Quotes About Research

It's easy to let your biases—political, intellectual, or otherwise—color your view of the world. A growing body of research suggests that even the smartest people tend to seek out evidence that confirms what they already think, rather than new information that would give them a more robust view of reality.

At least 20 percent of American men born between 1933 and 1942 had their first sexual intercourse with a prostitute.

contar historias que se basan en datos acumulados y no en anécdotas personales, anomalías llamativas, opiniones personales, estallidos emocionales o tendencias morales.

A good set of data can go a long way toward describing human behavior as long as the proper questions are asked of it. Our job in this book is to come up with such questions.

rely on accumulated data rather than on individual anecdotes

Un estudio que abarca cincuenta años de los Nobel de Química y Física demuestra que los ganadores vivieron más tiempo que los que solo fueron candidatos.

To a certain extent, Ruef's and Burt's research is a validation of the celebrated "strength of weak ties" argument first proposed by Mark Granovetter

Universities have a reputation for ivory-tower isolation from the real world, but it is an undeniable fact that most of the paradigmatic ideas in science and technology that arose during the past century have roots in academic research.

Ogburn and Thomas found 148 instances of independent innovation, most them occurring within the same decade.

Radios, vacuum tubes, transistors, televisions, solar cells, coaxial cables, laser beams, microprocessors, computers, cell phones, fiber optics—all these essential tools of modern life descend from ideas originally generated at Bell Labs.

If the commonplace book tradition tells us that the best way to nurture hunches is to write everything down, the serendipity engine of the Web suggests a parallel directive: look everything up.

be one of the key functions of the lab conference. In Dunbar's research, outsiders working on different problems were much less likely to dismiss the apparent error as useless noise. Coming at the problem from a different perspective, with few preconceived ideas about what the "correct" result was supposed to be, allowed them to conceptualize scenarios where the mistake might actually be meaningful.

MICROORGANISMS (1674--1680)

Ecstatic technology isn't limited to silicon chips and display screens. As John Lilly's early research established, it's the knowledge of how to tweak the knobs and levers in our brain. When we get it right, it produces those invaluable sensations of selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness.

Few of Bloom's research subjects showed any great promise as children. Instead, the one commonality was encouragement, a lot of encouragement. In each case, there was a parent or close relative who rewarded any display of talent, and ignored the opposite. Prodigies, it seemed, were made, not born. As Bloom later told reporters: "We were looking for exceptional kids, but what we found were exceptional conditions.

Theodore Berger, for example, a neural engineer at the University of Southern California, is working on an artificial hippocampus, one of the core neuronal structures implicated in this process. Berger's device records the electrical activity that arises whenever we encode short-term memories — for example, learning to play scales — then translates them into digital signals.

la economía es una ciencia que cuenta con herramientas excelentes para la obtención de respuestas, pero que sufre una seria escasez de preguntas interesantes.

Remarkably, though sadly predictably, British psychiatrists still cling to the psycho-social model that has subverted meaningful research for the past 30 years, establishing the validity of Max Planck's observation that science progresses one retirement at a time.

Social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have enough trouble predicting the past.")

Either way, I suspect that it's less effective to aim at the Gini index as a deeply buried root cause of many social ills than to zero in on solutions to each problem: investment in research and infrastructure to escape economic stagnation, regulation of the finance sector to reduce instability, broader access to education and job training to facilitate economic mobility, electoral transparency and finance reform to eliminate illicit influence, and so on.

The fact that a hypothesis is politically uncomfortable does not mean that it is false, but it does mean that we should consider the evidence very carefully before concluding that it is true.

As an experimental psychologist I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores. To

Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite.

For many people the greatest fear raised by the prospect of a longer life is dementia, but another pleasant surprise has come to light: between 2000 and 2012, the rate among Americans over 65 fell by a quarter, and the average age at diagnosis rose from 80.7 to 82.4 years.