B Kevin

“The debates about evolution, global warming, and homeopathy have been explicitly manufactured and funded by a variety of corporate, religious, and political entities from outside science, who are not in the least interested in the quest to divorce our human biases from our understanding of the world. They are not committed to taking the science seriously and are instead devoted to taking their own aims and giving them a thin patina of scientific respectability, enough to justify their claims to equal or greater validity than the existing and overwhelming scientific consensus. These groups are not interested in examining the data and happily reject it when it does not meet their preordained conclusions, inventing new “data” to suit their purposes. In the cases of global warming and evolution, these “controversies” were invented to push back against a perceived political agenda on the part of science and scientists. And the forces behind intelligent design and climate change denial were not wrong about that—science is political, and always has been, in that it informs decisions about the best policies in the public sphere, as well it should. And science certainly is a threat to the institutions pushing these antiscience agendas. Science will always be a political threat to some institutions, simply by virtue of its attempts to respect no authority other than data and logic. So much the worse for those institutions. And that’s another sign that these “debates” are not like the debate over quantum foundations—because those working against the scientific consensus are allied with (and often funded by) groups that are simply against the idea of science itself, like some fundamentalist religious groups.”
― Adam Becker, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Well, it doesn’t work. Lowering standards just leads to poorly educated students who feel entitled to easy work and lavish praise.”
― Matthew Syed, Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

“The way to get on with a cat is to treat it as an equal - or even better, as the superior it knows itself to be.”
― Elizabeth Peters, The Snake, the Crocodile and the Dog