Footnote Physicist

          “There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs.”           – Thomas Sowell I           “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”           – Christopher Hitchens II           “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”           – Pierre Simon Laplace (as paraphrased by Carl Sagan) III           Baselines (or base-rates ) are an acknowledgment of the fact that, totally aside from a given intervention, many effects are occurring in some normal rate all of the time.  Imagine, for example, that you give drug x to 10,000 people for a period of a year in order to figure out if it is dangerous.  Then imagine that 10 people in the study died.  One might be tempted to worry that the drug has a ...

          “The universe revealed by the relentless error-correcting mechanism of science was to him           infinitely preferable to the untested assumptions of traditional belief.  For Carl, the 'spiritual' had to           be rooted in natural reality.  He cherished those ideas about the cosmos that remained after the           most rigorous experiment and observation.  Scientific insight made him feel something, a soaring           sensation, a recognition that he could only compare to falling in love.”           – Ann Druyan I           “Real peer review is what happens after you've passed the bull-shit thing called, 'peer review.'”           – Eric Weinstein II           “Science i...

          “But is groupthink the best way to create really new science?  Risking heresy, I hereby dissent.  I           believe the creative process usually unfolds in a very different way.  It arises and for a while           germinates in a solitary brain.  It commences as an idea and, equally important, the ambition of a           single person who is prepared and strongly motivated to make discoveries in one domain of           science or another.  The successful innovator is favored by a fortunate combination of talent and           circumstance, and is socially conditioned by family, friends, teachers, and mentors and by stories           of great scientists and their discoveries.  He (or she) is sometimes driven, I will dare to suggest,...