Quotes About Theory

I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds....

Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong.

As Yogi Berra said, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.

Ex cura theoria nascitur.

Scranton showed that we have been building and using jet engines in a completely trial-and-error experiential manner, without anyone truly understanding the theory. Builders needed the original engineers who knew how to twist things to make the engine work. Theory came later, in a lame way, to satisfy the intellectual bean counter.

Mother Nature is not perfect, but has so far proven smarter than humans, certainly much smarter than biologists. So my approach is to combine evidence-based research (stripped of biological theory), with an a priori that Mother Nature has more authority than anyone.

It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied—what physicists call "percolation theory," in which the properties of the randomness of the terrain are studied, rather than those of a single element of the terrain.

If you know all possible conditions of a physical system you can, in theory (though not, as we saw, in practice), project its behavior into the future. But

The important difference between theory and practice lies precisely in the detection of the sequence of events and retaining the sequence in memory. If life is lived forward but remembered backward, as Kierkegaard observed, then books exacerbate this effect—our own memories, learning, and instinct have sequences in them. Someone

George Soros, cuando hace una apuesta financiera, no deja de buscar ejemplos que demuestren que su teoría inicial es falsa. Tal vez sea esto la auténtica confianza en uno mismo: la capacidad de observar el mundo sin necesidad de encontrar signos que halaguen el propio ego.*

Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong. This is the alternative to our search for confirmatory instances.

For a theory is a very dangerous thing to have.

Historians should stay away from chaos theory and the difficulties of reverse engineering except to discuss general properties of the world and learn the limits of what they can't know.

Una teoria è come una medicina (o un governo): spesso inutile, a volte necessaria, sempre interessata e occasionalmente letale. Per questo dev'essere usata con attenzione, moderazione e sotto la supervisione di un adulto.

Universal behavior is great on paper, disastrous in practice.

Scranton showed that we have been building and using jet engines in a completely trial-and-error experiential manner, without anyone truly understanding the theory. Builders

A theory is like medicine (or government): often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving, and on occasion lethal. So it needs to be used with care, moderation, and close adult supervision.

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds—so those who delay developing their theories are better off.

it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.

As the great game theorist Ariel Rubinstein holds: do your theories or mathematical representations, don't tell people in the real world how to apply them. Let those with skin in the game select what they need.

Theory should stay independent from practice and vice versa—and we should not extract academic economists from their campuses and put them in positions of decision making.

No, we don't put theories into practice. We create theories out of practice.

Theories that have not yet been known to be wrong, not falsified yet, but are exposed to be proved wrong. Why is a theory never right? Because we will never know if all the swans are white