Nandini

“Douglas Adams amusingly satirized computer addiction of exactly the kind that hit me. The target of his satire was the programmer who had a particular problem X, which needed solving. He could have written a program in five minutes to solve X and then got on and used his solution. But instead of just doing that, he spent days and weeks writing a more general program that could be used by anybody at any time to solve all similar problems of the general class of X. The fascination lies in the generality and in the purveying of an aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly product for the benefit of a population of hypothetical and very probably non-existent users – not in actually finding the answer to the particular problem X.”
― Richard Dawkins, An Appetite For Wonder: The Making Of A Scientist

“The writer C. S. Lewis once characterized this style of argument: “The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden.”18 Such arguments are effectively impossible to refute, as Lewis noted. “A belief in invisible cats cannot be logically disproved,” although it does “tell us a good deal about those who hold it.”19 The”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“Sensible decision making involves acting on the information we have, even while accepting that it may well be imperfect and our decisions may need to be revisited and revised in light of new information.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“Mrak was pulling a rhetorical switcheroo because it wasn’t environmentalists who argued everything was harmful; it was the tobacco industry. The industry insisted that everything from crossing the street to riding a bicycle was harmful, so tobacco should be viewed as just one of the routine risks that people accept by living life. The menace of daily life, some industry apologists called it.105 Life is dangerous. So is tobacco. Get used to it. So the tobacco industry argued. But there’s a world of difference between risks we choose to accept in exchange for rewards we want—like driving a car, drinking alcohol, or having unprotected sex—and having those risks imposed upon us against our will. There’s also a world of difference between the idea that evolution has equipped humans with some immunity to natural hazards and the idea that we somehow have immunity to something we’d never been exposed to in two million years of evolution. The secondhand smoke debate was crucial precisely because the risk wasn’t a choice and it wasn’t natural. It was a man-made risk that was being imposed without consent. The”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming