Soft and Hard Targets of Scepticism

When people like this get together, they become tribal. They pat each other on the back and tell each other how smart they are compared to those outside the tribe. But belonging to a tribe often makes you dumber.

On The Unreliability of Witnesses and Scientists

Once the reality of meteorite falls became established, the historian Eusebius Salverte pointed out that scientists' failure to recognise the truth of the matter for so long was borne out of "a predetermination to see nothing, or to deny what we had seen."

Is Science Kind of a Scam?

The way scientists do think makes us aware of how we can think. Samuel Johnson said that a performer riding on three horses may not accomplish anything, but he increases our respect for the faculties of man. The scientists who show that nature rides three horses at once—or even two horses, on opposite sides of the universe—also widen our respect for what we are capable of imagining, and it is this action, at its own spooky distance, that really entangles our minds.

Is this ET? Mystery of strange radio bursts from space

"If the result holds up, says Hippke, 'there is something really interesting we need to understand. This will either be new physics, like a new kind of pulsar, or, in the end, if we can exclude everything else, an ET.'

Hippke is cautious, but notes that remote possibilities are still possibilities. 'When you set out to search for something new,' he says, 'you might find something unexpected.'"

Why the Earth Will Never Be Invaded

"The odds of us existing, concluded Metaxas, 'are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all "just happened" defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row.'"

The Most Dangerous Ideas In Science

"High-energy physicist Sabine Hossenfelder called Dawid's kind of post-empirical science an 'oxymoron.'  More importantly, for scientists like Paul Steinhardt and collaborators, the new ideas are becoming 'post-modern.' They use the term in the sense that without more definitive connections to data, the ideas will not be abandoned because a community exists that continues to support them."