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      "text": "What it means to hold a belief based on evidence is, by definition, that one is open to the possibility that evidence might be discovered that would change one's mind. If no evidence would change one's mind, then one is not forming one's beliefs on the basis of evidence.",
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      "text": "The most difficult thing to accept for people who work hard at forming their beliefs on the basis of evidence is that not everyone forms their beliefs in that way. [...] Many people believe what and how they do precisely because they do not formulate their beliefs on the basis of evidence-- not because they're lacking evidence.",
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      "text": "Policing is about moving from the unknown to the known and then further—to the provable.",
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      "text": "You see, the trouble with detectives is that they’re detectives and are literally trained not to believe anything they haven’t verified themselves.",
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      "text": "Blackstone’s Police Operational Handbook recommends the ABC of serious investigation: Assume nothing, Believe nothing, and Check everything.",
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      "text": "I wasn’t ready to believe in ghosts, but that’s the thing about empirical experience: it’s the real thing.",
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      "text": "Knowledge of science can have a great impact on social and political policy. Students need to be told, clearly and directly, what statements are supported by the available evidence. It is not the teachers function to offer instead a contrived and unresolved “debate” in which one of the parties is an ill-defined position that lacks any evidence in its favor. To represent as equal ideas of unequal merit is to mislead and confuse. Because the consequences of so deceiving the students may be their later inability to perform their duties as conscientious and informed citizens, such educational practices ought to be recognized for the irresponsible charades they are.",
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      "text": "“This is the worst excess of conjecture and wishful thinking,” snapped Jackson. “We don’t know if Isaac is capable of any of this.” “He believes he is,” said Bi Wei. “I once met a woman who believed she was abducted by aliens who looked like the Teletubbies,” Jackson shot back. “That doesn’t make it true.”",
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      "text": "“Absence of proof,” said Bell, “is not proof of absence.”",
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      "text": "Everything changes when we look at the evidence; what looks impossible actually happened.",
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      "text": "Try to keep in mind one of the fundamental aspects of science: letting the evidence form belief rather than belief select evidence.",
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      "text": "Theories were a dime a dozen. The partition that separated science and wishful thinking was evidence: observations and firm facts.",
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      "text": "“It is my personal belief that nothing can exceed light speed,” said Sy at last. “I will mistrust anyone, government or Immortal, man or woman, human or alien, who attempts to tell me otherwise without providing convincing evidence.”",
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      "text": "Disproving a claim that something exists is often quite difficult, and this difficulty is often mistaken for evidence that the claim is true...Presented as I am periodically with these and other fantastical claims, I sometimes feel a little like a formally dressed teetotaler at a drunken orgy for reiterating that not being able to conclusively refute the claims does not constitute evidence for them.",
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      "text": "I remember thinking of mathematics as a kind of omnipotent protector. You could prove things to people and they would have to believe you whether they liked you or not.",
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      "text": "Even the clearest and most perfect circumstantial evidence is likely to be at fault, after all, and therefore ought to be received with great caution. Take the case of any pencil, sharpened by any woman: if you have witness, you will find she did it with a knife; but if you take simply the aspect of the pencil, you will say she did it with her teeth.",
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      "text": "Let us hear the suspicions. I will look after the proofs.",
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      "text": "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.",
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      "text": "\"Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing,\" answered Holmes thoughtfully. \"It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.\"",
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      "text": "\"Data! Data! Data!\" he cried impatiently. \"I can't make bricks without clay.\"",
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      "text": "It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.",
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      "text": "When a fact appears to be opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation.",
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      "text": "I can’t see proof in the dreams of long-dead prophets; you can read anything into them.",
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      "text": "The third aspect of my subject is that of science as a method of finding things out. This method is based on the principle that observation is the judge of whether something is so or not. All other aspects and characteristics of science can be understood directly when we understand that observation is the ultimate and final judge of the truth of an idea. But \"prove\" used in this way really means \"test,\" in the same way that a hundred-proof alcohol is a test of the alcohol, and for people today the idea really should be translated as, \"The exception tests the rule.\" Or, put another way, \"The exception proves that the rule is wrong.\" That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong.",
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      "text": "Anyway, I have to argue about flying saucers on the beach with people, you know. And I was interested in this: they keep arguing that it is possible. And that's true. It is possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it's possible or not but whether it's going on or not.",
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      "text": "In general, we look for a new law by the following process: First we guess it. Then we – now don't laugh, that's really true. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what, if this is right, if this law that we guessed is right, to see what it would imply. And then we compare the computation results to nature, or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn't make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. That's all there is to it.",
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      "text": "All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them.",
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      "text": "Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation. Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.",
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      "text": "Now, it is sometimes said that people who take a skeptical approach to UFOs or ancient astronauts or indeed some varieties of revealed religion are engaging in prejudice. I maintain that this is not prejudice. It is postjudice. That is, not a judgement made before examining the evidence but a judgement made after examining the evidence.",
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      "text": "I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.",
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      "text": "Appeal to ignorance — the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g. There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist — and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we're still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.",
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      "text": "I wish to propose a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I must, of course, admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system; since both are at present faultless, this must weigh against it.",
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      "text": "I believe that the extraordinary should certainly be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.",
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      "text": "A clear prediction in an area undergoing vigorous study permits doctrines to be subject to disproof. The last posture a bureaucratic religion wishes to find itself in is vulnerability to disproof, where an experiment can be performed on which the religion stands or falls.",
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      "text": "Modern man may assert that he can dispense with them, and he may bolster his opinion by insisting that there is no scientific evidence of their truth. But since we are dealing with invisible and unknowable things (for God is beyond human understanding, and there is no mean of proving immortality), why should we bother with evidence?",
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      "text": "I see that you will never agree. I cannot help that. I can only read the evidence.",
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