Independent Verification Quotes

Do not believe a thing because you have read about it in a book. Do not believe a thing because another man has said it was true. Do not believe in words because they are hallowed by tradition. Find out the truth for yourself. Reason it out. That is realization.

I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.

Because I don't believe everything I read.

What we are fed through the media I do not accept, unless you see it with your own eyes you cant trust anything.

Trust as little as you can to report, and examine all you can by your own senses.

I know that if enough people shout a falsehood, people start to think it's true and a lot of people don't do independent verification of everything they hear.

If you form the habit of taking what someone else says about a thing without checking it out for yourself, you'll find that other people will have you hating your friends and loving your enemies.

Science is nothing more than a method of inquiry. The method says an assertion is valid - and will be universally accepted - only if it can be reproduced by others, and thereby independently verified. The impersonal rigor of the method has produced enormously powerful results for 400 years. The scientific method is utterly apolitical. A truth in science is verifiable whether you are black or white, male or female, old or young. It’s verifiable whether you know the experimenter, or whether you don’t.

Measurements, observations, descriptions can only be considered scientific when they are independently confirmed by other people.

SO when I got word from three different sets of people who all said Manson had cancer, I knew I couldn't get straight info from his staff and had no choice but to go over the fence for it.

The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

I don't want people to say, 'Something is true because Tyson says it is true.' That's not critical thinking.

One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)

Evidence-based reasoning underpins all scientific thinking, and it involves testing hypotheses or theories against data. Validating a theory requires replicable measurements from independent groups with different equipment and methods of analysis. Convergence of evidence is critical to the acceptance of a scientific idea.

Most people don't know what they're talking about. They move their mouth and say things because they don't want to admit they don't know. Or they think they know, but it's just confabulation and biases. So ignore them unless what they say resonates with some real wisdom inside of you. Assume they're a fool and find out the truth for yourself.

The makers of dictionaries are dependent upon specialists for their definitions. A specialist's definition may be true or it may be erroneous. But its truth cannot be increased or its error diminished by its acceptance by the lexicographer. Each definition must stand on its own merits.