This is a personal essay which speaks to a harrowing reality that obtains in contemporary America from a right wing coup that is fundamentally flawed but not unique as it is a historical struggle. As a professional I don’t care what your political ideology is because science defines professionalism which is based on reason and is the only way to deliver results when it comes to doing work in science or the business world that is of true value and is not speculative because it has to posses persistence.  Only truth can persist.

When you are an apprentice to a scientist as I was when I landed in the US in the eighties, the term “truth” gets a firm definition in the context of what you do on a daily basis.

You realize that reputation matters much more as we are speaking of a life long commitment.  In science this is evident as you don’t apply with a resume but a curriculum vitae that lists your intellectual journey which begins from high school onwards and you list each and every publication resulting into almost a book by the time you are mid career.

I am led to reflect upon and write this piece as I see a government I never ever imagined I’d see in the USA.  It is the kind of government I expect to be not surprised to see in a poor third world nation because an overwhelming majority are uneducated. 

Yes, education makes a difference in learning about two polar opposites of reason and faith. 

Science represents reason because of the scientific methodology.  The methodology requires you to understand that you stand to loose it all in your career if it is found out that the work you published is not reproducible. Reproducibility is critical.

Science is replete with examples of people who came from highly regarded backgrounds, achieved quite a bit only to be exposed to have cheated.  Almost overnight all the support you had vanishes.

When I joined graduate school for data science, the allure of statistics was how it could provide such testing of reproducibility.

The United States of America was a beacon for truth because of a bipartisan commitment to this truth and more importantly the scientific methodology.  My pride as an immigrant citizen rested on this primacy of reason over faith as it derives from the Western European tradition of Galileo and the guilds that preserved what we already know so you can focus of “innovation” or what we don’t know.

I write this essay with the optimism that this country will shed the current government’s philosophical commitment to elevate faith over reason, which I see as an abrogation of a commitment to truth.

The very term truth in faith has no correlate in reason which is why I consider faith and reason as polar opposites.

This does not mean I don’t have faith and on the contrary I invest more time in a personal quest that is faith based.  At the core of faith is simply the idea that truth exists but unlike the form in which it can be presented in science, the truth that sages referred to is based on “knowing” with a totally different sense.  You may call it direct but don’t confuse it with the “knowing” of expert curated knowledge of science.

Science is about reproducibility as that is the basis on which curated knowledge is not questioned but “learnt”. The current administration’s RFK Jr is a disaster in that regard and worse than having a nuke from Russia land on the US.