Dan > Dan's Quotes

“In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award for accomplishing with pinpoint precision and unerring reliability, the feat of sitting exactly where it is sitting. Nothing would prevent us from agreeing with the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn that rocks are smarter than cats because rocks have the sense to go away when you kick them.”
― Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory has been endorsed by dozens of prominent experts, has inspired school programs designed to get kids to feel better about themselves, and in the late 1980s led the California legislature to form a Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. Yet Baumeister has shown that the theory could not be more spectacularly, hilariously, achingly wrong. Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“Sex and excretion are reminders that anyone's claim to round-the-clock dignity is tenuous. The so-called rational animal has a desperate drive to pair up and moan and writhe.”
― Steven Pinker

“Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.”
― Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs, at least not if you want them to listen to you. You can’t say that my interests are special compared to yours any more than you can say that the particular spot that I am standing on is a unique part of the universe because I happen to be standing on it that very minute.”
― Steven Pinker

“If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.”
― Steven Pinker

“I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they’re surprised that people are staying away in droves?”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“Questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations." - Steven Novella”
― Steven Novella

“History is strewn with ideas that were intuitive and made sense at the time, but were also hopelessly wrong.”
― Steven Novella

“Creationists argue that natural selection is only a negative process, and therefore cannot create anything. Chopra argues that skepticism is only a negative process, and therefore does not lead to knowledge. Both are wrong for the same reasons. They ignore the generation of diversity and new ideas upon which natural selection and skepticism acts. Weeding out the unfit is critical to both – natural selection allows evolution to proceed, and skepticism allows science to advance.”
― Steven Novella

“[T]he nature of science is not that of a steady, linear progression toward the Truth, but rather a tortuous road, often characterized by dead ends and U-turns, and yet ultimately inching toward a better, if tentative, understanding of the natural world.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“[T]he downside of skepticism: it can easily turn into an arrogant position of a priori rejection of any new phenomenon or idea, a position that is as lacking in critical thinking as the one of the true believer, and that simply does not help either science or the public at large.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“For example, a set of twenty-five studies involving five hundred astrologers examined the average degree of agreement between astrological predictions. In social science, such as in psychology, tests that have less than o.8 (i.e., 8o percent) agreement level are considered unreliable. Astrology's reliability is an embarrassingly low o. I, with a variability around the mean of o.o6 standard deviations. This means that there is, on average, no agreement at all among the predictions made by different astrologers.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“Scientific theories are tested every time someone makes an observation or conducts an experiment, so it is misleading to think of science as an edifice, built on foundations. Rather, scientific knowledge is more like a web. The difference couldn’t be more crucial. A tall edifice can collapse – if the foundations upon which it was built turn out to be shaky. But a web can be torn in several parts without causing the collapse of the whole. The damaged threads can be patiently replaced and re-connected with the rest – and the whole web can become stronger, and more intricate.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“Science progresses. Ideology tends to linger unchanged, and often unquestioned.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“Following the Post Modernist route, we may indeed never arrive at meaning, but not because meaning is not there... only because we are lost in endless linguistic games that are entirely beside the point.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“...the real threat from cranks is not that their customers might die -- there is the odd case, although it seems crass to harp on about them - but that they systematically the public's understanding about the very nature of evidence.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“More than that, these adverts sell a dubious world view. They sell the idea that science is not about the delicate relationship between evidence and theory. They suggest, instead, with all the might of their international advertising budgets, their Microcellular Complexes, their Neutrillium XY, their Tenseur Peptidique Végétal and the rest, that science is about impenetrable nonsense involving equations, molecules, sciencey diagrams, sweeping didactic statements from authority figures in white coats, and that this sciencey-sounding stuff might just as well be made up, concocted, confabulated out of thin air, in order to make money. They sell the idea that science is incomprehensible, with all their might, and they sell this idea mainly to attractive young women, who are disappointingly under-represented in the sciences.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“At this time we should take a brife moment to mention quacks: alternative therapists who sell vitamins and homeopathy sugar pills [the latter of which, by definition, contain no active ingredients], which perform no better than placebo in fair tests, and who use even cruder marketing tricks than the ones described in this book. In these people profit at all from the justified anger that people feel towards the pharmaceutical industry, then it comes at the expense of genuinely constructive activity. Selling ineffective sugar pills is not a meaningful policy response to the regulatory failure we have seen in this book”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients

“Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer.”
― Ben Goldacre

“Nutritionists are alternative therapists, but have somehow managed to brand themselves as men and women of science. Their errors are much more interesting than those of the homeopaths, because they have a grain of real science to them, and that makes them not only more interesting, but also more dangerous, because the real threat from cranks is not that their customers might die – there is the odd case, although it seems crass to harp on about them – but that they systematically undermine the public’s understanding of the very nature of evidence.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“In the past, [medicalization]has been portrayed as something that doctors inflict on a passive and un-suspecting world - an expansion of the Medical Empire. But in reality, it seems that these reductionist bio-medical stories can appeal to us all, because complex problems often have depressingly-complex causes, and the solutions can be taxing, and unsatisfactory.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“My basic hypothesis is this: the people who run the media are Humanities graduates with little understanding of science, who wear their ignorance as a badge of honor. Secretly, deep down, perhaps they resent the fact that they have denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of Western thought from the past two hundred years. There is an attack implicit in all media coverage of science - in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them. The media create a parody of science. On this template, science is portrayed as groundless, incomprehensible didactic truth statements from scientists - who, themselves, are socially- powerful, arbitrary un-elected authority figures. They are detached from reality. They do work that is either wacky, or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory, probably going to change soon and - most ridiculously - hard to understand. Having created this parody, the Commentariat then attack it, as if they were genuinely critiquing what science is all about.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or Mohammedan Nation.”
― John Adams