The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake
Steven Novella
Top 10 Best Quotes
“An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge.”
“science requires courage—the courage to face reality and accept its findings, even if they upset us or are disruptive to our comfortable ideology.”
“The human mind is like a sailboat on a sea with strong currents and a steady wind. We tend to just follow the currents of our biases and can easily be manipulated and blown about.”
“This is the essence of skepticism: How do we know what to believe and what to doubt? Once you begin to ask questions like “How do we actually know anything?” our beliefs start to fall one by one.”
“So, while we cannot trust the stories we are told, tradition, faith, convenient or reassuring narratives, charismatic figures, or even our own memories, we can slowly and carefully build a process by which to evaluate all claims to truth and knowledge. A big part of that process is science, which systematically tests our ideas against reality, using the most objective data possible. Science is still a messy and flawed process, but it is a process. It has, at least, the capacity for self-correction, to move our beliefs incrementally in the direction of reality. In essence, science is the process of making our best effort to know what’s really real.”
“It’s understandable, then, that pretty much every human culture independently developed some version of the belief that a special animating force makes living things alive. The Romans called it spiritus and the Greeks pneuma (both words also meaning “breath”). In China it is called chi, which also translates to “blood” because they felt the life force was carried in the blood. In Japan it is ki, in India prana, in Polynesia mana, and in Arabic it is baraka.”
“Don’t panic. This whole notion of thinking for yourself and questioning everything is actually quite fun and empowering. We can do this together.”
“Anyone who engages in social media witnesses the attribution error on a regular basis. Not only is there a tendency to assume other people’s motivations; we hastily infer their arguments and positions, based upon the pigeonhole into which we think they fit. Without listening to what they are actually saying, charitably interpreting that, and giving them an opportunity to clarify their position, we risk attributing a position to them that they don’t have, attacking a straw man, and then looking foolish. I’ve seen these exchanges rapidly degrade into mutual accusations of being a troll. There are real trolls out there, but sometimes trolling is in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes we can be the troll.”
“We all start as children believing pretty much whatever we’re told. The gulf of knowledge and experience between adults and young children is so great that to a child, any adult is perceived as the ultimate authority on any topic. As we mature we realize that not all adults agree with each other, so some of them must be wrong. We become more sophisticated in our choice of authority figures, but we still tend to rely on others to know what to think—on experts, leaders, religious figures, celebrities, talking heads, or just “common knowledge.”
“Respect for Knowledge and Truth—Skeptics value reality and what is true. We therefore endeavor to be as reality-based as possible in our beliefs and opinions. This means subjecting all claims to a well-founded process of evaluation. Skeptics believe that the world is knowable because it follows certain rules, or laws of nature. The only legitimate method for knowing anything empirical about the universe follows this naturalistic assumption. In other words, within the realm of the empirical (factual knowledge based on evidence), you don’t get to invoke magic or the supernatural.”
Except where otherwise noted, all rights reserved to the author(s) of this book (mentioned above). The content of this page serves solely as promotional material for the aforementioned book. If you enjoyed these quotes, you can support the author(s) by acquiring the full book from Amazon.
Book Keywords: