This Idea Must Die Quotes

“As a theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858-1947) noted, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." In other words, science advances by a series of funerals.”
― John Brockman (Ed.), This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“when a person’s commitment to evidence and logic grows dangerously thin or simply snaps under the burden of fear, wishful thinking, tribalism, or ecstasy, we recognize that he’s being “religious.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Publication bias is the tendency to not publish “negative,” or nonconfirmatory, results.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Psychological well-being is not determined by the presence of one type of emotion but by a diversity of emotions, both positive and negative. Whether or not an emotion is “good” or “bad” seems to have surprisingly little to do with the emotion itself but rather with how mindfully we ride the ebbing and flowing tides of our rich emotional life.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its life span. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.ad”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Just as you can’t attribute the spin of a proton to any one of its constituents, you can’t attribute an event in time to a single earlier cause. Complex systems have neither a useful notion of individuality nor a proper notion of causality.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“new ideas take over a vacuum formerly occupied by no well-articulated idea at all. That happens for either of two reasons: new ideas responding to new information made possible by new measurements, or else responding to new “outlooks.” (Among historians of science, the term used rather than the inadequate English term “outlook” is the German Fragestellung—literally, the posing of a question, but more broadly meaning a worldview from which that question can arise.)”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Twain said: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it,” Albert Einstein”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“an individual’s moral obligation in the situation is to ‘call it as he sees it’ without consideration of what others say.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“People are sheep—cowardly, deplorable sheep.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“It’s an illusion to believe that you can be happy when no one else is. Or that other people will not be affected by your unhappiness.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“us measure progress not by what is discovered but rather by the growing list of mysteries that remind us of how little we really know.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“(This is the tome that guides haruspication—I mean, psychiatry.)”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“A patient can have as many diagnoses as [she] damn well pleases.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“In 1900, Lord Kelvin, the great British physicist, put it clearly: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“When Max Planck began studying physics at the University of Munich in 1874, his teacher, Philipp von Jolly, warned him that it was already a mature field, with little more to learn.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“WEIRD people, they argue, are “the weirdest people in the world.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“WEIRD people (people in cultures that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic)”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“For me, the laws that apply to animals apply to us. And in that view of life, there is grandeur enough.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“As the French cognitive scientist Dan Sperber put it, cultures are epidemics of mental representations.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“seminary students in a rush were far less likely to help a stranger than were seminary students who weren’t late, in the experiment performed by John M. Darley and Dan Batson).”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) samples make up most nonclinical neuroimaging studies as well.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Max Planck observed, revolutions in science sometimes have to wait for funerals.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“The science of morality requires us to, in the end, get beyond the myth of a perfectly objective scientific morality.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“It’s simply not the case that secular liberalism, grounded in materialist utilitarianism, is the inevitable and default worldview of anyone who isn’t stupid, brainwashed, or uneducated;”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“commitment to spooky, nonempirical entities ranging from human rights to the Word of God to the coming proletarian Utopia.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“you’re more likely to die while horseback riding (one serious adverse event every 350 or so exposures) than from taking Ecstasy (one serious adverse event every 10,000 or so exposures).”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Economics graduate students are far more likely to free-ride than other students.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Filters fail when they know us too well and when they don’t know us well enough.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress