Quotes About Evidence

Nonetheless, people will often accept or even amplify their own suffering, as well as that of others, if they can brandish it as evidence of the world's injustice. There is no shortage of oppressors among the downtrodden, even if, given their lowly positions, many of them are only tyrannical wannabes. It's the easiest path to choose, moment to moment, although it's nothing but hell in the long run.

The existence of conscience, for example, provides some evidence for that, as does the fact that religious experiences can reliably be induced chemically, as well as through practices such as dancing, chanting, fasting, and meditating.

Maybe your misery is your attempt to prove the world's injustice, instead of the evidence of your own sin, your own missing of the mark, your conscious refusal to strive and to live.

people will often accept or even amplify their own suffering, as well as that of others, if they can brandish it as evidence of the world's injustice.

Interestingly enough, there is some evidence that it is the provision of social support, as much or more than its receipt, that provides these protective benefits (and, somewhat unsurprisingly, that those who give more tend to receive more).9 Thus, it truly seems that it is better to give than to receive.

In the Bayesian framework, how much you believe something after you see the evidence depends not just on what the evidence shows, but on how much you believed it to begin with.

Yes, the existence of human life is evidence for the existence of God; but it's much better evidence that our world was programmed by people much smarter than us.

If you do happen to find yourself partially believing a crazy theory, don't worry—probably the evidence you encounter will be inconsistent with it, driving down your degree of belief in the craziness until your beliefs come into line with everyone else's. Unless, that is, the crazy theory is designed to survive this winnowing process. That's how conspiracy theories work.

If you've ever run an experiment, you know scientific truth doesn't pop out of the clouds blowing a flaming trumpet at you. Data is messy, and inference is hard.

If you decide what color jelly beans to eat based just on the papers that get published, you're making the same mistake the army made when they counted the bullet holes on the planes that came back from Germany.

The significance test is the detective, not the judge.

When you're trying to draw reliable inferences from improbable events, wiggle room is the enemy.

Math is a science of not being wrong about things, its techniques and habits hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument.

Digo que esta noticia me parece interesante, porque es prueba de que en un país en donde no existe lo que pudiera llamarse oposición, hay en cambio partidarios de lo que sea, siempre y cuando se refiera al pasado.

When I consider the question, whether there are such persons in the world as those we call witches? my mind is divided between the two opposite opinions; or rather (to speak my thoughts freely) I believe in general that there is, and has been such a thing as witchcraft; but at the same time can give no credit to any particular instance of it.

My study of economics had taught me that the ideology of many conservatives was wrong; their almost religious belief in the power of markets—so great that we could largely simply rely on unfettered markets for running the economy—had no basis in theory or evidence.

Objected to as incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial

Those stories you heard? About going to a wonderful place called 'heaven' where there is no more pain or death and you live forever in a state of perpetual happiness? Also total bullshit. Just like all that God stuff. There's no evidence of a heaven and there never was. We made that up too. Wishful thinking. So

What happens when you die? Well, we're not completely sure. But the evidence seems to suggest that nothing happens. You're just dead, your brain stops working, and then you're not around to ask annoying questions anymore

It is the desire for explanations that are at once systematic and controllable by factual evidence that generates science; and it is the organization and classification of knowledge on the basis of explanatory principles that is the distinctive goal of the sciences.

That which is not measurable is not science. That which is not physics is stamp collecting.

You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10-12 to 1.

A petty concern with mere evidence is an antiquated and bourgeois feature of the captalist legal system. We are revolutionaries. We convict from a revolutionary passion.

I only believe those things which can be proved; but I know full well that proofs are relative and can, and are in fact, continually superseded and cancelled out by other proved facts; and therefore I believe that doubt should be the mental approach of all who aspire to get ever closer to the truth, or at least to that much of truth that it is possible to establish. . .