This Idea Must Die Quotes

“Information is a measure of uncertainty reduced.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“You may know that a prisoner’s guilt is independent of whether you’re hungry or not, but she’ll still seem like a better parole candidate when you’ve recently had a snack.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“After all, there have never been loonies carrying signs saying, “The End is Not Near.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“psychologists are too polite with one another’s ideas.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“We’d be unfeeling, unconscious zombies if we did.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Computers are fine, but it’s time to return to the mind itself and stop pretending we have computers for brains.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“field linguists (they’re like field biologists with really good microphones)”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“but no higher cancer rates have been discovered there.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Some places in the world, such as Ramsar, Iran, have a tenfold higher background radiation,”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“yet cancer rates in New England are higher than in Colorado—an inverse effect.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“New England has lower background radiation, Colorado is much higher,”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“We all die. Nearly half of us die of cancer (38 percent of females, 45 percent of males).”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“In fact nobody died, nobody became ill, and nobody is expected to.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“What people remember about Fukushima is that nuclear opponents predicted that hundreds or thousands would die or become ill from the radiation.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Cancer will be understood properly only by positioning it within the great sweep of evolutionary history.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Mark 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

“people view “tainted altruism” as worse than no altruism at all.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“people judge people as less moral when they act altruistically and gain in the process than when they gain from clearly nonaltruistic behavior.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Human beings are the unequivocal world champions of niceness. We act kindly not only toward people who belong to our own social groups or can reciprocate our generosity but also toward strangers thousands of miles away who will never know we helped them. All around the world, people sacrifice their resources, well-being, and even their lives in the service of others.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“A recent study found that non-abused six- to fourteen-month-olds who showed disregard for others’ distress were significantly more likely to be antisocial as adolescents.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“We can speak, think, refer to ourselves as agents, and so build up the false idea of a persisting self that has consciousness and free will.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Science is not a practice so much as an ideology.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“in its quest to prove itself as the supreme form of secular knowledge, science has inadvertently elevated itself into a theology.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“philosophers are premature ejaculators who decant too soon, spilling their seminal genius to no effect.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Karl Popper famously suggested the criterion of “falsifiability”: A theory is scientific if it makes clear predictions that can be unambiguously falsified.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Can it be that all of physics—and, indeed, all of science—is based on creating all the matter in the universe from a dozen objects with totally random mass values, while no one has the faintest idea about their origin?”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“we may just have to come around to the notion that there’s my universe and there’s your universe—but there’s no such thing as the universe.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Since string theorists have failed to propose any way to confirm string theory experimentally, string theory should be retired,”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“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.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress