Filtering on

"It sure helped public health and medicine once we realized there were things affecting our health that were just a little too small to see. I wonder if we could have figured that out without the invention of the microscope. I guess we might have just thought there were more invisible entities out there."

“It didn’t occur to anybody that there was a such a clear periodic pattern in the populations of those wolves and rabbits until somebody just started writing down every sighting—we’re pretty bad at estimating and remembering times between occasional events.”

“It’s amazing to first see a slow motion picture of a violin string making a note—wouldn’t it be great if our eyes and brains were fast enough to do this?”

“Do you think that modern technology offering us more different vantage points fundamentally changes our position on any practical questions?   For example, does it make a difference that in relatively recent decades we have gotten used to seeing the earth as a whole from space?”

“We can't really know anything about other galaxies, because we can only see them through fancy instruments and we can never know if the instruments are telling us the truth.”

Place appropriate trust in instruments where direct observation is not possible (or is less precise/accurate).   

Recognize continuum from direct observation to indirect observation via instruments  

Identify cases in which instrumentation is needed to solve problems (e.g. entities/events are too slow, too fast, too small — that is, those for which we cannot rely on our everyday senses and cognitive capacities), especially in policy contexts.