Dan

“Scientific theories are tested every time someone makes an observation or conducts an experiment, so it is misleading to think of science as an edifice, built on foundations. Rather, scientific knowledge is more like a web. The difference couldn’t be more crucial. A tall edifice can collapse – if the foundations upon which it was built turn out to be shaky. But a web can be torn in several parts without causing the collapse of the whole. The damaged threads can be patiently replaced and re-connected with the rest – and the whole web can become stronger, and more intricate.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“My basic hypothesis is this: the people who run the media are Humanities graduates with little understanding of science, who wear their ignorance as a badge of honor. Secretly, deep down, perhaps they resent the fact that they have denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of Western thought from the past two hundred years. There is an attack implicit in all media coverage of science - in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them. The media create a parody of science. On this template, science is portrayed as groundless, incomprehensible didactic truth statements from scientists - who, themselves, are socially- powerful, arbitrary un-elected authority figures. They are detached from reality. They do work that is either wacky, or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory, probably going to change soon and - most ridiculously - hard to understand. Having created this parody, the Commentariat then attack it, as if they were genuinely critiquing what science is all about.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“For example, a set of twenty-five studies involving five hundred astrologers examined the average degree of agreement between astrological predictions. In social science, such as in psychology, tests that have less than o.8 (i.e., 8o percent) agreement level are considered unreliable. Astrology's reliability is an embarrassingly low o. I, with a variability around the mean of o.o6 standard deviations. This means that there is, on average, no agreement at all among the predictions made by different astrologers.”
― Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk

“...the real threat from cranks is not that their customers might die -- there is the odd case, although it seems crass to harp on about them - but that they systematically the public's understanding about the very nature of evidence.”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science