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The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition — thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.
Michael Shermer
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Michael Shermer
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: September 8
Historian Of Science
Journalist
Philosopher
Psychologist
Sport Cyclist
Writer
Glendale
California
USA
Michael Brant Shermer
Cause
Autism
Causes
Controversy
Whether
Reveals
Comes
Recent
Doe
Whereas
Human
Naturally
Vaccinations
Humans
Medical
Cognition
Thinking
Habit
Scientifically
More quotes by Michael Shermer
We do not just blindly concede control to authorities instead we follow the cues provided by our moral communities on how best to behave.
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We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.
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Anecdotal thinking comes naturally science requires training.
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For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals.
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Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.
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If spirituality is the sense of awe and humility in the face of the creation, what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists, and the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionists.
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When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they had a real experience.
Michael Shermer
In the long run, it is better to understand the way the world really is rather than how we would like it to be.
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Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.
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In science, if an idea is not falsifiable, it is not that it is wrong, it is that we cannot determine if it is wrong, and thus it is not even wrong.
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I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism.
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Science is not a thing. It's a verb. It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena.
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Flawed as they may be, science and the secular Enlightenment values expressed in Western democracies are our best hope for survival.
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I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true? The answer is science.
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Belief is the natural state of things. It is the default option. We just believe. We believe all sorts of things. Belief is natural disbelief, skepticism, science, is not natural.
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Since humans are by nature tribal, the overall goal is to expand the concept of the tribe to include ALL members of the species, in a global free society.
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Skepticism is not a position that you stake out ahead of time and stick to no matter what.
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But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.
Michael Shermer
The price of liberty is, in addition to eternal vigilance, eternal patience with the vacuous blather occasionally expressed from behind the shield of free speech.
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Mysteries once thought to be supernatural or paranormal happenings - such as astronomical or meteorological events - are incorporated into science once their causes are understood.
Michael Shermer
