Bill

“These partisan beliefs can upset the equation in which more information will bring us closer to the truth. A recent study in Nature found that the more informed that strong political partisans were about global warming, the less they agreed with one another.44”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

“I better confess that while I do abhor war, yet there are worse things. Ah, my friends, far worse! A state of so-called peace, in which labor organizations are riddled, as by plague germs, with insane notions out of anarchistic Red Russia! A state in which college professors, newspapermen, and notorious authors are secretly promulgating these same seditious attacks on the grand old Constitution! A state in which, as a result of being fed with these mental drugs, the People are flabby, cowardly, grasping, and lacking in the fierce pride of the warrior! No, such a state is far worse than war at its most monstrous!”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“After all, it was Hardin who said: ‘A nuclear blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“It is amusing to poke fun at the experts when their predictions fail. However, we should be careful with our Schadenfreude. To say our predictions are no worse than the experts’ is to damn ourselves with some awfully faint praise. Prediction does play a particularly important role in science, however. Some of you may be uncomfortable with a premise that I have been hinting at and will now state explicitly: we can never make perfectly objective predictions. They will always be tainted by our subjective point of view.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't