When someone says ‘I have these two crystals if you rub them together you’ll get healthy.’ Rather than just discount it—because that’s as lazy as accepting it, both of those are just lazy brain—what you should do is inquire. So do you know how to inquire? Every scientist would know how to start that conversation. They would say ‘Well where did you get these? What kinds of ailments does it cure? How does it work? What does it cost? Can you demonstrate that it works?’ And you go through this… And at the end the person is in tears because they weren’t prepared for that level of questioning. So science literacy is vaccine against charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance of the forces of nature.
Neil de Grasse Tyson - on the nature of scientific inquiry
(Source: youtube.com)
