Scientific Thinking

Scientific thinking is probably one of the best ways to clear out the clouds in our mind and make responsible decisions. I mean scientific thinking versus unscientific ways of gaining knowledge, which are valid in many other situations: intuition, tradition, personal experience, common sense, logic and authority.
This is not becoming a scientist, but instead, putting the principles of the scientific thinking into practice to answer any questions that are relevant in this context. To do that, we need to keep in mind those principles:

1. Ruling out rival hypothesis: is this the best explanation for the finding? E.g. are we sure the effect is not a placebo effect?
2. Correlation vs. Causation: just because two things are associated with each other, this does not mean that one must cause the other.
3. Falsifiability: for a claim to be scientific, it must be falsifiable. i.e. we must be able to test it. E.g. Karma cannot be tested and therefore cannot be a scientific claim, even if it is real.
4. Replicability: findings must be consistently replicated, to test that results are not obtained just by chance.
5. Extraordinary claims: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
6. Occam’s Razor: if two explanations account equally well for a phenomenon, the simpler one (i.e., the more parsimonious) should be chosen.

Often, we know enough about a subject to think we are right, but not enough to think we are wrong. And now we see the world flooded of all kind of points of views, explanations and complot theories about COVID-19 and many other topics. Hopefully, scientific thinking will help us to navigate these turbulent waters.