Quotes About Evidence

How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?

There is considerable evidence that women's education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children

A woman scoffs at evidence. Show her the sun, tell her it is daylight, at once she will close her eyes and say to you, "No, it is night.

When an incident is reported, HR almost always starts from a place of disbelief. They request evidence and ask for proof. But if HR is investigating a sexual harassment case within the company, it is their duty as HR to protect their employees. That is the sentiment that has to shift.

When someone like Richard Branson goes up there and starts doing chartered flights... and you can look back on Earth and see the Earth's curvature, I'll believe the Earth is a globe.

It is being stated that Modi was a minor at the time of his marriage, which is a big lie. There is evidence to prove that when he got married, he was not a minor but had grown up.

A statement is persuasive and credible either because it is directly self-evident or because it appears to be proved from other statements that are so.

I think you have to look at these cold cases. If they're done properly, if the homicides are done properly, and everything's documented properly, you have a lot of concrete statements from those people that they would be able to look at them and refresh their memory.

There's no statistical evidence that human beings have an ability to move in and out of the markets effectively. It's next to impossible.

It is now proved beyond doubt that smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.

You can think somebody's stealing from the cookie jar, but if you don't catch him you don't catch him.

we form many incorrect beliefs because we have natural tendencies to evaluate evidence in a biased and faulty manner.

a skeptic is just a person who wants to see and evaluate the evidence before believing. In its truest sense, a skeptic is someone who keeps an open mind, but requires rigorous investigation before choosing to believe something.

It's the quality of our reasons for believing that make us intelligent and thoughtful individuals

Pseudoscientists typically focus on only one explanation for a phenomenon, quickly brushing aside alternative explanations. And, in their desire to support their belief, they are willing to accept flimsy, oftentimes anecdotal, evidence.

A person's conclusions can only be as solid as the information on which they are based. Thus, a person who is exposed to almost nothing but inaccurate information on a given subject almost inevitably develops an erroneous belief, a belief that can seem to be "an irresistible product" of the individual's (secondhand) experience.

This tendency to focus too heavily on the occasional success is helped along by an asymmetry in the way we evaluate success and failure. A single success generally does more to confirm a strategy's effectiveness than a single failure does to disconfirm it. Indeed, successes tend to be taken as prima facie evidence that the strategy is effective.

A second way in which our motives influence the kind of evidence we entertain involves whose opinions, expert or otherwise, we consult. We can often anticipate other people's general beliefs and overall orientations, and thus can predict with some accuracy their views on a particular question. By judiciously choosing the right people to consult, we can increase our chances of hearing what we want to hear.

Perhaps the most general and most important mental habit to instill is an appreciation of the folly of trying to draw conclusions from incomplete and unrepresentative evidence. An essential corrollary of this appreciation should be an awareness of how often our everyday experience presents us with biased samples of information.

We therefore should be more skeptical than we seem to be about evidence presented to us secondhand. We should become accustomed to asking ourselves where the information originated, and how much distortion—deliberate or otherwise—is likely to have been introduced along the way.

In other words, when testing a hypothesis of similarity, people look for evidence of similarity rather than dissimilarity, and when testing a hypothesis of dissimilarity, they do the opposite. The relationship one perceives between two entities, then, can vary with the precise form of the question that is asked.

The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

It is not what we believe, but why we believe it. Moral responsibility lies in diligently weighing the evidence. We must actively doubt; we have to scrutinize our views, not take them on trust. No virtue attached to blindly accepting orthodoxy, however 'venerable'...