Interlude - Index of

118 | Turbulent Adolescence
believing the useful-truth, we could believe the science behind
it. This could work if human brains were infinitely powerful
computers, but they are not. A simple useful-truth may
have a beneficial effect that a much more complex scientifictruth
would not. Consider a person in a deadly fight with one
chance in a hundred of survival. Believing that I will live if I try
hard enough is more likely to inspire the necessary effort than
believing that I should try even though I’m 99 percent likely
to die. If people’s brains were perfect calculating machines,
the beliefs might be equal, but they’re not equal for the flawed
brains we actually have.
What does it mean to be a scientist if science itself is telling
you to believe falsehoods? A scientist who abandons scientific-truth
to believe useful-truth is no longer practicing science.
How does this affect the rest of that scientist’s work? If
the useful-truth is in an area unrelated to the science, this is
no problem, but what about scientific study of useful-truths
themselves?
Many scientists believe that scientific-truth is always useful,
or at worst neutral. They argue that the problem is in how
science is applied, not in science itself. Yet this trust in the
value of science is not a scientific-truth. The evidence is quite
strong that science is good at producing scientific-truths—
facts about the physical world and even facts about the human
world—but there is much less evidence that scientific-truths
are always useful-truths. I think that scientists and engineers
are sometimes offensive because we insist on spouting scientific-truths
that are not useful-truths, and this upsets people.
The question of whether different groups of people have
equal intelligence is an emotionally charged example. Hypothetically,
suppose that on average, left-handers are one IQ