I'm afraid I haven't properly designed the Muggles Studies course I introduced at my local Harry Potter fan club. Last Sunday we finally had our second class (after wasted months of insistence and delays), and I introduced some very basic descriptions of common biases, while of course emphasizing the need to detect them in ourselves before trying to detect them in other people. At some point, which I didn't completely notice, the discussion changed from an explanation of the attribution bias into a series of multicultural examples in favor of moral relativity. I honestly don't know how that happened, but as more and more attendants voiced their comments, I started to fear someone would irreversibly damage the lessons I was trying to teach. They basically stopped short of calling the scientific method a cultural construct, at which point I'm sure I would have snapped. I don't know what to make of this. Some part of me tries to encourage me and make me put more effort into showing these people the need for more reductionism in their worldview, but another part of me just wants to give them up as hopeless postmodernists. What should I do?
That isn't really clear to me. Science wasn't intelligently designed; it evolved. While it has different ideals and functions from other human institutions (such as religions and governments), it has a lot in common with them as a result of being a human institution. It has a many features that contribute to the well-being of its participants and the stability of their organizations, but that don't necessarily contribute much to its ostensible goal of finding truth.
For instance, it has been commonly observed that wrong ideas in science only die when their adherents do. Senior scientists have influence proportional to their past success, not their current accuracy. This serves the interests of individual humans in the system very well, by providing a comfortable old age for successful scientists. But it certainly does not counteract human cognitive biases; it works with them!
Yes, science has the effect of finding quite a lot of truth. And philosophers and historians of science can point to good reasons to expect science to be much better at this than other claimed methods such as mysticism or traditionalism. But science as an institution is tailored at least as much to self-sustenance through human biases, as to counteracting them.