aerospace-agenda: tempest-caller:dawnofthebadpuns:the-attagirl:lokicolouredglasses:fandom-un
aerospace-agenda: tempest-caller: dawnofthebadpuns: the-attagirl: lokicolouredglasses: fandom-universe: kungfucarrie: The most dangerous phrase in the language is, “we’ve always done it this way.” “Come on, let’s mix it up!” The heart surgeon says. “B-but we’ve always done it this way!” The other replies, “this is how you replace a heart valve.” “That’s the most dangerous phrase in the human language!” The first surgeon replies haughtily as he inputs a fruit loop into the patient’s heart. “This will be his valve. He will be a fruit loop in a world of Cheerios.” (taken from this post on the experiments of Harry Harlow) This is serious business, because this is a large part of how sexism, racism, homophobia, rape culture, ethnocentrism, etc. continue to happen. The reason we do heart surgeries the way we do is not “because that’s what we’ve always done.” It’s because that’s how year of scientific research says will give the best results. One of the best uses of the scientific method is to test common practice, and either eliminate it or give it legitimacy. Don’t do things because “that’s what we’ve always done,” do them because that is what evidence and research say we should do. Saying “we’ve always done it this way” justifying maintaining a harmful societal norm is dangerous. We can do better. I honestly can’t believe someone saw a post about how it’s bad to justify bigotry or other hardships with “that’s the way it is/has always been/etc” and decided to debunk that with an example of heart surgery as if that’s in any way comparable or the point of this post. But honestly, even if the post was talking about things like that? If science found a better way to do heart surgery, and after tons of study and research it was undeniably the best way to do it, and surgeons said “Nah, we have always done it our way so we are going to keep doing it our way; who cares what the science says” that would be a problem. …If we did surgery “the way we’ve always done it”, it’d be being done in a small theater complete with live audience, with sawdust on the floor, no, or extremely addictive, anesthetic, unwashed hands, and unsterilized tools. Probably other stuff, too, that’s just stuff formalized in (western) medicine from the past hundred-fifty years, give or take, off the top of my head. Pretty much any changes to that got pushback from the establishment from what I’m aware, specifically because guess what way things had always been done…! Surgery is a spectacularly poor example to use to try and disprove that “the way we’ve always done it” thing. -- source link