Question:

What does having scientific inquiry guard us against?

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What does having scientific inquiry guard us against?

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  1. Anyone trying to give you misleading infornation.  In scientific inquiry, the information has to be tested (usually a number of times by different people) to see if the same results always occur, and to determine the probablility is of getting a different result.

    If you look at advertisements (let's say for diet ads for a weight loss pill as an example), you'll see celebrities saying "It worked for me, I lost __ pounds".  The companies are counting on the fame of the celebrity to get people to buy their product.  Somewhere in fine print it may also say "Results not typical.".  Nor does it take into consideration other factors, such as whether the person exercised or not (maybe they would have lost weight regardless of the pills), what types of foods they ate or how much, or the initial weight of the people involved (as an example, it's more likely for a 400 pound person to lose 40 pounds than a 160 pound person - perhaps a better indication of effectiveness of the product would be % body weight lost, in which case the 400 lb person lost 10% but the 160 lb person lost 25% even though the amount lost was the same for each).  In a scientific study, these would all be controlled so the only variable was the use of the specific product.

    Not only that, but there would be a control group which may get pills without the ingredient being tested just to be sure some other factor didn't have any effect.  It's easy to say that if you used a plant fertilizer and your plants grew that the growth over six months increased, but the plants would most likely grow anyway in this time.  Instead, in a scientific inquiry, you would have 50 plants that were fertilized and 50 that were not (the control group) and compare the difference in the sizes to see if the group with the fertilizer grew more.

    So scientific inquiry is a way of testing if claims made are are backed up by their results.  You can't necessarily say "proven", because all it would take is one example to make the statement false (all pennies have the Lincoln Memorial on the back:  http://www.dirckthenoorman.com/wordpress...  - is true until you find a wheat penny:http://content.answers.com/main/content/... ).  So there's often a probability attached to the statement as a "p=0.05" statement.  The example given means that there is a 95% probability of the statement made being true (the 0.05 would indicate the possible 5% [0.05] of the time when exceptions occur.  A p=0.01 would be a 1% probability error, or the statement was true 99% of the time.

    Scientists also recognize that not everything can be tested, so some things are still considered a matter of faith, rather than able to be "proven" either true or false.

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