Quotes About Error

is that if one suffers in this world, it's on account of error.

El pensamiento es una superstición primaria. La razón es un concepto irracional. La pueril noción de que somos capaces de pensar ha constituido el mayor error de los humanos.

don't you see that the essential error is the same? Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.

There's only one thing you can count on, Mr. President," he said. "On any given moment in any given day, somebody somewhere is screwing up.

the witch was an empiricist: she relied on her senses rather than on faith or doctrine, she believed in trial and error, cause and effect. Her attitude was not religiously passive, but actively inquiring. She trusted her ability to find ways to deal with disease, pregnancy, and childbirth—whether through medications or charms.

Human manners are wildly inconsistent; plenty of people have said so. But this one takes the cake: the manner in which we're allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point that out. The conspicious consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spirtual error, or even bad manners.

People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.

What a knot of history one mistake can become.

Cars with flames painted on the hood might get more speeding tickets. Are the flames making the car go fast? No. Certain things just go together. And when they do, they are correlated. It is the darling of all human errors to assume, without proper testing, that one is the cause of the other.

Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity

even a bad idea is better than no idea. Error can point the way to truth, while empty-headedness can only lead to more empty-headedness or to a career in politics.

El error puede indicar el camino de la verdad, mientras que una cabeza hueca sólo conduce a una cabeza más hueca o bien a una carrera política.

If people err systematically and substantially in making those predictions, it's likely that they will make some bad decisions—decisions that produce regret, even when events turn out well.

And so by carefully investigating what is here and now, we must seek for the things that can save us. We should flee, entirely, all the works of lawlessness; otherwise, they may overwhelm us. And we should hate the error of the present age, that we may be loved in the age to come. 2 We should not allow our souls to relax, thinking they can consort with sinners and the wicked; otherwise we may become like them.

people either live in the light or walk in the darkness; they either stand for the truth or propagate error.

There's always someone at fault, which is not the same as blame.

Permitieron que su ego nublara su juicio empresarial, un error muy común pero potencialmente letal.

Even if you do a few things right, such as making high use of modern programming practices, you might still make a mistake that nullifies your productivity gains.

Avoid duplicate code. Undoubtedly the most popular reason for creating a routine is to avoid duplicate code. Indeed, creation of similar code in two routines implies an error in decomposition. Pull the duplicate code from both routines, put a generic version of the common code into a base class, and then move the two specialized routines into subclasses.

Use locking to control access to global variables. Similar to concurrency control in a multiuser database environment, locking requires that before the value of a global variable can be used or updated, the variable must be checked out. After the variable is used, it's checked back in. During the time it's in use (checked out), if some other part of the program tries to check it out, the lock/unlock routine displays an error message or fires an assertion.

the error rate in manual testing is comparable to the bug rate in the code being tested.

That is a lethal combination—cocky plus wrong—especially when a more prudent option exists: simply admit that the future is far less knowable than you think.

The history of knowledge conventionally focuses on breakthrough ideas and conceptual leaps. But the blind spots on the map, the dark continents of error and prejudice, carry their own mystery as well. How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline—the sociology of error.

They mistook the smoke for the fire.