"SKEPTIC: VIEWING THE WORLD WITH A RATIONAL EYE" by Michael Shermer

• If scientific observations are to be of any use, they must be tested against a theory, hypothesis, or model.
• It does not matter who you are or how important you think your idea is, if it is contradicted by the evidence it is wrong.
• The unwillingness to submit to peer review and the inability to admit error are antitheses of good science.
• Scientism is a scientific worldview that encompasses natural explanations for all phenomena, eschews supernatural and paranormal speculations, and embraces empiricism and reason as the twin pillars of a philosophy of life appropriate for an Age of Science.
• Feynman thought in visual metaphors,
• Because we are primates with such visually dominant sensory systems we need to see the evidence to believe it,
• In science, if an idea is not falsifiable, it is not that it is wrong; it is that we cannot determine if it is wrong, and thus it is not even wrong.
• To detect baloney—that is, to help discriminate between science and pseudoscience—I suggest ten questions to ask when encountering any claim.
• 1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
• But science is messier than most people realize.
• 2. Does this source often make similar claims?
• 3. Have the claims been verified by another source?
• 4. How does the claim fit with what we know about how the world works?
• 5. Has anyone gone out of the way to disprove the claim, or has only confirmatory evidence been sought?
• The confirmation bias is powerful and pervasive and is almost impossible for any of us to avoid.
• 6. Does the preponderance of evidence converge to the claimant’s conclusion, or a different one?
• 7. Is the claimant employing the accepted rules of reason and tools of research, or have these been abandoned in favor of others that lead to the desired conclusion?
• 8. Has the claimant provided a different explanation for the observed phenomenon, or is it strictly a process of denying the existing explanation?
• 9. If the claimant has proffered a new explanation, does it account for as many phenomena as the old explanation?
• 10. Do the claimants’ personal beliefs and biases drive the conclusions, or vice versa?
• We must always be on guard against errors in our reasoning.
• To be skeptical is to aim toward a goal of critical thinking.
• The belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking (as well as creationism, Holocaust denial, and crank theories of physics), and is easily refuted by noting that beliefs and theories are not built on single facts alone, but on a convergence of evidence from multiple lines of inquiry.
• smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons.
• Most of us most of the time come to our beliefs for a variety of reasons having little to do with empirical evidence and logical reasoning (that, presumably, smart people are better at employing).
• Science is a way of thinking that recognizes the need to test hypotheses so that the process is not reduced to mere opinion mongering, that the findings of such tests are provisional and probabilistic, and that natural explanations are always sought for natural phenomena.
• Lacking a fundamental comprehension of how science works, the siren song of pseudoscience becomes too alluring to resist, no matter how smart you are.
• The study of animals whose existence has yet to be proven is known as cryptozoology, a term coined in the late 1950s by the Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans.
• The reason why cryptids merit our attention is that there have been enough successful discoveries made by scientists based on local anecdotes and folklore that we cannot dismiss all claims a priori.
• “Anecdotes do not make a science. Ten anecdotes are no better than one, and a hundred anecdotes are no better than ten.”
• The anecdotal tales make for gripping narratives, but they do not make for sound science. After a century of searching for these chimerical creatures, until a body is produced skepticism is the appropriate response.
• Humans are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals. Like all other animals, we evolved to connect the dots between events in nature to discern meaningful patterns for our survival.
• Cold reading, where you literally “read” someone “cold,” knowing nothing about them. You ask lots of questions and make numerous statements and see what sticks.
• Warm reading, utilizing known principles of psychology that apply to nearly everyone.
• Hot reading, where the medium obtains information on a subject ahead of time.
• Data and theory. Evidence and mechanism. These are the twin pillars of sound science. Without data and evidence there is nothing for a theory or mechanism to explain. Without a theory and mechanism, data and evidence drift aimlessly on a boundless sea.
• A meta-analysis is a statistical technique that combines the results from many studies to look for an overall effect, even if the results from the individual studies were insignificant.
• To be tested scientifically Bible coders would need to predict events before they happen.
• Humans evolved brains that are pattern-recognition machines, designed to detect signals that enhance or threaten survival amid a very noisy world.
• Unfortunately, the system has flaws. Superstitions are false associations—A appears to be connected to B, but it is not
• Skepticism is the default position because the burden of proof is on the believer, not the skeptic.
• Clarke’s First Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” Clarke’s Second Law: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
• Any sufficiently advanced ETI is indistinguishable from God.
• Science and technology have changed our world more in the past century than it changed in the previous hundred centuries.
• Moore’s Law of computer power doubling every eighteen months continues unabated and is now down to about a year.
• The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless, and the effects of belief are overpowering.
• If cloning does work there is no reason to ban it because the three common reasons given for implementing restrictions are myths: the Identical Personhood Myth, the Playing God Myth, and the Human Rights and Dignity Myth.
• Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.
• Thus I call this balance the Captain Kirk Principle: intellect is driven by intuition, intuition is directed by intellect.
• The best predictor of how well a psychotherapist will work out for you is your initial reaction in the first five minutes of the first session.
• Most of us are not good at lie detection because we rely too heavily on what people say rather than on what they do.
• Although motivation seminarists publish countless glowing testimonials in their promotional literature, there is no scientific evidence showing that self-help programs work, and some reasons to think that they may do more harm than good.
• Skepticism is the antidote for the confirmation bias.
• The reason why folk science so often gets it wrong is that we evolved in an environment radically different from the one in which we live.
• Since humans are storytelling animals, we are more readily convinced by dramatic anecdotes than we are by dry data.
• Memory is more like an editing machine than it is a tape recorder, and as we misremember the past, we thus mispredict the future. The road to unhappiness is paved with false memories.
• truth in science is not determined democratically.
• It does not matter whether 99 percent or only 1 percent of the public believes a theory. It must stand or fall on the evidence, and there are few theories in science that are more robust than the theory of evolution.
• It is not enough to argue that creationism is wrong; we must also show that evolution is right.
• We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as Ambulocetus natans, but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more. No single discovery from any of these fields denotes proof of evolution, but together they converge to reveal that life evolved in a specific sequence by a particular process.
• At a February 12, 2002, news briefing, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explained the limitations of intelligence reports: “There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
• This boundary between the known and the unknown is where science flourishes.