Science Quote by Jack Schwartz

“Avoid context and specifics; generalize and keep repeating the generalization” reads like a lab-coated warning label for propaganda, the kind of sentence that pretends to be advice while actually indicting the people who follow it. Coming from a scientist, it lands with extra bite: science is supposed to be the discipline of context, of controlled variables, of specifics that can be checked. So the line works as anti-method, a deliberately inverted version of scientific reasoning that exposes how public narratives get manufactured when evidence is inconvenient.

The intent is almost certainly diagnostic. Schwartz isn’t celebrating vagueness; he’s pointing to a tactic that thrives in politics, advertising, and even workplace culture: strip away the conditions that would complicate a claim, then replace reality with a slogan. “Generalize” collapses messy distributions into a single, emotionally legible story. “Keep repeating” is the behavioral nudge: repetition doesn’t prove truth, it simulates familiarity, and familiarity is often mistaken for credibility.

The subtext is that specificity is accountability. Context invites questions like “when,” “for whom,” and “compared to what” - questions that force a speaker to expose assumptions, data quality, and trade-offs. Generalizations, by contrast, are portable. They travel well through headlines, meetings, and social feeds because they demand no follow-up and punish nuance as pedantry.

The line also hints at a cultural drift: in an attention economy, the cost of precision is time, and time is what neither institutions nor audiences reliably give. Schwartz’s phrasing, clipped and procedural, mimics an instruction manual to underscore the bleak joke: manipulation has a method, and it’s embarrassingly simple.