liveonearth | Entries tagged with reason

"A single dot on a canvas is not a painting and a single bet cannot resolve a complex theoretical dispute. This will take many questions and question clusters. Of course it's possible that if large numbers of questions are asked, each side may be right on some forecasts but wrong on others and the final outcome won't generate the banner headlines that celebrity bets sometimes do. But as software engineers say, that's a feature, not a bug. A major point of view rarely has zero merit, and if a forecasting contest produces a split decisions we will have learned that the reality is more mixed than either side thought. If learning, not gloating, is the goal, that is progress."
--Tetlock, Philip and Gardner, Dan, in p269 in Superforecasting; The Art and Science of Prediction 2015.

Crossposts: https://liveonearth.livejournal.com/1439152.html

"Mr. Trump, you appear to be laboring under the delusion that you have the necessary qualifications to be president. The manifest failure of almost everything you have attempted during your first six months, coupled with the anarchic chaos that pervades your White House, should give you pause--or would give pause to any person of normal sensitivity...

Get all your news, not from FOX but from all the sources available to a president, many of them not available to the rest of us. Announce your decisions after due consideration and consultation, not impulsively on Twitter. Cultivate common good manners when dealing with people. Do no be misled by the crowds thatcheer your boorish rudeness: they are a minority of the American people.

Listen to experts better qualified than you are. Especially scientists. Be guided by evidence and reason, not gut feeling. By far the best way to assess evidence is the scientific method. Indeed, it is the only way if we interpret "scientific" broadly. In particular--since the matter is so urgent and it may already be too late--listen to scientists when they tell you about the looming catastophe of climate change."

--Richard Dawkins, when asked by John Horgan in interview, "What would you say to Trump if you had his ear"?

Crossposts: http://liveonearth.livejournal.com/1428723.html

The worst criticism
seeks to have the last word
and leave the rest of us in silence;
the best opens up an exchange
that need never end.
--Critic Rebecca Solnit, quoted in Brainpickings.org

It is far better to grasp the universe
as it really is
than to persist in delusion,
however satisfying
and reassuring.
-Carl Sagan

Even if

every gun in the world

suddenly disappeared,

there would still be gun violence

--Ben Carson, retired neurosurgeon and Republican candidate for president

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
--Oliver Sachs
(New York Times, Opinion, “Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer,” Feb. 19, 2015)

( This from the FFRF blog: )

*Created tags for reason and humanism.

SOURCE
http://ffrf.org/news/blog/item/23735-remembering-oliver-sacks

This author recognizes that the 19th century explanation of how homeopathy works it not going to satisfy modern people forever. Eventually even the slow ones will wise up that all of science flies in the face of it. I'd like to get the full text to find out if this person actually has a science bone in his body, or it it's just another circuitous route to nonsense. http://www.homeopathyjournal.net/article/S1475-4916(04)00112-2/abstract

INTERESTING TIMES

are better than no times at all.

Entries tagged with reason

QotD: If Learning, Not Gloating, Is the Goal

QotD: What Dawkins would say to Trump

QotD: Types of Criticism

QotD: Sagan on the Value of Realism

QotD: Ben Carson on Guns

In Memory of Oliver

A Reasonable Homeopath?

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May 2025

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