年来大量的研究证明是无稽之谈。

大约25年前，一份统计分析报告指出自闭症与用作疫苗防腐抗菌剂的硫汞撒可能存在关联。

虽然这份报告之后被指出存在分析错误，但人们对疫苗的恐惧却由此扎根。

此后，科学家们进行了数百次研究，都没有发现自闭症和疫苗之间存在任何关联。

然而，这种恐惧依然存在。

那些从疫苗中移除了硫柳汞的国家，自闭症病例并未减少，恐惧情绪仍在蔓延。

此后，一份英国的研究声称他们发现8名儿童患上自闭症与他们接种麻疹、流行性腮腺炎、风疹疫苗的时间点之间存在关联。

但由于第一作者伪造并篡改了相关研究数据，这篇论文最终因虚假内容被撤稿。

后来大量重复的实验并没有得出同样的结论（比如著名的TED演讲：肢体语言塑造自己，被证明结论不可重复）。

即便如此，疫苗接种率仍旧急转直下，导致2015年麻疹和腮腺炎在美国、加拿大和欧洲再度爆发，数以万计的儿童染病，甚至死亡。

People are prone to resist scientific claims when they clash with intuitive beliefs. They don’t see measles or mumps around
anymore. They do see children with autism. And they see a mom who says, “My child was perfectly fine until he got a vaccine and became autistic.”
当直觉和科学发生冲突时，人们倾向于抵制科学。

大众只看到自闭症患儿，全然无视麻疹和腮腺炎。

他们只记得一位妈妈说过：“我家孩子原来很健康，就是打了疫苗后才得了自闭症。

”
Now, you can tell them that correlation is not causation. You can say that children get a vaccine every two to three months for the first couple years of their life, so the onset of any illness is bound to follow vaccination for many kids. You can say that the science shows no connection. But once an idea has got embedded and become widespread, it becomes very difficult to dig it out of people’s brains—especially when they do not trust scientific authorities. And we are experiencing a significant decline in trust in scientific authorities.现在，你可以告诉他们接种疫苗和自闭症之间并不存在因果关系。

小孩在头几岁时几乎每两三个月就要接种一次疫苗，所以不少疾病都会恰巧发生在接种疫苗以后。

在科学上，这两者并不存在必然联系。

但是一旦“疫苗会导致自闭症”这个说法出现并普及后，你便很难把它从人们脑海中清除干净，特别是当那些人并不相信科学权威的时候。

现在，我们正在经历一场大众对科学权威的信任危机。

The sociologist Gordon Gauchat studied U.S. survey data from 1974 to 2010 and found some deeply alarming trends. Despite increasing education levels, the public’s trust in the scientific community has been decreasing. This is particularly true among conservatives, even educated conservatives. In 1974, conservatives with college degrees had the highest level of trust in science and the scientific community. Today, they have the lowest.
美国社会学家戈登·高查特研究了从1974年到2010年的调查数
据，发现了一些令人担忧的趋势。

尽管教育水平在提高，但公众对科学界的信任度却在下降，在保守派中尤其如此，即便是其中受过良好教育的保守派。

1974年，拥有本科学历的保守派对科学和科学界的信任度是所有调查群体中最高的。

但是今天，这群人恰恰是最不信任科学的。

Today, we have multiple factions putting themselves forward as what Gauchat describes as their own cultural domains, “generating their own knowledge base that is often in conflict with the cultural authority of the scientific community.” Some are religious groups (challenging evolution, for instance). Some are industry groups (as with climate skepticism). Others tilt more to the left (such as those that reject the medical establishment). As varied as these groups are, they are all alike in one way. They all harbor sacred beliefs that they do not consider open to question.
如高查特所言，如今社会上的众多派系都一套自创的理论体系，这些理论知识的根基与科学界主流文化相悖。

其中有质疑进化论的宗教组织，质疑气候变化的工业组织，还有一些抗拒医疗机构的左翼组织。

这些组织尽管形式多样，但其实都如出一辙，都认为他们的信仰是神圣不容置疑的。

To defend those beliefs, few dismiss the authority of science. They dismiss the authority of the scientific community. People don’t argue back by claiming divine authority anymore. They argue back by claiming to have the truer scientific authority. It can make matters incredibly confusing. You have to be able to recognize the difference between claims of science and those of pseudoscience.
为了捍卫这些信仰，他们并没有直接蔑视科学的权威性，而是选择挑战科学家的权威。

这些人不再通过宣扬神的权威来反驳科学，而是声称他们拥有真正的科学权威。

这种说法极易混淆视听。

所以你必
须学会如何识别科学和伪科学言论之间的差异。

Sc ience’s defenders have identified five hallmark moves of pseudoscientists. They argue that the scientific consensus emerges from a conspiracy to suppress dissenting views. They produce fake experts, who have views contrary to established knowledge but do not actually have a credible scientific track record. They cherry-pick the data and papers that challenge the dominant view as a means of discrediting an entire field. They deploy false analogies and other logical fallacies. And they set impossible expectations of research: when scientists produce one level of certainty, the pseudoscientists insist they achieve another.
科学的捍卫者们指出了伪科学的五大典型特征。

第一，伪科学家认为科学共识是打压异见的阴谋产物；第二，有伪科学就有伪专家，他们毫无实据地挑战现有知识体系；第三，他们会刻意挑选一些数据和论文，断章取义来挑战主流观点，以此诋毁整个科学领域。

再者，他们会做出一些错误类比和逻辑谬误。

最后，他们会恶意拔高科学研究的上限：当科学家得到一定程度的结论后，伪科学家们便声明他们已经更进一步了。

It’s not that some of these approaches never provide valid arguments. Sometimes an analogy is useful, or higher levels of certainty are required. But when you see several or all of these tactics deployed, you know that you’re not dealing with a scientific claim anymore. Pseudoscience is the form of science without the substance.
并不是说伪科学家们的那套说法都毫无依据。

有时候，类比确实是有用的，提供更准确的论断也是有必要的。

但是，当你看到伪科学家采用了以上部分或全部的伎俩时，你就知道，你所看到的不再是一个科学的论断。

伪科学徒有“科学”的外表，而无科学之实。

The challenge of what to do about this—how to defend science as a more valid approach to explaining the world—has
actually been addressed by science itself. Scientists have done experiments. In 2011, two Australian researchers compiled many of the findings in “The Debunking Handbook.” The results are sobering. The evidence is that rebutting bad science doesn’t work; in fact, it commonly backfires. Describing facts that contradict an unscientific belief actually spreads familiarity with the belief and strengthens the convicti on of believers. That’s just the way the brain operates; misinformation sticks, in part because it gets incorporated into a person’s mental model of how the world works. Stripping out the misinformation therefore fails, because it threatens to leave a painful gap in that mental model—or no model at all.
面对以上这些挑战，我们要如何为“科学是一种更为有效的阐释世界的方法”这一观点正名？其实方法就蕴含在科学本身之中。

科学家为此曾经做过一些实验。

2011年，两位澳大利亚科学家整理了他们的研究成果，并发表在《揭露真相手册》一书中，他们的结论发人深省。

证据表明，直接对伪科学进行反击并不奏效，多数时候反而会适得其反。

澄清这些伪科学只会让这些错误观点流毒更广，并让伪科学信徒愈加执迷不悟。

大脑的运作方式便是如此：错误信息根深蒂固，某种程度上已成为人们对世界运作模式认知的组成部分。

这时，直接根除错误信息就会破坏原有的认知模式的完整性，甚至彻底摧毁原有认知体系，从而宣告失败。

So, then, what is a science believer to do? Is the future just an unending battle of warring claims? Not necessarily. Emerging from the findings was also evidence that suggested how you might build trust in science. Rebutting bad science may not be effective, but asserting the true facts of good science is. And including the narrative that explains them is even better. You don’t focus on what’s wrong with the vaccine myths, for instance. Instead, you point out: giving children vaccines has
proved far safer than not. How do we know? Because of a massive body of evidence, including the fact that we’ve tried the alternate experiment before. Between 1989 and 1991, vaccination among poor urban children in the U.S. dropped. And the result was fifty-five thousand cases of measles and a hundred and twenty-three deaths.
那么相信科学的人该何去何从？难道科学与伪科学间的口水战将永无止境？未必如此。

两位澳洲学者的研究中同样指明了树立民众对科学信心的方法。

直接驳斥伪科学未必有效，然而展示真正科学的事实却行之有效。

如果在此之外能补充一些对事实的解释，效果则更佳。

举个例子，你不用指出关于疫苗流言的荒谬之处，反之，你可以指出接种疫苗比不接种更能确保儿童的健康。

当人们问及原因时，你可以举出大量证据支持你观点，甚至可以提到科学家们曾经做过的替代试验。

例如，在1989到1991年间，美国城区贫困儿童的疫苗接种率有所下降，结果新增了55000例麻疹感染病例，123名儿童死亡。

The other important thing is to expose the bad science tactics that are being used to mislead people. Bad science has a pattern, and helping people recognize the pattern arms them to come to more scientific beliefs themselves. Having a scientific understanding of the world is fundamentally about how you judge which information to trust. It doesn’t mean poring t hrough the evidence on every question yourself. You can’t. Knowledge has become too vast and complex for any one person, scientist or otherwise, to convincingly master more than corners of it.
另一种行之有效的方式是向人们揭露伪科学误导大众的套路。

伪科学都有套路可循，帮助人们识别伪科学的套路能让更多人主动了解科学。

对世界的科学认识能帮人从根本上筛选可靠信息。

这并不意味着你要对一切问题追根究底，任谁也做不到。

学海无涯，知识的体量绝非一人所能掌握，科学家亦是如此，他们所掌握的不过是冰山一角。

Few working scientists can give a ground-up explanation of the phenomenon they study; they rely on information and techniques borrowed from other scientists. Knowledge and the virtues of the scientific orientation live far more in the community than the individual. When we talk of a “scientific community,” we are pointing to something critical: that advanced science is a social enterprise, characterized by an intricate division of cognitive labor. Individual scientists, no less than the quacks, can be famously bull-headed, overly enamored of pet theories, dismissive of new evidence, and heedless of their fallibility. (Hence Max Planck’s observation that science advances on e funeral at a time.) But as a community endeavor, it is beautifully self-correcting.
当今的科学家鲜有能对研究对象给出全面解释的，他们需要依赖其他科学家所提供的信息和技术。

科学所蕴含的知识和美德更多体现在整个科学界中而非科学家个人身上。

“科学界”这个概念包含了一些关键的事实：高等科学是一种基于复杂脑力劳动分工的社会事业。

个体科学家比“江湖郎中”高明不了多少，他们更有可能冥顽不化，对自己偏爱的理论无比迷恋，对新的证据不屑一顾，而且对他们自己的错误熟视无睹。

（因此马克斯·普朗克一度认为科学进入了死胡同）。

不过，当科学界拧成一股绳后，会形成强大的自我修正能力。

Beautifully organized, however, it is not. Seen up close, the scientific community—with its muddled peer-review process, badly written journal articles, subtly contemptuous letters to the editor, overtly contemptuous subreddit threads, and pompous pronouncements of the academy— looks like a rickety vehicle for getting to truth. Yet the hive mind swarms ever forward. It now advances knowledge in almost every realm of existence—even the humanities, where neuroscience and computerization are shaping understanding of everything from free will to how art
and literature have evolved over time.科学界看似组织有序，实则不然。

甚至当我们深入了解科学界后，我们会看到混乱的同行审议流程、蹩脚的期刊论文、难掩对编辑鄙夷的信件、公然侮蔑的网络留言和浮夸的学会声明，这些东西都让科学界看起来像一辆即将散架的通往真理之车。

然而整个集体依旧一心向前，推动这辆车继续前进。

如今，在科学的推动下，几乎所有学科都在不断发展，甚至包括人文学科。

神经科学和计算机正在重塑我们对自由意志、艺术和文学演进方式等所有事物的理解。

Today, you become part of the scientific community, arguably the most powerful collective enterprise in human history. In doing so, you also inherit a role in explaining it and helping it reclaim territory of trust at a time when that territory has been shrinking. In my clinic and my work in public health, I regularly encounter people who are deeply skeptical of even the most basic knowledge established by what journalists label “mainstream” science (as if the other thing is anything like science)—whether it’s facts about physiology, nutrition, disease, medicines, you name it. The doubting is usually among my most, not least, educated patients. Education may expose people to science, but it has a countervailing effect as well, leading people to be more individualistic and ideological.今天，你们正式成为了科学界的一份子，这个可能是人类历史上最具力量的集体事业。

作为科学界的一员，你们也要在这一紧要关头承担起为科学界辩护和夺回信任失地的职责。

当我在我的诊所和公共卫生机构工作时，我经常会碰到很多人对记者们认定为“主流科学”（搞得像其他非主流的才是科学一样）的基础知识持有怀疑态度，无论这些知识是关于生理、营养、疾病、药物还是其他学科。

这些怀疑往往出现在受教育程度最高而非最低的病人中。

教育或许能让人接触到科学，但也可能产生反作用，让人们更加奉行个人主义，以意识形态为纲。

The mistake, then, is to believe that the educational
credentials you get today give you any special authority on truth. What you have gained is far more important: an understanding of what real truth-seeking looks like. It is the effort not of a single person but of a group of people—the bigger the better—pursuing ideas with curiosity, inquisitiveness, openness, and discipline. As scientists, in other words.当今社会，文凭不会给予你任何通向真理的特权。

教育给予你的是远比文凭更加重要的东西，即理解追求真理的方法。

追求真理不是一个人的事，而是来源于集体的努力，人多力量大，要带着好奇心、求知欲、开放的心态和自律去追寻真理。

或者说，真正去成为一名科学家。

Even more than what you think, how you think matters. The stakes for understanding this could not be higher than they are today, because we are not just battling for what it means to be scientists. We are battling for what it means to be citizens.
甚至比您的想法更重要的是您的如何去想，理解这一点的风险不会比今天高，因为我们不仅仅是在为成为科学家的意义而战，我们正在为成为公民的意义而战。