Lawrence Summers Quotes

Berelson had done a major compendium of research and found that the high quality studies with very good data were usually done in studies or programs that were not very important, while the most important areas were usually informed by poorer data and less rigid studies. As an example he gave the extensive data that the defense department then had on the relative physical fitness prowess of the marines verses the other services, but had little or no data as to whether the marine was a better fighter, had better judgment in crises, was more skilled with weapons system of the time etc. The Education Department had great data on the performance of students on mathematics tests but almost none on how to teach mathematics.

This is one of the first written statements that primary causes should be studied by man and not just accepted as mysteries created by God. At the time, all of the sciences and mathematics were considered part of natural philosophy.

In the 1960s, the cigarette companies and their lobbyists paid consultants and some scientists to demonstrate that tobacco did not cause cancer. By the beginning of the 21st century, the practice of lobbyist bought research was very common. The lobbyists realized that their many might alter the approach and quality of the research so the results would support their political points of view. If the studies did not, the lobbyists and industries simply did not make the results public, and the terms of their financing often prohibited the consultants from releasing information on their own,

This quotation is important because it illustrates a common problem politicians have with funding science and mathematical research. Actually, so far many millions of dollars have gone into studying and developing methods of producing random numbers and sequences of them which are extremely important to many branches of science and essential to the operation of computers. Yet to the layman, the expense of public money to find better ways to pick random numbers seems totally absurd. Just pick one or use any random number. However, it is virtually impossible for a human being to truly randomly pick a number from 1-999. Most methods produce biases which invalidate the randomness. But this is very counter intuitive. So much decision making about scientific funding and policy is counter intuitive to the politician and the general public.

This is a very important historical quotation regarding the conflict between Science and Religion. What this quotation shows it that the accusation that the study of science undermined religious belief was a common accusation in the 17th century as well as today. Here Boyle gives the best argument against the accusation, However, despite the fact that this then seemed to be an irrefutable argument and it seems so today even, the accusation is continuously made with small fundamentalist religious factions attempting to reduce the influence of science on society.

This quotation polarized the economists into those who thought that economics was held back by the rigidity of the scientific method and those who thought that economics was a backward science because it did not follow the standards of the more developed scientists. Scientists from other fields are almost universally in agreement and accuse many economists of making predictions and pronouncements from analyses that in other sciences would only be called guesses. The same is said of politics by many scientists.

The Institute was just getting started then. The stock market had crashed the year before, and we were one year into the Great Depression. Several of the trustees that that they should devote the first department of the institute to the study of economics to focus on the challenge of the depression. Flexner, the first Director, thought that a bad idea giving this quotation as his reason. He then persuaded the trustees to start with mathematics where the Institute has since done its finest work.

Some scientists would use this as an example of what scientific research is really like; others would argue that Ballard, however great as a field scientists and explorer, was a poor basic scientist and theoretician. He tends to work in the softer side of his science. This would be a very unusual occurrence for an experimental physicist or a molecular biologist.