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One of the reasons for its success is that science has a built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. when we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition.
-Carl Sagan
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One Of The Reasons For Its Success

Carl Sagan
One of the reasons for its success is that science has a built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. when we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition.
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More From Carl Sagan

Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. but so does pseudoscience. sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. if it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience.
Doe Pseudoscience Would Be
When things get bad enough, then something happens to correct the course. and it's for that reason that i speak about evolution as an error-making and an error-correcting process. and if we can be ever so much better - ever so much slightly better - at error correcting than at error making, then we'll make it.
Errors Evolution Speak
Error is a supposition that pleasure and pain, that intelligence, substance, life, are existent in matter. error is neither mind nor one of mind's faculties. error is the contradiction of truth. error is a belief without understanding. error is unreal because untrue. it is that which stemma to be and is not. if error were true, its truth would be error, and we should have a self-evident absurdity -namely, erroneous truth. thus we should continue to lose the standard of truth.
Life Pain Mistake
I believe that part of what propels science is the thirst for wonder. it's a very powerful emotion. all children feel it. in a first grade classroom everybody feels it; in a twelfth grade classroom almost nobody feels it, or at least acknowledges it. something happens between first and twelfth grade, and it's not just puberty. not only do the schools and the media not teach much skepticism, there is also little encouragement of this stirring sense of wonder. science and pseudoscience both arouse that feeling. poor popularizations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience.
Encouragement Children Powerful
In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. their motives are in many cases consonant with science. 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.
Kindness Fear Real
Facts are neutral until human beings add their own meaning to those facts. people make their decisions based on what the facts mean to them, not on the facts themselves. the meaning they add to facts depends on their current story … facts are not terribly useful to influencing others. people don’t need new facts—they need a new story.
Mean People Decision
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