Skeptical quotes

From WikiSynergy

Contents 1 Skepticism, logic, and critical thinking 2 Alternative medicine 3 See also 4 References

• "In science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded. The true skeptic takes an agnostic position, one that says the claim is not proved rather than disproved. He asserts that the claimant has not borne the burden of proof and that science must continue to build its cognitive map of reality without incorporating the extraordinary claim as a new "fact." Since the true skeptic does not assert a claim, he has no burden to prove anything. He just goes on using the established theories of "conventional science" as usual. But if a critic asserts that there is evidence for disproof, that he has a negative hypothesis --saying, for instance, that a seeming psi result was actually due to an artifact--he is making a claim and therefore also has to bear a burden of proof." - Marcello Truzzi, Zetetic Scholar, #12-13, 1987.

• "Not knowing everything is not evidence that, in the absence of knowledge, any available appealing explanation is true. Sometimes the truth is unappealing." - Steve Zeitzew, MD

• "Science is a way of thinking, much more than it is a body of facts." - Carl Sagan

• "Science is not a body of information. Science is a method of investigation."

• "The medicine that I use has two things that distinguish it from some other forms of "medicine:"

1. It appears to work anywhere on the planet.

2. I don't have to believe in it for it to work." - David Ramey, DVM

• "Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves." - physicist Richard Feynman

• "Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic. And it doesn't work. Science cannot solve everything, but the alternatives really solve nothing."

• "Scientific thinking might be defined as learning to distinguish the exception from the rule. I'd have a hard time entrusting my health to someone who didn't know the difference." - Stan Polanski

• "Science makes a lousy religion and religion makes a lousy science." - Linda Rosa

• "Faith and Reason inhabit different worlds--and so far there is no space travel between them." - Erika Wilson

• "Entire vocabularies of esoteric jargon, based on circular reasoning and ignorance, have been invented by true believers to describe their imagined version of reality." —-- Paul Lee

• "We certainly shouldn't abandon the field to the quacks by not turning up to play." - Peter Moran

• "Deciding not to act is still a decision. If it results in death, it is a decision that led to death." - Graeme Kennedy

Skepticism, logic, and critical thinking

• "Mundus vult decipi." (The world wants to be deceived.)

• "The worst thing that bad people can do is make us doubt good people". - Jacinto Benavente (1866-1954); Spanish dramatist.

• "Skepticism is the first step toward truth." - Denis Diderot

• "The brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they have been proven to have their counterparts in the world of fact." - John Tyndall (1820-1893), physicist

• "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." - William Kingdon Clifford

• "A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which this world is suffering." - Bertrand Russell

• "Test everything; hold fast what is good." - 1 Thess. 5:21

• "Scholars are trained to scrutinize, to insist on adequate evidence, to ferret out logical inconsistencies and weak arguments. We are naturally suspicious of claims that go beyond our experience. Scholars are trained skeptics. Our professional motto is 'show me'. Where's your evidence? If you can't prove it, you shouldn't believe it!...If trust is the natural disposition of childhood, doubt is our disposition as adults. Academic training cultivates an ethic of suspicion, if not unbelief....we've learned to put every aspect of life through the fire of critical reflection....[But] the fact we don't know everything doesn't mean we don't know anything." - Richard Rice, Ph.D.; Spectrum, v. 28:1, pp. 39-40.

• "Everybody is entitled to his own opinions but not his own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

• "Don't confuse ignorance with a point of view." - Dilbert

• "The plural of anecdote is not data." - Roger Brinner [1]

• "Humans have brains that are built to work on anecdote rather than real data." - Jeffrey P. Utz, MD

• "Anecdotes are useless precisely because they may point to idiosyncratic responses." - Pediatric Allergy & Immunology, 1999 Nov;10(4) 226-234

• "The most important quality of the scientific method is its capacity to eliminate bias. That's what randomisation, blinding, proper sampling and so on is about. That's where almost all non-scientific medicine breaks down." - Patrick Bramwell-Wesley

• "Scholars are trained to scrutinize, to insist on adequate evidence, to ferret out logical inconsistencies and weak arguments. We are naturally suspicious of claims that go beyond our experience. Scholars are trained skeptics. Our professional motto is 'show me'. Where's your evidence? If you can't prove it, you shouldn't believe it!...If trust is the natural disposition of childhood, doubt is our disposition as adults. Academic training cultivates an ethic of suspicion, if not unbelief....we've learned to put every aspect of life through the fire of critical reflection....[But] the fact we don't know everything doesn't mean we don't know anything." - Richard Rice, Ph.D.; Spectrum, v. 28:1, pp. 39-40.

• "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." –Aristotle

• "Anecdotes are useless precisely because they may point to idiosyncratic responses." - Pediatric Allergy & Immunology, 1999 Nov;10(4) 226-234

• "Proof is not anecdotal. Proof is scientific. Show me the research." - Mark Levine, DC

• "Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true." - Francis Bacon

• "What a fool believes" -- Doobie Brothers[2]

But what a fool believes he sees

No wise man has the power to reason away

What seems to be

Is always better than nothing

There's nothing at all

But what a fool believes he sees...

• "The plural of anecdote is not data." - Roger Brinner

• "The last treatment before "cure" by natural causes (perhaps running it's course) should not be considered cause and effect."

• "Of course, the best (worst) part of it is that the alt-med people are convinced that it is all plausible because they are looking for evidence to bolster their belief rather than build a belief based on evidence. Which is what makes them 'alternative.'" - Greg Hart

• "Yes, you are correct that the individual patient may believe that xyz worked for them and granted it is difficult to respond to that belief, but it is more difficult to agree with what has no basis for being correct. It will not take long for that blind agreement to catch up with you." - Charles Morrow

• "Randomized controlled trials appear to annoy human nature--if properly conducted, indeed they should." - K.F. Schultz

• "The mind may find unique ways to express what it conceives of reality, but reality remains unchanged by the mind's efforts." - David Haas

• "Belief and sincerity do not define truth; it exists despite belief and sincerity." - Joshua David Mather

• "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - P.K.D.

• "You can do little with persons who are disposed to accept these curious medical superstitions. You have no fulcrum you can rest upon to lift an error out of such minds as these, often highly endowed with knowledge and talent, sometimes with genius, but commonly richer in the imaginative than the observing and reasoning faculties." - Oliver Wendell Holmes MD, in remarks before the graduating class of the Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1871

• "I don't think anyone condemns you or anyone else for entertaining a notion about a particular cause and effect. What I and others think is that it's best to concentrate on ideas that have evidence to back them as opposed to any idea that might possibly be true. Most wasteful of time and energy is entertaining ideas that have either weak, circumstantial, or anecdotal evidence for but have solid evidence *against* them." - Karen Daskawicz

Alternative medicine

According to notable scientific skeptics and physicians like Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, James Randi, Marcia Angell, Phil B. Fontanarosa, George D. Lundberg, and Stephen Barrett, the concept of "alternative" is often being misused in a misleading form of marketing, implying something that is far from the case:

• "Alternative has two possible meanings. Correctly employed, it refers to methods that have equal value for a particular purpose. (An example would be two antibiotics capable of killing a particular organism.) When applied to unproven methods, however, the term can be misleading because methods that are unsafe or ineffective are not reasonable alternatives to proven treatment. To emphasize this fact, we place the word "alternative" in quotation marks throughout this book whenever it is applied to methods that are not based on established scientific knowledge." - Stephen Barrett, MD [3]

• "There is no alternative medicine. There is only scientifically proven, evidence-based medicine supported by solid data or unproven medicine, for which scientific evidence is lacking. Whether a therapeutic practice is 'Eastern' or 'Western,' is unconventional or mainstream, or involves mind-body techniques or molecular genetics is largely irrelevant except for historical purposes and cultural interest. As believers in science and evidence, we must focus on fundamental issues-namely, the patient, the target disease or condition, the proposed or practiced treatment, and the need for convincing data on safety and therapeutic efficacy." - Fontanarosa P.B., and George D. Lundberg "Alternative medicine meets science" JAMA. 1998; 280: 1618-1619.

• "There cannot be two kinds of medicine - conventional and alternative. There is only medicine that has been adequately tested and medicine that has not, medicine that works and medicine that may or may not work. Once a treatment has been tested rigorously, it no longer matters whether it was considered alternative at the outset. If it is found to be reasonably safe and effective, it will be accepted." - Marcia Angell, Kassirer JP, "Alternative medicine--the risks of untested and unregulated remedies." N Engl J Med 1998;339:839.

See also

• Project:Skepticism

References