A clever expedient; ingenious stratagem, crafty or subtle deception.
The world ‘artifice’ looks and sounds like it knows its business. And its place, too, in the menu above.
Other than scientific method and laws of nature and physics, science boils down to artifice – what people do with knowledge, how they coerce it to their aims.
Science may be based on intelligence and technique. Translated into technology its simply, for the rest of us, a tool. Like a club , a bear trap, plans to dam creeks or route foes, understanding seasons to crop, divining metal into implement, accumulating knowledge for generations that follow.
Not only to primitives was it magic at first encounter, today it is equally magic to we who accept daily its gifts in return for a few credits of dull labor.
Science works at such levels of technological sophistication and interdependent processes that even to cognoscenti, colleagues of disciplines one step removed seem to weave indescribable magic.
On the web today scientific knowledge is reliably identified as Kocher by source – if reliable sources are known.
Not so when it’s news based on press releases, or bogus research from a bought scientist, or scraped content on a bot-generated website.
Or concoctions parading as science news. As I am prone to offer.
Tread warily on the web.
