Perhaps the sharpest distinction between science and pseudo-science is that science has a far keener appreciation of human imperfections and fallibility than does pseudoscience (or ‘inerrant’ revelation). If we resolutely refuse to acknowledge where we are liable to fall into error, then we can confidently expect that error - even serious error, profound mistakes - will be our companion forever.

#TheDemonHauntedWorld #读书

#TheDemonHauntedWorld 看到现在都在讲破除迷信，总感觉书里的例子本身有些过时，比如 UFO 和麦田怪圈之类的…现在的人真的还信这种东西吗？现在都是电磁场和量子力学啦。也许中学的我看更合适，恍惚记得中学课本有讲麦田怪圈。中学的时候我还在接受果壳的科学启蒙，感觉现在接触到的很多科学方法（比如 false positive）都是那个时候学的…
不过这本书里讲到的概念今天依旧适用，比如迷信之所以是迷信是因为证据不足，而不是现象本身不引起科学家的兴趣，作者也很希望找到外星人。以及如果把所有不明白的现象都称为 Demon 的话，那整个世界都要 demon haunted 了。以及一种迷信倒下了，另一种又会崛起：

So urgent on the vulgar is the necessity of believing, that the fall of any system of mythology will most probably be succeeded by the introduction of some other mode of superstition...

不过也讲到了中世纪的猎巫，我稍微感兴趣一点。说当时教皇的训谕指出 both sexes 跟魔鬼性交，然而最后被猎的都是女巫…

Keeping an open mind is a virtue - but, as the space engineer James Oberg once said, not so open that your brains fall out.

​

What sceptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct and to understand, a reasoned argument and, especially important, to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The question is not whether we like
the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the premises or starting point and whether that premise is true.

Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in thi future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there ar no authorities; at most, there are experts.

学到一种逻辑谬误：special pleading（片面辩护），就是说论证的时候故意忽略掉不利于自己观点的方面，或者指明某个东西是特例但又不说为什么是特例。主要是维基里这几个例子太好笑了​​：

• 為了節省開支，員工出差只准買最便宜的機票，但我是老闆，所以我可以買最好的。
• 我國國情不同，因此西式民主暫時不適合我國。
• 女生該注重外表，應該常保自己的外表乾乾淨淨的，應該留長頭髮但不該有體毛，而且皮膚要白、身材要瘦、身上不能有痘子或疤痕；不過男生不必注重外表。
• 我們應該平等對待所有族群的人，但韓國人很賤，因此韓國人除外。

Observational selection, also called the enumeration of favourable circumstances, or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses (e.g., a state boasts of the Presidents it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers).

唔，感觉这应该是我最容易犯的一种逻辑谬误…

weasel words, […] Presidents […] may therefore be tempted to arrange wars while waving the flag and calling the wars something else - ‘police actions’, ‘armed incursions’, ‘protective reaction strikes’, ‘pacification’,‘safeguarding American interests’, and a wide variety of ‘operations’, such as ‘Operation Just Cause’. Euphemisms for war are one of a broad class of reinventions of language for political purposes. Talleyrand said, ‘An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public’.

惯用伎俩了，原来叫 weasel words…刚好前段时间在#明亮的对话 里也读到含糊用词 https://rhabarberbarbara.bar/@unagi/107911355987180825

Tobacco is addictive; by many criteria more so than heroin and cocaine. […] More people have died of tobacco than in all of World War II. According to the World Health Organization, smoking kills three million people every year worldwide. This will rise to ten million annual deaths by 2020, in part because of a massive advertising campaign to portray smoking as advanced and fashionable to young women in the developing world.

2020 已经过了​​看了下现在的数据，貌似是一年 8 million？今天走在路上还有个人问我有没有烟…

the Harvest Moon Festival is an important holiday in traditional Chinese communities in America. In the week preceding the festival, the death rate in the community is found to fall by 35 per cent. In the following week the death rate jumps by 35 per cent. Control groups of non-Chinese show no such effect. […] On more detailed study, it turned out that the fluctuations in death rate occurred exclusively among women 75 years old or older. The Harvest Moon Festival is presided over by the oldest women in the households. They were able to stave off death for a week or two to perform their ceremonial responsibilities.

？？这就是责任心吗…

Being human, scientists also sometimes engage in observational selection: they like to remember those cases when they’ve been right and forget when they’ve been wrong. But in many instances, what is ‘wrong’ is partly right, or stimulates others to find out what’s right.

if we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition - even when it seems to be doing a little good - we abet a general climate in which scepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate. Figuring out a prudent balance takes wisdom.

There are perhaps ten times more astrologers than astronomers in the United States. In France there are more astrologers than Roman Catholic clergy.

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at the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes - an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly sceptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.

An ancient Chinese proverb advises, ‘Better to be too credulous than too sceptical’, but this is from an extremely conservative society in which stability was much more prized than freedom and where the rulers had a powerful vested interest in not being challenged. Most scientists, I believe, would say, ‘Better to be too sceptical than too credulous’.

这是哪句谚语啊​​每次在外文书里看见中国谚语我都对不上号，想了想感觉我知道的最接近的是“宁可信其有 不可信其无”？但英文翻译成这样感觉跟作者批判的完全就不是一回事儿了？不知道是不是别的谚语…

Every now and then, I’m lucky enough to teach a kindergarten or first-grade class. Many of these children are natural-born scientists - although heavy on the wonder side and light on scepticism. They’re curious, intellectually vigorous. Provocative and insightful questions bubble out of them. They exhibit enormous enthusiasm. I’m asked follow-up questions. They’ve never heard of the notion of a ‘dumb question’.
But when I talk to high school seniors, I find something different. They memorize ‘facts’. By and large, though, the joy of discovery, the life behind those facts, has gone out of them. They’ve lost much of the wonder, and gained very little scepticism. They’re worried about asking ‘dumb’ questions; they’re willing to accept inadequate answers; they don’t pose follow-up questions; the room is awash with sidelong glances to judge, second-by-second, the approval of their peers. They come to class with their questions written out on pieces of paper, which they surreptitiously examine, waiting their turn and oblivious of whatever discussion their peers are at this moment engaged in.

Bright, curious children are a national and world resource. They need to be cared for, cherished, and encouraged. But mere encouragement isn’t enough. We must also give them the essential tools to think with.

How much science is there on the radio or television talk shows, or on those dreary Sunday morning programmes in which middle-aged white people sit around agreeing with each other?

“in which middle-aged white people sit around agreeing with each other”好好笑​​

But what are these time-varying electric and magnetic fields permeating all of space? What do E and B mean? We feel so much more comfortable with the idea of things touching and jiggling, pushing and pulling, rather than ‘fields’ magically moving objects at a distance, or mere mathematical abstractions. But, as Feynman pointed out, our sense that at least in everyday life we can rely on solid, sensible physical contact to explain, say, why the butter knife comes to you when you pick it up, is a misconception. What does it mean to have physical contact? What exactly is happening when you pick up a knife, or push a swing, or make a wave in a waterbed by pressing down on it periodically? When we investigate deeply, we find that there is no physical contact. Instead, the electrical charges on your hand are influencing the electrical charges on the knife or swing or waterbed, and vice versa. Despite everyday experience and common sense, even here, there is only the interaction of electric fields. Nothing is touching anything.

If we no longer insist on our notions of how Nature ought to behave, but instead stand before Nature with an open and receptive mind, we find that common sense often doesn’t work. Why not? Because our notions, both hereditary and learned, of how Nature works were forged in the millions of years our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. In this case common sense is a faithless guide because no hunter-gatherer’s life ever depended on understanding time-variable electric and magnetic fields. There were no evolutionary penalties for ignorance of Maxwell’s equations.

no evolutionary penalties for ignorance of Maxwell’s equations 好好笑😆

His unification of electricity, magnetism and light into one coherent mathematical whole is the inspiration for subsequent attempts - some successful, some still in their rudimentary stages […]

我还以为他要说 some successful, some failed！学到了，以后做得不咋成功的项目就说还在 rudimentary stage​​我国处于并将长期处于社会主义 rudimentary stage（什么

听说麦克斯韦结婚早但是没有孩子。我觉得如果我能做出些厉害成果，我就不在乎我有没有孩子，我的成果就是我的孩子，为啥要生个孩子然后寄希望于孩子能做出什么成就呢，我自己就行。知识造福千秋万代，孩子一百年后就死了，啥也不是。得真的很喜欢小孩子才生。

其实也不需要特别厉害的成就…有些论文里就是一个小小的 idea 就可以启发后人做出更厉害的东西，所以只要能做一点小小的东西就可以了​​

书里说到假设女王 1860 想造出电视机，并愿意大量投钱的话，那大概是不可能如愿的，因为前置的技术都还没有发明出来。事实上麦克斯韦方程组发现的时候，谁也不知道它能启发电波塔，通讯卫星，电视和雷达的发明。
所以，不能投钱然后指明必须发现什么技术，科学家们做不到，很可能前置技术还没有发现也根本不知要如何发现。我们应当广泛地探索，等待意想不到的结果的出现。
我就想到我读博的这个 funding 支持的 topic 其实跟我现在做的项目一毛钱关系也没有​​跟 funding body 做报告的时候必须要解释我为什么在做这些东西，都是教授帮我扯的谎，说我是在 explore，是意外的发现，是 creative works 所必须的，一大通一大通的。那边买账了。我教授真厉害​​

Basic research is where scientists are free to pursue their curiosity and interrogate Nature, not with any short-term practical end in view, but to seek knowledge for its own sake. Scientists of course have a vested interest in basic research. It’s what they like to do, in many cases why they became scientists in the first place. But it is in society’s interest to support such research. This is how the major discoveries that benefit humanity are largely made.

Maxwell wasn’t thinking of radio, radar and television when he first scratched out the fundamental equations of electromagnet-ism; Newton wasn’t dreaming of space flight or communications satellites when he first understood the motion of the Moon; Roentgen wasn’t contemplating medical diagnosis when he investigated a penetrating radiation so mysterious he called it ‘X-rays’; Curie wasn’t thinking of cancer therapy when she painstakingly extracted minute amounts of radium from tons of pitchblende; Fleming wasn’t planning on saving the lives of millions with antibiotics when he noticed a circle free of bacteria around a growth of mould; Watson and Crick weren’t imagining the cure of genetic diseases when they puzzled over the X-ray diffractometry of DNA; Rowland and Molina weren’t planning to implicate CFCs in ozone depletion when they began studying the role of halogens in stratospheric photochemistry.

Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter, but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?

不得不讲本书作者真的是对后代非常有责任心的…我真的就是做着好玩，没想过能有什么用，不过看来只要我自己觉得好玩就够了，有没有用是后人的事​​

If we’re absolutely sure that our beliefs are right, and those of others wrong; that we are motivated by good, and others by evil; that the King of the Universe speaks to us, and not to adherents of very different faiths; that it is wicked to challenge conventional doctrines or to ask searching questions; that our main job is to believe and obey - then the witch mania will recur in its infinite variations down to the time of the last man.

How confident are we that the power to drive and determine public opinion will always reside in responsible hands?

“It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.”
US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, 1950