David Brin Quotes

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

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

I strongly discourage any intellectuals, regardless of race, from speaking on matters for which they have limited or no expertise.

No scientist ever believes that he has the final answer or the ultimate truth on anything.

For all its beauty, honesty, and effectiveness at improving the human condition, science demands a terrible price - that we accept what experiments tell us about the universe, whether we like it or not. It's about consensus and teamwork and respectful critical argument, working with, and through, natural law. It requires that we utter, frequently, those hateful words - 'I might be wrong.'

In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken..."

The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.

It's for scientists to lay out the data and lay out what they think, and then it's for the public to make up its own mind. We don't live in a priesthood where some small group imposes its views on other people - that's not the way that science works, and it's not the way a democratic society should work.

Scientific criticism has no nobler task than to shatter false beliefs.

If any expert or scientist reaches a conclusion or espouses a view that departs from the ideologue’s world view, it is the expert that he examines carefully and not his ideology.

Science is really about individual experts reaching a consensus.

In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong.

The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes. Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry — is not even a ”subject " — but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.

Another of the qualities of science is that it teaches the value of rational thought, as well as the importance of freedom of thought; the positive results that come from doubting that all the lessons are true... Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

It is a common failing-and one that I have myself suffered from-to fall in love with a hypothesis and to be unwilling to take no for an answer. A love affair with a pet hypothesis can waste years of precious time. There is very often no finally decisive yes, though quite often there can be a decisive no.

True science teaches us to doubt and, in ignorance, to refrain.

Indeed the reasoned criticism of a prevailing belief is a service to the proponents of that belief; if they are incapable of defending it, they are well advised to abandon it. This self-questioning and error-correcting aspect of the scientific method is its most striking property.

When an investigator has developed a formula which gives a complete representation of the phenomena within a certain range, he may be prone to satisfaction. Would it not be wiser if he should say 'Foiled again! I can find out no more about Nature along this line.'

The attitude of the true scientist towards the real limits of human understanding was unforgettably impressed on me in early youth by the obviously unpremeditated words of a great biologist; Alfred Kuhn finished a lecture to the Austrian Academy of Science with Goethe 's words, "It is the greatest joy of the man of thought to have explored the explorable and then calmly to revere the inexplorable." After the last word he hesitated, raised his hand in repudiation and cried, above the applause, "No, not calmly, gentlemen; not calmly!

A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" - find out how he feels about astrology.

In a liberal scientific society, to claim that you are above error is the height of irresponsibility.

It is a mistake to believe that science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form to replace the religious catechism by something else, even a scientific one.

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

The worst, the most difficult thing I think is that the more you become intrigued by science and the information is out there, the more you are aware of the paucity of your own knowledge.