Think first before you call yourself “evidence-based.”

The purpose of the scientific enterprise is to remove bias from our understanding of the world.

However, if we base our ideas of the world and our our decisions primarily on scientific data, we paradoxically introduce bias and stand in opposition to the core purpose of science.

When we perform an experiment, we subject our bias to the brute force of reality. The experimental results either confirm our hypothesis and make our preconceived idea based less on bias, refute it and thereby reject our bias, or do something of mix between the two.

The questions come from bias.

The answers reduce that bias.

Some questions are unaskable with the scientific method.

Others have never been asked due to lack of resources or will.

Others are legitimate questions none of us have ever even thought to ask… yet.

To use science correctly, we recognize its limitations, admit we do not know most of what can be known and that much what is true could be unknowable, and then navigate most of life where it exists in the gray areas *between* scientific findings, with exact findings of studies rarely if ever leading to an exact correct decision with perfect precision.

If instead we mold most of our thoughts and decisions to the existing scientific data we become profoundly biased by conforming them to what can be asked, the precise ways in which questions were asked, and the choices of other people in what to ask.

The worst part about this is your mind has become biased primarily to conform to the minds of other people whose biases determined the questions asked in scientific studies.

Is it not better to embrace your own bias than to conform to someone else’s?

Use evidence as a tool, recognize its limitations, and it will bear much fruit.

But don’t base your life and identity on it.