By fostering a culture that values doubt, embraces complexity, and remains open to revision, science can renew itself and guide society toward discovery rather than dogma.
01.12.2025 20:37
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By fostering a culture that values doubt, embraces complexity, and remains open to revision, science can renew itself and guide society toward discovery rather than dogma.
Amid a growing crisis of public trust in science fueled by misinformation and polarization, scientists who openly acknowledge uncertainty are actually perceived as more trustworthy.
We propose practical strategies including diverse teams, careful AI integration, and metacognitive training to counter our "bias blind spot" and strengthen critical thinking in future scientists and physicians.
While human evolution optimized our minds for rapid, survival-oriented judgments, the scientific method succeeds by deliberately engaging slower, more analytical thinking that questions assumptions and welcomes revision.
This paper argues that cultivating epistemic humility—the practice of acknowledging uncertainty and the limitations of human cognition—is essential for revitalizing science in an era of climate change, pandemics, and AI development.
The result is richer for it. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed learning from each other.
In research, we tend to emphasize what we write about, but the who and how matter just as much, if not more. This collaboration generated more constructive tension than any project I've been part of—continuous pushback, revision, and hard-won consensus.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Behind this paper: a physician from Iran, a social scientist from Australia, a behavioral scientist from Norway, a history and philosophy enthusiast from the US, and a data scientist from the US.
Paris December 9, 2025: forms.gle/N6fWuNhWWpuc...
Bordeaux December 13, 2025: forms.gle/ZvqX1AizoQzU...
Please join us in Paris on December 9, 2025 and/or in Bordeaux on December 13, 2025 to continue our series of collaborative design sessions that will bring together leaders from healthcare, technology, engineering, and creative sectors to reflect, reimagine and reanimate the healthcare system.
The paintbrush empowers us to reimagine and redesign what we find. And the podium creates space for everyone to share what worked, what failed, and what we learned.
The flashlight illuminates the systems we're embedded in, revealing structures we often don't even notice. The microscope lets us analyze these systems in detail, identifying both their strengths and their vulnerabilities.
To ensure AI delivers meaningful value, we need five fundamental tools: a mirror, a flashlight, a microscope, a paintbrush, and a podium.
The mirror helps us examine our own motivations and values—ensuring we're building AI for the right reasons.
A huge thanks to the MIT Critical Data village behind this essay. I am simply the messenger.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
We need AI that will keep humans on the rails, and humans that will keep AI on the rails. Bruno Latour would say AI systems aren't neutral tools but active participants in networks that reconfigure relationships between humans, institutions, and knowledge production.
Trained, fine-tuned and finally monetized by humans operating in a capitalist world, AI exhibits the behavior of those who create it. Confident, dominant, all-knowing, designed to impress and designed to please, because after all, it is optimized for profit.
AI systems rely entirely on human-generated data, not all of it, but those easily accessed by their creators, as far as their eyes can see, but not those hiding in plain sight: bodies of knowledge from religions, non-Western civilizations, and from indigenous communities.
Current AI systems are extensions of the human intelligence handpicked by their developers. Like a digital prosthesis, they are tools for their ends, not ours.
Intelligence evolved as a way for living systems to resist entropy, the universal drift toward disorder. It is life’s strategy for maintaining itself in an ever-degrading universe.
datascienceandhealth.ubc.ca/events/ai-fu...
Join us at the AI & Future of Medicine at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada on November 15-16, 2025 as we forge a path forward in the chaos that the AI hype has wrought.
And now, medical students entering this environment face a world where hospitals already use AI systems trained on historical data marinated in unconscious biases in daily decision-making, while receiving hardly any training on how to critically evaluate these tools or understand their limitations
commercial interests that prioritize profit over patient outcomes, evaluation systems that reward individual expertise over collective wisdom and historical roots of a knowledge creation system tinged with racism and sexism, among other epistemic injustices.
The challenge extends beyond curriculum reform. AI deployment in healthcare reveals deeper structural problems:
while deaths from preventable medical errors have risen from 96,000 deaths annually based on the "To Errr is Human" report from the Institute of Medicine published in 1999 to a staggering 800,000 based on recent estimates, despite billions invested in patient safety initiatives.
Meanwhile, the healthcare system that medical students are preparing to join faces profound systemic failures. It produces more carbon emissions than any other industry...
Current medical education perpetuates epistemic injustices by training students on knowledge derived from observations of white men in rich countries, then expecting these findings to apply universally. This approach creates physicians who are unprepared to serve diverse populations effectively
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into medical practice necessitates a complete reimagining of how we prepare future physicians, but this transformation cannot succeed without simultaneously addressing the systemic failures that plague healthcare delivery.
Medical education does not exist in a vacuum, and attempts to reform it in isolation are fundamentally inadequate if the broader healthcare system remains broken.
(The illustration is provided by Dancing with Markers.)
Through dialogues and workshops, participants will discuss AI development and use that recognize its transformative potential but also the irreplaceable value of human connection.
Please register here: sites.google.com/view/ai-fait...
The event will be livestreamed on Facebook.