A recent article by Gardiner Harris in the New York Times quotes Otis Brawley, of the American Cancer Society, re the conflict between evidence and self-interest:
| "If your income is dependent on you not understanding something, it is very easy not to understand something." |
... an observation quite relevant in many areas, including politics.
(It's probably an allusion to Upton Sinclair's 1935 quip "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"; cf. Medicine and Statistics (2010-11-13), ...) - ^z - 2011-10-11