Skip to content

The Job of Science is to Make People Less Stupid

The job of the human being, as you go through life, is to become less stupid.

The job of the human being, as you go through life, is to become less stupid. And that is the job of science, to try to educate us about the nature of what we are, our very nature, how we’re built, how we work, understand that and in doing that it seems to me is fulfilling and of great value and not scary and spooky and all the rest of it.  


When scientists finally say “Okay this is the way something works” everybody says “Oh, no, they debugged another thing and demystified another thing” and that’s just not the way to think about it.  The way to think about it is “Oh, that’s how that works!” and then go onto the things that occupy our minds most of the time, which are all our social relationships.

60 Second Raeds is recorded in Big Think’s studio.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock. 

Related

Up Next
And this is something that really could change the world if you would have more people that A, would care about truth, but would not only get stuck in their process of finding truth, but would also apply their knowledge and rationality towards steering the future towards better outcomes.