Shawn Lawrence Otto QUOTES

181 " legitimate scientific conclusions are empirical—that is to say, inductive and based on observation—they will rarely, if ever, make absolute statements without allowing for the possibility of error. Lack of absolute certainty is not a weakness in science—it’s a strength. It’s the only way one knows it is science. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

182 " Antiscience advocates on the left could be just as vicious as the right’s climate deniers when scientists pointed out that their ideas that cell phones cause brain cancer, vaccines cause autism, genetically modified crops are unhealthy to eat, and similar notions were not supported by the evidence. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

183 " the adherent is looking at the world through the lens of the converted. What made a scientific theory different, was that it didn’t demand conversion; it was testable. It was the boldness or riskiness of its real-world predictions that made it rigorous. And that’s what made it science. As Popper put it, “the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.” While science can rarely absolutely say that something is true, it can absolutely say that something is false. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

184 " Berlin may have become a scientific and cultural capital in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but the Nazis considered the city’s artistic and scientific cross-pollination degenerate. As they elevated rhetoric and ideology over science and tolerance, Germany’s intellectuals began to either conform to Nazi authoritarianism or flee. Within a decade, German scientific and technological progress ground to a halt as the Third Reich lost many of its most creative minds "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

185 " There is an observable reality on which empirical science is based and from which knowledge is derived. That is why it has power: it creatively disrupts prior views, both scientific and ideological, enabling us to affect the physical world in ways we couldn’t before. The observations and knowledge extend incrementally, by the contributions, risks, and suffering of many. They do not extend in sudden and dramatic paradigm shifts, and they didn’t in Einstein’s day, either. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

186 " All of our knowledge derived using science stands exposed to the same test of falsifiability: it is stated in such a way that an experiment could prove it false. That none has so far gives us high confidence that a given proposition, like the theory of evolution, is probably true, and we quantify that probability repeatedly using statistics. The more often it has been tested and survived, the more likely it is to be a fully objective truth. But this sort of confidence is not an article of faith—just the opposite. It’s an article of what survives after the rigors of doubt and scrutiny. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

187 " Journalists look for conflict to find an angle, so there are always two sides to every story. Bob says 2 + 2 = 4. Mary says it is 6. It sounds surprising, but Mary may have legitimate reasons for her perspective. The media outlet gets a good headline "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

188 " Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

189 " its trial-and-error, observational approach, which adopts whatever new tools become available, applies metaphor, builds on the latest recorded knowledge (“the literature,” as scientists call it), and makes and tests bold predictions. Science is our very best tool against prejudices and unexamined attitudes, not the cultural expression of them. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

190 " Locke suggested, in natural law and physical reality: by only stating what we know from observation and what we can tie back to observation—but, as Popper noted, with testability, not with certainty. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

191 " The modern journalistic approach does not work when applied to scientific questions, and it tends to skew public policy in counterfactual directions, as the above example shows. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

192 " In the end, the fundamental idea that objectivity doesn’t exist, and that science is little more than a metanarrative of the dominant culture, whose elite use it to hang on to power, was perhaps postmodernism’s most corrosive contribution—one that informed and enabled a much more massive attack on science by religious ideologues and powerful industrial interests in the years to come. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

193 " The obliteration of two cities of civilians avoided what would surely have been a bloody invasion against a radicalized nation that was using suicide bombers, but it also exposed the dark side of the power that science could unleash, and the horrific consequences that can arise when ethics lag behind knowledge. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

194 " Seeking authority in the cultural dialogue, conservative Catholic scholars make similarly revisionist, neo-postmodern statements today, arguing that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is practicing “scientism”—that scientists think they are superior and look down on those who don’t “believe” in science, as if it were a belief system instead of a process of measuring nature with our hands and eyes and tools. It’s a brilliant tactic, and an excellent example of the intellectual handicap postmodernism has created for itself and science: as long as everyone has their own truth, no one can presume to question anyone else’s. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

195 " Espousing antiscience—that the absence of absolute certainty is grounds for inaction or doubt, or that we should then hear out all perspectives equally—is evidence of either a lack of understanding of the most basic tenets of reason, or of motivation by an unreasonable agenda. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

196 " But today, journalism schools teach a mantra that scientists will say is completely false: “there is no such thing as objectivity”—a phrase frequently repeated by some of the profession’s leading figures, and contained in many newspaper reporters’ guidelines. This conceit may be true when reporting on politics or interviewing the witnesses to a crime, but it is decidedly not true when it comes to reporting on events or issues that have large inputs of objective knowledge from science, even when those issues or events are political. For such stories, we have developed a unique, reproducible, peer-reviewed method of scientific research whose very purpose is to create the objective knowledge reporters seem to think cannot be had. The process of science is designed to cull out reliable knowledge—no matter who does the investigating or reports on the outcome—from our gender identities, our political identities, our religious identities, our sexual identities, our cultural identities, and so on, trimming away all those subjective forms of bias reporters think we can never escape until we are left with knowledge that is provisionally objective in the stories we tell about reality. While it may not be possible to attain total objectivity, approaching it is what science is all about, and the reliable knowledge it produces is responsible for every advance in the modern world. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

197 " And why sequester him under a house arrest, limiting his influence? It’s because his evidence-based arguments—look through my telescope and see for yourself—were compelling, especially to his adoring, young audiences. Knowledge is power, and that power is political. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

198 " Today what we too often see is called “false balance,” because it presents both sides as if they have equal weight of the evidence, when that is objectively not true. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

199 " scientists for the last two generations saw their role as the creators of knowledge and believed they should leave the moral, ethical, and political implications to others to sort out. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

200 " by presenting them as a debate, journalism becomes an implicit advocate for extreme views, weighting them and presenting them to the public as if they had equal merit with tested knowledge. Journalism thus fuels the extreme partisanship we see in public dialogue today, and feeds into the hands of the very power journalists exist to challenge—vested interests who seek to circumvent evidence and undermine the democratic process to achieve a desired outcome. "

― Shawn Lawrence Otto , The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It