Quotes About Evidence

Setting fire to a person and seeing whether he burns is a dumb way to determine his guilt.

four out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that "the peer-reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against [the hypothesis].

Echoing a famous argument by the philosopher Karl Popper, most scientists today insist that the dividing line between science and pseudoscience is whether advocates of a hypothesis deliberately search for evidence that could falsify it and accept the hypothesis only if it survives.

Believe it or not—and I know that most people do not—violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species' existence.

To make decisions "rationally," by some set of rules, means to base the decisions on some grounds of truth:

A commitment to the concrete does more than just ease communication; it can lead to better reasoning.

Just as citizens should grasp the basics of history, science, and the written word, they should command the intellectual tools of sound reasoning. These include logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, the optimal ways to adjust our beliefs and commit to decisions with uncertain evidence, and the yardsticks for making rational choices alone and with others.

I am sometimes asked, "How do you know there won't be a war tomorrow (or a genocide, or an act of terrorism) that will refute your whole thesis?" The question misses the point of this book. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them.

But probabilities are not about the world; they're about our ignorance of the world. New information reduces our ignorance and changes the probability.

Submitting all of one's beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

mitigate and credible and credulous. What this means

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. —Carl Sagan

As Francis Crick liked to say, "Any theory that can account for all the facts is wrong, because some of the facts are wrong.

The fact that a hypothesis is politically uncomfortable does not mean that it is false, but it does mean that we should consider the evidence very carefully before concluding that it is true.

As an experimental psychologist I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores. To

Any hypothesis that comes out of left field to explain a massive social trend with a single overlooked event will almost certainly turn out to be wrong, even if it has some data supporting it at the time.

But proving that incarceration deters people (as opposed to incapacitating them) is easier said than done, because the statistics at any time are inherently stacked against it.

El sometimiento de todas nuestras creencias a los juicios de la razón y las evidencias es una destreza antinatural, como la alfabetización y el cálculo, y ha de ser inculcada y cultivada.

The essence of all beauty, I call love, The attribute, the evidence, and end, The consummation to the inward sense Of beauty apprehended from without, I still call love.

The healing power of love and relationships has been documented in an increasing number of well-designed scientific studies involving hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world.

The genuiness of our worship cannot be measured in decibels of sound, and although it is vital that we express our love for God vocally, He looks to see the evidence in our lives.

It isn't enough to love; we must prove it.

Love grows from the rich foam of forgiveness, mongrels make good dogs, and the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.

There is reliable and consistent research evidence demonstrating that omega-3 fats, mainly from fish, lower the death rate from heart disease and lower the risk of sudden cardiac death. This is hardcore evidence that fish oil saves lives.