Rachel

“Proponents of science as a foundation for health care have not come together to form a grassroots movement, and until this happens, all of us will have to live with a system based on pseudoscience, greed, myths, lies, fraud, and looking the other way.

Patients need to understand that more care is not better care, that doctors are not necessarily right, and that some doctors are not even truthful.

Genuine health-care reform--like the right to vote--will not be granted magnanimously. Like civil rights, the right to good health care will have to be won in public struggle. To bring about real change, real people will have to say, "Enough!”
― Otis Webb Brawley, How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America

“[Kandel is quoting John Eccles] I learned from [Karl] Popper what for me is the essence of scientific investigation - how to be speculative and imaginative in the creation of hypotheses, and then to challenge them with the utmost rigor, both by utilizing all existing knowledge and by mounting the most searching experimental attacks. In fact I learned from him even to rejoice in the refutation of a cherished hypothesis, because that too is a scientific achievement and because much has been learned by the refutation.

Through my association with Popper I experienced a great liberation in escaping from the rigid conventions that are generally held with respect to scientific research. . . . When one is liberated from these restrictive dogmas, scientific investigation becomes an exciting adventure opening up new visions; and this attitude has, I think, been reflected in my own scientific life since that time.”
― Eric R. Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind

“It has been said that to teach is to touch the future. Helping students to see the past more clearly, to understand and communicate with others more fully in the present, and to imagine the future more justly is to transform the world.

There is nothing more hopeful than that. I started this book with the questions, Is it better? My answer is: Not yet, but it could be. It's up to us to make sure it is. I remain hopeful.”
― Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

“The Gini coefficient, devised by the Italian sociologist Corrado Gini in 1912, is a measure of income or wealth disparity in a population. It is usually expressed as a fraction between 0 and 1, and it seems easy to understand, because 0 is the coefficient if everyone owned an equal amount, while 1 would obtain if one person owned everything and everyone else nothing. In our real world of the mid-twenty-first century, countries with a low Gini coefficient, like the social democracies, are generally a bit below 0.3, while highly unequal countries are a bit above 0.6. The US, China, and many other countries have seen their Gini coefficients shoot up in the neoliberal era, from 0.3 or 0.4 up to 0.5 or 0.6, this with barely a squeak from the people losing the most in this increase in inequality, and indeed many of those harmed often vote for politicians who will increase their relative impoverishment. Thus the power of hegemony: we may be poor but at least we’re patriots! At least we’re self-reliant and we can take care of ourselves, and so on, right into an early grave, as the average lifetimes of the poorer citizens in these countries are much shorter than those of the wealthy citizens. And average lifetimes overall are therefore decreasing for the first time since the eighteenth century. Don’t think that the Gini coefficient alone will describe the situation, however; this would be succumbing to monocausotaxophilia, the love of single ideas that explain everything, one of humanity’s most common cognitive errors. The”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future