Prometheus Bedeviled Quotes

“With shaken
confidence in the consistency and legitimacy of what they take to be scientific research, people revert to ancient and erroneous habits of thought-post hoc ergo propter hot- reasoning, reliance on anecdotal evidence, false analogy, and simple rumor chasing.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“The lay public, with very little in the way of expertise to guide it, finds itself confronted with dozens of studies-or rather, with journalistic summaries of these, which are inevitably truncated and most often distorted into the bargain. Some of these are peer-reviewed studies, some merely claims put forth by ambitious researchers, but all of them have passed through a filter of journalistic judgment that selects for their ability to grab attention. Sober explanation is not usually part of the package.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“There is nothing in the record of the human species that suggests that wrongheadedness is self-correcting, or that the capacity for rationalization cannot sustain an illusion for 2500 years and more. Nor, sadly, is there anything in that record to suggest that scientific rationalism, in medicine or anything else, is self-sustaining and thus eternally embedded in the culture that developed it. This has little to do with the actual philosophical strength of the scientific outlook, which is enormous. Rather, it is to acknowledge that some law of intellectual entropy may be a given of the human condition.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“Since so many research conclusions depend on essentially mathematical ideas-the principles of statistical and probabilistic inference-and since even the best-trained physicians tend to have only a modest mathematical education, physicians end up taking many of these conclusions on faith.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“The difference is that bad engineers will soon be checked by the results of their poor judgments through the inoperability, unreliability, or high cost of what they create. (Physical reality is a stern taskmaster!) By contrast, bad doctors-such is the way of the world-can often rely on the gullibility, suggestibility, fear, and desperation of their clients to get themselves off the hook. And, of course, the old adage still holds as ever: doctors get to bury their mistakes.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“These days (as those few physicians who try actively to fight quackery have found to their sorrow), it is nearly impossible to deprive a doctor of his license to practice for anything so problematical as mere scientific heterodoxy. To fly by the seat of one's pants, espousing or devising nostrums as one chooses, without regard to scientific validity, is an open option. The stock of patients who can be recruited by the force of personality or the lure of hope is essentially limitless.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“One is reminded of the adage that whether elephants fight or make love, the grass gets trampled.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“Commenting on the hostile reaction to an article of his,"' Roy M. Poses, a specialist in analysis of clinical research, remarks: "Most distressing ... was the influence of a certain kind of post-modern thinking on publications about qualitative methods in respected medical and health care journals. These contained arguments that there is no external reality, and scoffed at scientists' attempts to be objective as possible as futile and foolish.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“This is the downside of what is generally regarded as a virtue: the self-confidence and moral independence of those schooled to believe in their own autonomy and intellectual competence. It can have the unfortunate, sometimes tragic, effect of inducing people to overvalue their ability to make judgments and decisions that require considerable technical training as well as a wide base of experience and knowledge. But deference to even the most well-warranted authority has become perilously dilute in a culture whose celebration of individualism is unconstrained.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“The abashed modesty that faddish cultural relativism seeks to impose on us is not merely unwarranted on intellectual grounds. It is a species of grave moral delinquency. Our doctors not only "know different" about how the body works, and how its illnesses and injuries may be treated, they "know better." To deny this is to open the door to all kinds of avoidable suffering, in this society and elsewhere.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“He blockades and nullifies the relentless monism upon which conventional medicine, like conventional science, is predicated. In its place, he offers a dramatically dualized vision of human nature, where a spiritual body, made of "energy" and "information," stands behind the gross impostures of mere flesh. He speaks with the authoritative confidence of objective truth, yet invites his disciples to believe that the strength of their subjective vision is the key to taking command of reality.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“Chopra is vastly fond of the word "quantum," and it gives a distinct coloration to his pitch.; In the context of his discourses, "quantum" is chiefly flaunted before audiences who would run in terror from any discussion of self-adjoint operators on a separable complex Hilbert space, though they might be lured back by the suggestion that Hilbert space is a domain of inexpressible spiritual bliss.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“Our task as science educators is to ensure that discussions of values and ethics in science become models of rational inquiry rather than verbal free-for-ails where uninformed individuals generate more heat than light as they share mutual ignorance.8's”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“Nonspecialist science education has to pass along a general sense of the content, methods, efficacy, and authority of science. Yet it must do so without evoking the complex of resentments and anxieties that so ominously besiege science in contemporary society. At best this would be a daunting task. In the current climate, where our various social and political mechanisms are pulling in a dozen different directions at once, it may be an impossible one.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“To be reconciled to the gap between experts and nonexperts requires a certain maturity to begin with. By "maturity," I mean the reasonably ungrudging acceptance of the propositions that science is epistemologically competent and that it is no more ethically deficient than most other human institutions-probably a good deal less so. Without this kind of goodwill and trust as a social background assumption, it is hard to see how a minimal scientific-literacy syllabus could have the desired effect.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“The aim is not to have mem-hers of the general public attuned to science to the point where they can make expert scientific judgments, but rather to equip them to understand who the experts are, why they really are experts (as opposed to mere
posturers), and how to seek them out when expertise is necessary. This is a big step down from more grandiose notions of scientific literacy still propounded elsewhere-for instance, the insistence of the NSF's "Guiding Principle" that "all children can and all children must learn rigorous science, mathematics, and technology.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“When it comes to the ever-elusive goal of achieving what is usually called "scientific literacy" for the general population, it is hard not to conclude that the task is hopeless.7b”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“Both leftists and conservatives have, in their different ways, contributed to a slack public educational system, which is particularly feeble when it comes to science. Neither faction is likely to accept serious reform gracefully, the left because of its dogmatic anti-elitism, the right because of its own version of anti-elitism as well as its resistance to public expenditure and its fervent preference for "localism" in all things.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“The general culture itself, though without strong ideological passions or theoretical enthusiasms, is poor soil for cultivating a widespread understanding of science. It is, to use blunt words, a lazy, fatally unambitious culture, strongly resistant to demands for sustained and coherent thought on any topic (aside, perhaps, from sports, guns, and automobiles).”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“This is precisely what one observes in the real-life maneuvering of postmodern academics who exploit the caustic power of postmodern nihilism to dissolve healthy skepticism, so that they can then propound emotionally gratifying dogma insulated from close interrogation.70 Without some such intellectual strategy, it is hard for today's left-utopians
to convince themselves that nature seconds their treasured assumptions and that history truly intends to vindicate them." It is worth noting that some of the more wily creationists have caught on to this particular trick, which is especially useful in proselytizing college students.72”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“Whether a more traditionally minded left, primarily concerned with wages, hours, employment, trade-union organizing, and concrete checks on the power of private capital, could have found the same welcome as a "left" centered on cultural theory, identity politics, and the vaporous propositions of postmodernism is a question that 1, as a traditionally minded leftist, find intriguing. To me, the survival of a community of left-wing thinkers in any form is somewhat gratifying, while at the same time the descent of the left into profound silliness is greatly depressing. But then, I suspect that the oh- scurantism of the postmodern left has something to do with its persistence in the good graces of the university, although the precise connection eludes me.68”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“One also has to keep up with new wrinkles in the popular conception (or misconception) of science and with whatever fresh terminological
chaff (Kuhnian paradigm shifts, chaos theory, or quantum mysticism, for instance) creationists mix into their ongoing snow job. This is unremitting and wearisome work, and whoever finds the time to do it is thereby giving up time that might well be spent doing something creative and intrinsically worthwhile. But it is an obligation laid on scientists and those who love science by the fears and prejudices of a demotic culture that is far from mature and, all in all, not quite sane, at least when it comes to facing up to the discomforts of the scientific worldview.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“NCTM reforms and similar programs lives on.!11 In the final analysis, it does not really flow from a conviction that such ideas promote superior teaching and learning of elementary and high-school mathematics. Rather, hypertrophied political piety lies at the root. Constructivism and its variants offer convenient pretexts for the display of self-perceived political virtue. They make it possible for well-meaning math teachers, and the well-meaning ed-school theorists under whom they study, to think of themselves as activists addressing urgent political and social problems through their educational practices.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“In discussing California's "Whole Math" (as it is called) with one such leading critic (math professor Abby Thompson of the University of California at Davis), I once suggested that the program seemed designed to brake the progress of bright kids. Thompson replied that I underestimated its anti-elitist fervor: "I don't think this is quite correct. The idea [espoused by 'Whole' Math advocates] is more precisely that there are no smart kids, that all children are equally talented at math, and that any differences that appear are due to societal failure, and probably racism and sexism to boot."-'(”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“Social constructivist and postmodernist articles of faith-that no community of knowers enjoys a privileged epistemological position above any other-obviously stokes the confidence of multiculturalism's advocates when they insist that these "Otherly" perspectives be brought into today's science classroom, despite their poor fit with standard science.-';”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“A corollary of this philosophy is that it is not particularly important for a teacher to understand science well. The teacher, after all, is but a coparticipant in the process of constructing "knowledge." (The deemphasis on teacher expertise is probably just as well. As physicist Alan Cromer has pointed out, the training of teachers in constructivist methodology is marvelously suited to creating confusion about the scientific points at issue.)28”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“The most salient feature of the statement is its categorical rejection of the idea that there is any wide disparity among people in their innate ability to master science. A blithe egalitarianism reigns. Any attempt to confront this pipe dream with an "elitist" view of the spectrum of talent would be rejected with pious horror.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“To start with, the idea of "children," in the everyday sense of the term, learning "rigorous science and mathematics" is palpably absurd.'] In the course of history a few actual children have managed the trick-Pascal, Gauss, and Galois come to mind-but such talent is as rare as that of Mozart or Mendelssohn. Even Newton was unacquainted with rigorous science and mathematics before the age of twenty!”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“Unfortunately, the reach of resentful anti-elitism is not limited to bureaucratic documents and ed-school screeds, which (at least it could be argued) are destined to repose unread and ignored.'; The same animosity has made inroads into the training of supposed scientific professionals.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

“The plain fact is that we cannot hope to turn average students into scientists of professional caliber, even if we could somehow induce them to aim for scientific careers. Science is an elitist calling, and it draws upon abilities that are manifest in only a small segment of the population, irrespective of whether they might be latent, if only we knew how to tap them, in a far larger spectrum of people. The first concern of a pedagogy that aims at turning out scientists, therefore, is to identify this aptitude and at the same time to insulate it, in certain ways, from those personal and cultural factors that might discourage its maturation.”
― Norman Levitt, Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture