The question
How do you decide what to believe, when you cannot check everything yourself?
Cases to argue about
- A single well-run study finds a result nobody has replicated yet.
- Ten thousand people report that a remedy works for them.
- A model predicts something twenty years out, matching past data closely.
- A practice used successfully by a community for centuries, never formally studied.
- A result you can reproduce yourself on a lab bench in twenty minutes.
Rank them. Defend your ranking. Then argue with someone who ranked differently.
There is no answer key here
Case 4 in particular deserves care. Long-standing practices often encode real observation over timescales no study could match, and dismissing them as “anecdote” has caused science to miss things repeatedly. Weighing that against the value of controlled testing is a genuinely hard question — which is why we are discussing it rather than me telling you.
Curriculum connection
A2.4
apply scientific literacy skills when investigating social and environmental issues that have personal, local, and/or global impacts
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A2.5
analyse contributions to science by people from various communities, including communities in Canada
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E2.3
summarize observational evidence used to support theories about the origin and evolution of the universe and the solar system, considering diverse ways of knowing
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