No.57
I got a "request forbidden" on the Harvard link, but the first one with Richard Feynman was a nice read.
I'm not sure about any essays, but I always liked this excerpt from The God Delusion (say what you will about Richard Dawkins, his love for science is clear for all to see):
>I do remember one formative influence in my undergraduate life. There was an elderly professor in my department who had been passionately keen on a particular theory for, oh, a number of years, and one day an American visiting researcher came and he completely and utterly disproved our old man's hypothesis. The old man strode to the front, shook his hand and said, "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you, I have been wrong these fifteen years". And we all clapped our hands raw. That was the scientific ideal, of somebody who had a lot invested, a lifetime almost invested in a theory, and he was rejoicing that he had been shown wrong and that scientific truth had been advanced.
That's one of the things I very much like about science, the implicit presumption that what you believe to be true (or might be true), is quite possibly false; the idea of falsefiability or a null hypothesis, and genuine intellectual curiosity about the truth behind a certain phenomenon at the expense of what you yourself might prefer to believe.
The nature of scientific rigor is in that sense honesty in practice, with regards to others as well as yourself.
No.109
http://www.skeptic.com/insight/carl-sagan-and-the-dangers-of-skepticism/
>I believe that scientists should spend more time in discussing these issues…. There are many cases where the belief system is so absurd that scientists dismiss it instantly but never commit their arguments to print. I believe this is a mistake.
>[…] supporters of superstitions and pseudoscience are human beings with real beliefs, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. … If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.
No.112
>>111
>first trips
>this quote
Damn.
Although bullshit can just be made up on the spot, unless it's clever or intricate (there has been some energy put into making it believable) it shouldn't be hard to dismiss it by pointing out simple inconsistencies and/or demand data to support whatever assertions are made.
I'd maintain the energy spent is roughly equal then.
No.140
Science is not born of consensus, and even less is it found in peer review. Rather it is found in skepticism about third hand facts and disbelief in the authority of experts. Trust but verify, which in the context of science means trust but replicate, which of course really means don’t trust. Consensus is the madness of crowds. We are prone to believe stuff because everyone else believes it, which is at best a vicious cycle leading to madness, and at worst prone to being unduly influenced by the insane, and manipulated by the evil. The insane don’t shift, as they are insane, and the evil don’t shift, because they are lying about what they believe. The evil and the insane tend to dominate the consensus.