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We sow hatred of others fueled by what we think is true, or what we want to be true, without regard to what is true. Cultural and political factions battle for the souls of communities and of nations. We’ve lost all sight of what distinguishes facts from opinions. We’re quick with acts of aggression and slow with acts of kindness.
scientists are not in search of each other’s opinions. We’re in search of each other’s data.
Do whatever it takes to avoid fooling yourself into believing that something is true when it is false, or that something is false when it is true.
Leonardo da Vinci would be in full agreement: “The greatest deception men suffer is from their
After thinking deeply about how a scientist views the world, about what Earth looks like from space, and about the magnitude of cosmic age and of infinite space, all terrestrial thoughts change. Your brain recalibrates life’s priorities and reassesses the actions one might take in response. No outlook on culture, society, or civilization remains untouched. In that state of mind, the world looks different. You are transported. You experience life through the lens of a cosmic perspective.
Objective truths apply to all people, places, and things, as well as all animals, vegetables, and minerals. Some of these truths apply across all of space and time. They are true even when you don’t believe in them.
The press, in an attempt to break a story, may mislead the public’s awareness of how science works by headlining a just-published scientific paper as the truth, perhaps also touting the academic pedigrees of the authors.
Objective truths of science are not founded in belief systems. They are not established by the authority of leaders or the power of persuasion. Nor are they learned from repetition or gleaned from magical thinking. To deny objective truths is to be scientifically illiterate, not to be ideologically principled.
Social, political, or legislative attempts to require that everybody agree with your personal truths are ultimately dictatorships.
While there, I came to resent labels of all kinds. What are they, if not intellectually lazy ways of asserting you know everything about a person you’ve never met?
TROPE 1: Conservatives value the nuclear family and the stability it brings to civilization, unlike liberals, who live under questionable moral codes. Let’s look at family values by the usual issues that come under scrutiny: out-of-wedlock births and divorce rates. If you analyze state-by-state childbirth statistics, you find that nearly half of all babies born in the states of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and South Carolina are born to unmarried women.8 Yet each of these states voted red in every general election
this century.9 The corresponding rates for the famously blue states of California, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and New York are half that. Babies born out of wedlock could highlight, for example, a landscape of liberated women who don’t need men or eschew 1950s family paradigms. Or it could indicate regional differences in abortion rates. In any case, it’s not evidence of traditional family values.
the most pernicious is confirmation bias: you remember the hits and forget the misses. It affects us all, at one level or another. The antidote? Dispassionate rational analysis.
When you conduct this exercise, you find that eight of the top ten states that pay more per capita to the federal government than they receive are blue states. On the other end, not including Virginia (home of the high-budget Pentagon), six of the ten states that receive more support from the federal government28 than they pay are red states.29 Given prevailing political rhetoric, you might have expected zero out of ten.
“If an argument lasts longer than five minutes, then both sides are wrong.”
simultaneously wanting to “save the whales” and “abort the babies.”15 Let’s look at recent abortion rates in the US. Of the more than 5 million known pregnancies per year between 1990 and 2019,16 nearly 13 percent were medically aborted.17 Yet all by itself the uterus spontaneously aborts as many as 15 percent of all known pregnancies during the first twenty weeks. Many more miscarriages go unnoticed since they occur in the first trimester, often before you know you’re pregnant. Combined, the number of spontaneous abortions may surpass 30 percent of all pregnancies.18 So, if God is in charge,
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if you don’t need a curb cut to reach the sidewalk from the street, but a person in a wheelchair does, yet the person in the wheelchair knows vector calculus and you don’t, shall we classify your mathematical illiteracy as a disability? Is a student developmentally delayed, or is the teacher simply incompetent?
