Quotes About Science

It is my great hope someday to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency is respect.

Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong.

Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.

Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.

We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.

This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what's going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that "science" means more data.

Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.

what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.

Self-contradiction is made culturally to be shameful, a matter that can prove disastrous in science.

Science isn't the sum of what scientists think, but exactly as with markets. Had science operated by majority consensus, we would be still stuck in the Middle Ages.

It would be preferable if we were better at understanding cancer or the (highly nonlinear) weather than the origin of the universe. How

Characteristically, Samuelson intimidated those who questioned his techniques with the statement "Those who can, do science, others do methodology." If you knew math, you could "do science." This is reminiscent of psychoanalysts who silence their critics by accusing them of having trouble with their fathers.

There is, in the Black Swan zone, a limit to knowledge that can never be reached, no matter how sophisticated statistical and risk management science ever gets.

the (stated) purpose of science is to get to the truth, not to give you a feeling of organization or make you feel better. We tend to use knowledge as therapy.

for decades doctors never suspected that this "useless" tissue might actually have a use that escaped their detection. The

La persona a quien se atribuye la difusión de esta idea del semiescepticismo tendencioso es sir Doktor Professor Karl Raimund Popper, posiblemente el único filósofo de la ciencia a quien leen y de quien hablan los actores del mundo real (aunque es posible que los filósofos profesionales no lo hagan con tanto entusiasmo).

My idea is that not only are some scientific results useless in real life, because they underestimate the impact of the highly improbable (or lead us to ignore it), but that many of them may be actually creating Black Swans. These

The very same desire for order, interestingly, applies to scientific pursuits-it is just that, unlike art, the (stated) purpose of science is to get to the truth, not to give you a feeling of organization or make you feel better. We tend to use knowledge as therapy.

One conceivable way to discriminate between a scientific intellectual and a literary intellectual is by considering that a scientific intellectual can usually recognize the writing of another but that the literary intellectual would not be able to tell the difference between lines jotted down by a scientist and those by a glib nonscientist.

Rewriting the history of technology. How, in science, history is rewritten by the losers and how I saw it in my own business and how we can generalize. Does knowledge of biology hurt medicine? Hiding the role of luck. What makes a good entrepreneur?

the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what's going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that "science" means more data.

He can also formulate a hypothesis after the results of the experiment—thus fitting the hypothesis to the experiment.

Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is the alternative to our search for confirmatory instances.

Engineers tend to develop tools for the pleasure of developing tools, not to induce nature to yield its secrets.