Steven Novella > Quotes

“What do you think science is? There's nothing magical about science. It is simply a systematic way for carefully and thoroughly observing nature and using consistent logic to evaluate results. Which part of that exactly do you disagree with? Do you disagree with being thorough? Using careful observation? Being systematic? Or using consistent logic?”
― Steven Novella

“Questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations." - Steven Novella”
― Steven Novella

“History is strewn with ideas that were intuitive and made sense at the time, but were also hopelessly wrong.”
― Steven Novella

“An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“science requires courage—the courage to face reality and accept its findings, even if they upset us or are disruptive to our comfortable ideology.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“Creationists argue that natural selection is only a negative process, and therefore cannot create anything. Chopra argues that skepticism is only a negative process, and therefore does not lead to knowledge. Both are wrong for the same reasons. They ignore the generation of diversity and new ideas upon which natural selection and skepticism acts. Weeding out the unfit is critical to both – natural selection allows evolution to proceed, and skepticism allows science to advance.”
― Steven Novella

“The human mind is like a sailboat on a sea with strong currents and a steady wind. We tend to just follow the currents of our biases and can easily be manipulated and blown about.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“Ignorance is a low-energy state. It takes constant vigilance and work to climb out of it.”
― Steven Novella

“It’s understandable, then, that pretty much every human culture independently developed some version of the belief that a special animating force makes living things alive. The Romans called it spiritus and the Greeks pneuma (both words also meaning “breath”). In China it is called chi, which also translates to “blood” because they felt the life force was carried in the blood. In Japan it is ki, in India prana, in Polynesia mana, and in Arabic it is baraka.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How To Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“So, while we cannot trust the stories we are told, tradition, faith, convenient or reassuring narratives, charismatic figures, or even our own memories, we can slowly and carefully build a process by which to evaluate all claims to truth and knowledge. A big part of that process is science, which systematically tests our ideas against reality, using the most objective data possible. Science is still a messy and flawed process, but it is a process. It has, at least, the capacity for self-correction, to move our beliefs incrementally in the direction of reality. In essence, science is the process of making our best effort to know what’s really real.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“This is the essence of skepticism: How do we know what to believe and what to doubt?
Once you begin to ask questions like “How do we actually know anything?” our beliefs start to fall one by one.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“We all start as children believing pretty much whatever we’re told. The gulf of knowledge and experience between adults and young children is so great that to a child, any adult is perceived as the ultimate authority on any topic. As we mature we realize that not all adults agree with each other, so some of them must be wrong. We become more sophisticated in our choice of authority figures, but we still tend to rely on others to know what to think—on experts, leaders, religious figures, celebrities, talking heads, or just “common knowledge.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“Anyone who engages in social media witnesses the attribution error on a regular basis. Not only is there a tendency to assume other people’s motivations; we hastily infer their arguments and positions, based upon the pigeonhole into which we think they fit. Without listening to what they are actually saying, charitably interpreting that, and giving them an opportunity to clarify their position, we risk attributing a position to them that they don’t have, attacking a straw man, and then looking foolish. I’ve seen these exchanges rapidly degrade into mutual accusations of being a troll. There are real trolls out there, but sometimes trolling is in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes we can be the troll.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“Don’t panic. This whole notion of thinking for yourself and questioning everything is actually quite fun and empowering. We can do this together.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“Respect for Knowledge and Truth—Skeptics value reality and what is true. We therefore endeavor to be as reality-based as possible in our beliefs and opinions. This means subjecting all claims to a well-founded process of evaluation. Skeptics believe that the world is knowable because it follows certain rules, or laws of nature. The only legitimate method for knowing anything empirical about the universe follows this naturalistic assumption. In other words, within the realm of the empirical (factual knowledge based on evidence), you don’t get to invoke magic or the supernatural.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“These aren't just culturally determined stories we tell each other. Science is a method, and ideas have to work in order to survive. But we occasionally encounter postmodernist arguments that essentially try to dismiss the hard-won conclusions of science. I guess if you're losing a fight over evidence and logic, it's easy to just sweep the board off the table and say none of it matters.”
― Dr. Steven Novella

“Opposition to transgenic technology often takes the form of “This couldn’t happen in nature.” This is not valid logic (it is an example of both the appeal-to-nature fallacy and the genetic fallacy), and it’s also factually incorrect. There is something called horizontal gene transfer. Genes can move between unrelated organisms. For example, it was discovered in 2014 that cultivated sweet potatoes contain a transgene from a soil bacterium (Agrobacterium), a completely natural transgene. Objection to transgenes seems to be based on the notion that genes from one organism are inherently different from genes from another organism. But this is untrue. A gene doesn’t know it’s a fish gene or a tomato gene or a person gene. They are just genes. In fact, fish and tomatoes share about 60 percent of their genes. It’s true that different kingdoms use different promoters, which are gene regulators, but these are easily swapped out to make them compatible with the target species.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“Like any pseudo scientific thinking, denialism begins with a desired conclusion. Rather than supporting a controversial or rejected claim, like many pseudo sciences, denialists maintain that a generally accepted scientific or historical claim is not true, usually for ideological reasons. Denialists then engage in what is called motivated reasoning, rationalizing why the undesired claim is not true or at least not proven. They therefore are working backwards from their desired conclusion, filling in justifications for what they believe, rather than following logic and evidence wherever it leads.”
― Steven Novella

“As we try to make sense of the world, we work with our existing knowledge and paradigms. We formulate ideas and then systematically seek out information that confirms those ideas. We dismiss contrary information as exceptions. We interpret ambiguous experiences as in line with our theories. We make subjective judgments that further reinforce our beliefs. We remember these apparent confirmations, and then our memories are tweaked over time to make the appearance of confirmation even more dramatic.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How To Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“If it’s natural, it has to be good for you. Well, bird shit and gravel are natural, but I won’t eat them! —James “The Amazing” Randi”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“If B follows A, then B is not necessarily a cause of A.”
― Steven Novella, Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills

“There is already pushback by some in the deaf community against erasing deaf culture by curing deafness.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Future: What Yesterday's Science and Science Fiction Tell Us About the World of Tomorrow

“Humans in general are great at coming up with reasons to maintain their desired beliefs in the face of contradictory data. More intelligent and educated people aren’t necessarily better at critical thinking, but they are likely to be more clever and creative in coming up with such excuses—and scientists are no exception.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“Those who deny the existence of mental illness play similar semantic games. They narrowly define illness as pathological disease, meaning that there has to be something objectively abnormal about cells, tissues, or organs. This description does apply to some diseases, but not all: There are disorders that are defined by the way some organ or system is functioning, but in the absence of clear pathology. Migraine headaches, for example, are a clear disorder without any diagnosable pathology. There are many brain disorders, because brain function depends upon more than just the health of brain cells. Healthy brain cells may still be organized and networked in such a way that their function is disordered. The brain is the organ of mood, thoughts, and behavior. Disordered brain function may therefore lead to a mood disorder or thought disorder. We call such entities mental illness.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“Genetic modification” refers to several techniques for changing organisms to suit our wants and needs. The technology involves various methods for inserting one or more specific genes directly into a target organism, or selectively altering or silencing a gene that is already there. There are two basic types of gene insertions: transgenic and cisgenic. Cisgenic insertion involves inserting genes from closely related species, ones that could potentially crossbreed with the target species. Transgenic insertion involves genes from distant species—even from different kingdoms of life, such as putting a gene from a bacterium into a plant.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“A logical fallacy is an invalid connection between a premise and a conclusion, where the conclusion does not necessarily flow from the premise(s) but is argued as if it does.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“denialism is a subset of pseudoscience, one that tries to cloak itself in the language of skepticism while eschewing the actual process of scientific skepticism.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“An excessively positive outlook can also complicate dying. Psychologist James Coyne has focused his career on end-of-life attitudes in patients with terminal cancer. He points out that dying in a culture obsessed with positive thinking can have devastating psychological consequences for the person facing death. Dying is difficult. Everyone copes and grieves in different ways. But one thing is for certain: If you think you can will your way out of a terminal illness, you will be faced with profound disappointment. Individuals swept up in the positive-thinking movement may delay meaningful, evidence-based treatment (or neglect it altogether), instead clinging to so-called “manifestation” practices in the hope of curing disease. Unfortunately, this approach will most often lead to tragedy. In perhaps one of the largest investigations on the topic to date, Dr. Coyne found that there is simply no relationship between emotional well-being and mortality in the terminally ill (see James Coyne, Howard Tennen, and Adelita Ranchor, 2010). Not only will positive thinking do nothing to delay the inevitable; it may make what little time is left more difficult. People die in different ways, and quality of life can be heavily affected by external societal pressures. If an individual feels angry or sad but continues to bear the burden of friends’, loved ones’, and even medical professionals’ expectations to “keep a brave face” or “stay positive,” such tension can significantly diminish quality of life in one’s final days. And it’s not just the sick and dying who are negatively impacted by positive-thinking pseudoscience. By its very design, it preys on the weak, the poor, the needy, the down-and-out. Preaching a gospel of abundance through mental power sets society as a whole up for failure. Instead of doing the required work or taking stock of the harsh realities we often face, individuals find themselves hoping, wishing, and praying for that love, money, or fame that will likely never come. This in turn has the potential to set off a feedback loop of despair and failure.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“Sometimes one side is completely wrong (like anti-vaxxers).”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How To Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

“We are also predisposed to believe stories, especially when they have an emotional theme. Perhaps this is a result of our evolution. Let’s say your friend tells you to avoid the valley over the ridge because a large lion is hunting there. We probably descended from those who chose to believe their friend and not those who decided to go to the valley and check it out for themselves. In other words, selective pressures may favor accepting stories as probably true as a default.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake