Immanuel Kant
Critique of Pure Reason,
“Transcendental Logic,†Introduction, part 1
I recall that I quite frequently used to see something rather similar which strikes me as even more apt,
though this may be an issue of translating from Kant's original German:
(-- or substitute your own pithy expression for "nonsense" at the end there.)
This is a very useful sieve for properly distinguishing ivory-tower barnacle collections and experimental results (trivia) from crackpot and New Age whackjobs (bogus theories) from "Real Science", which can make useful predictions by showing how a theory applies to some real numbers, and can usefully and reliably predict some not-yet-observed numbers.
Oddly, though, I haven't been able to find this quote anywhere on the Internet, so I suspect that my memory is faulty. I stand by the sentiment of my version though.
"Vinton Cerf is ... the mathematician who is often referred to as the "father of the internet". From 1972 to 1986, he was one of the key people in the US Defense Department who made it possible for distant and different computers to exchange packets of information -- and that's the foundation of the internet on top of which rides the world wide web today.
... (Cerf) inveigh(s) against "the stewards of our national destiny" for cutting money from key areas of research in its 2006 budget. That's a recipe, says Cerf, for "irrelevance and decline."
... a higher proportion of young Americans are opting for better paid law and medicine over science and engineering and visa restrictions on bright foreign students further dilute the talent pool. 'The rest of the world is catching up', says John E. Jankowski, a senior analyst at the National Science Foundation."
"What, then, should we teach our kids in high school science classes? The answer seems to me very obvious. We should teach them consensus science, and we should teach it conservatively.I'm not exactly sure of what to make of that last sentence. For me science and skepticism (middle-of-the-road skepticism: "we should proportion the strength of our belief in a proposition to the strength of the evidence" , as opposed to hyper-skepticism or "Pyrrhonism": "we can't really be certain about anything and therefore shouldn't accept the truth of anything.") are almost synonymous. I suspect that Derbyshire agrees -- I think that he means "Let's make sure that all the kids get the basics, and leave the controversies for those who do wish to pursue the matter further."
Consensus science is the science that most scientists believe ought to be taught. “Conservatively†means eschewing theories that are speculative, unproven, require higher math, or even just are new, in favor of what is well settled in the consensus. It means teaching science unskeptically, as settled fact."
"Scepticism is the philosophical current which over-emphasises doubt and the relativity of human knowledge, while Dogmatism underestimates the relativity of knowledge and lays claim to knowledge of absolute truths."...
Scepticism is commonly dominant during periods of social crisis when the old systems of thinking break down; dogmatism on the other hand is frequently associated with the immature stages of development of a movement."
Joseph Needham, Vol. 3 of Science and Civilization in China:
- The Jesuits' intention was to convert the Chinese to The True Faith: Christianity, and they offered Galilean (that is, "Galileo-style" -- I tripped over this the first time) natural science as an example of the fringe benefits of adopting Jesus Christ as one's Savior.
- The Chinese, on the other hand, saw through the Christianity as just another ethnic belief system like the many they already tolerated in their kingdom. But they recognized Galilean natural science as something genuinely new, because it was valid for anybody who made the effort to understand it, not just for people who happened to have been childreared to believe it (like, e.g., Yin and Yang...).
"Why is science in the media so often pointless, simplistic, boring, or just plain wrong? ...
It is my hypothesis that in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science, for their own means. They then attack this parody as if they were critiquing science. ...
Science stories usually fall into three families: wacky stories, scare stories and "breakthrough" stories."
"For self-styled golden ears to be claiming, and trying, to be 'objective' is to deny reality, because perception is not like instrumentation. Everything we perceive is filtered through a judgmental process which embodies all of our previous related experiences, and the resulting judgment is as much beyond conscious control as a preference for chocolate over vanilla. We cannot will ourselves to feel what we do not feel. Thus, when perceptions are so indistinct as to be wide open to interpretation, we will tend to perceive what we want to perceive or expect to perceive or have been told that we should perceive. This, I believe, explains the reports that Peter Belt's devices work as claimed.
Perhaps what bothers me so much about the Belt affair is the alacrity with which supposedly rational, technically savvy individuals have accepted, on the basis of subjective observation alone, something which all their scientific and journalistic background should tell them warrants a great deal of skepticism. But then, perhaps I shouldn't be that surprised.
Despite heroic efforts to educate our population, the US (and, apparently, the UK) has been graduating scientific illiterates for more than 40 years. And where knowledge ends, superstition begins. Without any concepts of how scientific knowledge is gleaned from intuition, hypothesis, and meticulous investigation, or what it accepts today as truth, anything is possible. Without the anchor of science, we are free to drift from one idea to another, accepting or 'keeping an open mind about' as many outrageous tenets as did the 'superstitious natives' we used to scorn 50 years ago. (We still do, but it's unfashionable to admit it.) Many of our beliefs are based on nothing more than a very questionable personal conviction that, because something should be true, then it must be. (Traditional religion is the best example of this.) The notion that a belief should have at least some objective support is scorned as being 'closed-minded', which has become a new epithet. In order to avoid that dread appellation, we are expected to pretend to be open to the possibility that today's flight of technofantasy may prove to be tomorrow's truth, no matter how unlikely. Well, I don't buy that."
"... if you do not know the reason something happens, it is considered extremely unscientific -- not to say ethically questionable -- to fabricate an explanation for it, offer that as incontrovertible fact, and then sell devices whose supposed effect is grounded in those fabrications."
