“I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.”
― On Certainty
― On Certainty
“There is a widely held notion that does plenty of damage: the notion of “scientifically proved.” Nearly an oxymoron. The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt. Precisely because we keep questioning everything, especially our own premises, we are always ready to improve our knowledge. Therefore a good scientist is never “certain.” Lack of certainty is precisely what makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain, because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better evidence or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use but is also in fact damaging, if we value reliability.”
― This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
― This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
“But the history of science—by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans—teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply. The error bar is a pervasive, visible self-assessment of the reliability of our knowledge.”
― The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
― The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
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