david

“We’ve noted how the notion of balance was enshrined in the Fairness Doctrine, and it may make sense for political news in a two-party system (although not in a multiparty system). But it doesn’t reflect the way science works. In an active scientific debate, there can be many sides. But once a scientific issue is closed, there’s only one “side.” Imagine providing “balance” to the issue of whether the Earth orbits the Sun, whether continents move,”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“For example, a 1907 JAMA editorial highlighted that out of the fourteen football players killed that fall, none had been over twenty years in age. The editorial concluded that there need be no hesitation “in deciding that football is no game for boys to play.”
― Kathleen Bachynski, No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis

“We take it for granted that great individuals—Gandhi, Kennedy, Martin Luther King—can have great positive impacts on the world. But we are loath to believe the same about negative impacts—unless the individuals are obvious monsters like Hitler or Stalin. But small numbers of people can have large, negative impacts, especially if they are organized, determined, and have access to power. Seitz, Jastrow, Nierenberg, and Singer had access to power—all the way to the White House—by virtue of their positions as physicists who had won the Cold War. They used this power to support their political agenda, even though it meant attacking science and their fellow scientists, evidently believing that their larger end justified their means. Perhaps this, too, was part of their professional legacy. During the Manhattan Project, and throughout the Cold War, for security reasons many scientists had to hide the true nature of their work. All weapons”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“More important, such events share a second feature, one that is absent from an increase in taxes: they reduce our own incomes while leaving others’ incomes unaffected. Higher taxes, in contrast, reduce all incomes in tandem. This difference holds the key to understanding the mother of all cognitive illusions.”
― Robert H. Frank, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work