Help finding a quote I lost

[wonderingmind42]

Hey gang. Great job on the 4 stages of denial thread. Keep it up!

I'm trying to locate a quote that I thought I read somewhere on manpollo, and instead of spending a bunch of time futiley searching, it dawned on me that I could just ask.

It was from a scientist, and the sentiment was "It's commonly thought that when there are widely divergent opinions, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. But in science, that is rarely the case."

Anybody?

cheers

[gazelle]

This seems a bit more cumbersome than what you're after, but I found this:

from "Environmental science input to public policy.(IV. The Environment)"

One obstacle is the journalists' "truth-in-the-middle tradition"--the idea that there are two sides to every question, and that the truth lies somewhere in the middle (Schneider, 2002). This may be sensible for many social or political issues, but science does not work by producing compromise solutions to differences of opinion. Science suffers from a particular kind of "elitism"; better explanations replace poorer ones. It is an elitism based on experiment and systematic observation, theory, intense internal debate and competition, and the testing of conclusions against the real world. In scientific debates the truth almost never lies in the middle. The earth goes around the sun, they do not both go around each other; there is no phlogiston, or even phlog; as Michelson and Morley showed, there is no "ether" filling space whereby earth could cause an ether wind as it travels (and no compromise "ether breeze" either!); and "scientific creationism" is an oxymoron.

[Edit: I wasn't able to find anything via the Manpollo search]

[Edit2: Perhaps it was something more along the lines of David Goodstein (from American Scientist's "Setting Scientific Agendas"]

"[Philip] Kitcher likes to argue by setting out polar extremes, deciding that neither can be correct and concluding that the truth must lie somewhere in the middle. This technique makes him seem eminently reasonable at every step, no matter how far off the real axis he leads us" - David Goodstein

[wonderingmind42]

Gazelle--that's perfect! Thanks!