Saturday, April 22, 2017

Humility / Audacity

I thought about making a poster for the Seattle March for Science today, then didn't, because I figured there would be lots of posters, and I'm not that good at slogans or visual art, better at long-winded explanations of stuff, so probably other posters would be more worthy of people's attention. Indeed, there were lots of clever posters there and I didn't take any pictures of them because I'm not good at remembering to take pictures. So instead I'm writing a blog post about the poster I maybe should have made. It would have had just two words: “HUMILITY” across the top and “AUDACITY” across the bottom.

I'm probably missing a lot of the words for this, having not studied history nor philosophy of science in any depth, being just some guy that does software and reads stuff... so this is going to be a pretty square and incomplete account of things... so maybe you think about science as an institution, or as a practice. It's an institution made of people, a practice performed by people. We often fail to live up to our best ideals, but they're still our ideals (cf. the USA). Humility in particular would be good to highlight at this sort of event, both to and from the crowd.

I didn't see either of my words anywhere. That's fine. I did see a “Make America Care Again” sign, which was the first MAGA riff I've ever liked.

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