Quotes About Error

the mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,—universal signs, instead of these village symbols,—and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

Foolish people ask you, when you speak what they do not wish to hear, How do you know it is the truth, and not an error of your own? We know the truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.

Spurgeon used his wit to provoke laughter in private and in public. He said in one of his sermons, "If by a laugh I can make men see the folly of an error better than in any other way, they shall laugh.

And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will be right.

If paying attention is love, I am love. If knowing is love, I am love. If helping you not to fall into error and to be good is love, I am love.

later you might discover that what you said is not true. When you do not know that what you are saying is untrue, you are making a mistake.

Here, In concise form, is what I have characterized as "Galileo's mistake." It is an error that has been understood by philosophers from the eighteenth century onward, from David Hume to Imman-uel Kant to Thomas Kuhn, with Increasing clarity. The mistake is In the belief that nature is Its own interpreter. It is not.

He looks out on a raging battlefield and sees error everywhere, and he thinks he can find the truth by avoiding error. —Lerone Bennett, "Tea and Sympathy: Liberals and Other White Hopes," 1964

Oop—I is tripped.

Within the theological structure of the cults there is considerable truth, all of which, it might be added, is drawn from biblical sources, but so diluted with human error as to be more deadly than complete falsehood.

embarrassment as quickly

Rather, he found himself enchanted with examples of simple human error, mundane malfunctions and mechanical glitches. The sheer variety of things that could and did go wrong in the world never failed to surprise and strangely comfort him.

Like all big mistakes, mine started with a goat.

It was very successful, but it fell on the wrong planet.

It was one of the greatest errors in evaluating dictatorship to say that the dictator forces himself on society against its own will. In reality, every dictator in history was nothing but the accentuation of already existing state ideas which he had only to exaggerate in order to gain power

But not to know error is to lie, is to spit up poison through the harrowing margins of weakened mineral campaigns. It is the deeply filtered and the wretched who deny this, who test themselves with exoteric perfection, who turn their branded melodias to simple outward gain. In contrast to the rotation of immensity, to the treble glare of inward cyclical rarity, such outward wit carries less than the power of negation.

Bias and noise—systematic deviation and random scatter—are different components of error.

The first lesson is that errors of prediction are inevitable because the world is unpredictable. The second is that high subjective confidence is not to be trusted as an indicator of accuracy (low confidence could be more informative).

From the perspective of noise reduction, a singular decision is a recurrent decision that happens only once. Whether you make a decision only once or a hundred times, your goal should be to make it in a way that reduces both bias and noise. And practices that reduce error should be just as effective in your one-of-a-kind decisions as in your repeated ones.

However, the magic of error reduction works well only when the observations are independent and their errors uncorrelated. If the observers share a bias, the aggregation of judgments will not reduce it. Allowing the observers to influence each other effectively reduces the size of the sample, and with it the precision of the group estimate.

The word fallacy is used, in general, when people fail to apply a logical rule that is obviously relevant.

MSE has that property—and it is the only definition of overall error that has it. In figure 6, we have computed the value of MSE in the set of five measurements for ten possible integer values of the line's true length.

Tetlock also found that experts resisted admitting that they had been wrong, and when they were compelled to admit error, they had a large collection of excuses: they had been wrong only in their timing, an unforeseeable event had intervened, or they had been wrong but for the right reasons.

whenever accuracy is the goal, bias and noise play the same role in the calculation of overall error.